Some initial thoughts on Spellcraft
Sorry this is going to be a little long and rambly, I don’t have time for fewer words.
Spellcraft is the first release from studio One More Game. They describe it as a “Real Time Battler”, and that’s pretty accurate. Don’t get scared of “real time” though; it’s obvious one of the design pillars was to take the micro management out of the loop and make the game entirely about planning your strategies and reacting to the enemy’s moves. This part works very well.
I’ve read some people [citation needed] compare it to Autobattlers such as TFT, and what with the “battler” in OMG’s own genre descriptor you’d be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion, but nothing could be further from the truth. (Okay, calling it a crafting based VR arcade racer could be further from the truth. But you get what I’m saying.)
Autobattlers such as TFT (okay, really, there is only TFT. Riot has taken Blizzard’s mantle of “see a great game idea poorly executed, make the good version, shoulder the originator out of the market”. Remember when Blizzard used to be good at that?) have a central loop of economy vs gambling; there’s secondary loops around unit placement and reacting to the builds of the dominant enemies in your lobby, but other than initial unit placement, there’s no similarities here. TFT is hardly the first game to invent “place your pieces on the map where you like”.
Instead, you have control over when your three units (and it’s always three right now, although I read [citation needed] that once upon a time it escalated from 2 in the first round to up to 5 in the end? Sounds miserable) cast their respective normal spells and ultimates, and where they target. You specifically do not have direct control over their movement, which can be very frustrating when you see a spell with a 3 second telegraph coming but have no tools available to do anything about it. Many spells have a positional component, but you get to pick from a list of normals and ults, and it’s very possible to craft a build for your hero that is entirely devoid of movement or defensive options. In which case you’ll just have to take the spell to the face.
Speaking of crafting builds and team comps, that all happens in the menu before you even launch the game. Once you’re in the game, you’re stuck with what you got for the best of 7 format that follows. Each round tasks you with either getting a set number of kills (killed units return after a 10s delay and cast their revive spell when they do) or getting a team wipe: kicking all three enemy pieces off the board at the same time. The tutorial helpfully suggests spreading out your damage to achieve this, but in my experience that’s a recipe for disaster. You generally have a strong enemy DPS threat (oftentimes a ramping one) that you have to take care of. The tension is nice: if you CAN get the enemy’s team to low health all at the same time and then hit them with a big AOE, it feels very satisfying to see the “TEAM WIPE” message. That said, in the dozen or so team wipes I’ve seen in my 6 hours with the game, I’d say the majority just kind of happened by accident.
Your units also have what we’d call auto attacks in League. They do happen automatically, and they also automatically pick a target. I *think* your targeted spells can force a unit to retarget its autos to whoever you cast the spell on, but don’t quote me on that. Especially with units like the archer and the riflewoman, who rely heavily on autoattacks for their DPS, it’s quite frustrating to not really know who they’re going to attack. There are plenty of taunts in the game, so the enemy can mess with your targeting, but the only spell I’ve seen that has been able to reliably let me pick who I’m targeting is the Archer’s roll (which does show you while you’re targeting which unit you’ll be attacking after the roll) (so in this case, the rolling does help.)
This brings us to what I’m struggling with the most right now. The game packs quite a lot of complexity into its bite sized matches. Not only is there physical damage (unhelpfully referred to as simply “damage” in most places) and magic damage, there is also frost, ice, and poison damage; there is armor, and I think there is magic resist, but I’m not sure if there’s dodging and critical hits. Anyway, Spellcraft has the vibes of a game that would use all these and more. It’s clearly a theorycrafter’s dream.
I should mention items. In between rounds, both players get to pick one item out of a randomly selected three items. The loser goes first, granting a nice bit of rubberbanding sometimes. Other times it really doesn’t matter because you may have either no good picks available to your team’s remaining open item slots, or you have two that you both value equally and it doesn’t matter what the enemy does, if they go first.
These items have all the stats mentioned above and more. The design space of items and abilities in this game really is “yes”. Every character can carry two items, and when you get your second item, you unlock a combo based on the items’ types (helpfully shown both by color and shape of the frame around the item’s art. Good accessibility!) These combos are… interesting. Some of them are purely mathy and there’s clearly a best option. For instance, I made a stupid mistake in my most recent game; I had two items that both fit my build nicely. One gave the character carrying the items +75 AP (they call it something else, but let’s be real, it’s AP) (for the non-League afflicted, Ability Power, or Spell Power, or wizard pew pew harder), the other gave everyone on my team +50 AP. Being the mega brain math wizard I am, I figured that 150 > 75, without first checking if my two other characters had AP scalings. They did not. So I cheated myself out of 25 AP.
Items seem to be unique? I’ve not been in a situation where I received two of the same item. It seems that once an item has been picked by either player, it is removed from the pool. This is neat and clean in theory, but with the spikiness of some items, I’m not sure it’s the right call. For instance, there’s an item that just says “you can never be affected by burn”, and there’s one character in the game built around the concepting of inflicting burn and then cashing in on it. The item has other stats, too, of course, but if I was playing burnie guy, I’d consider picking this item just to grieve my enemy by removing it from the pool. Seems weird, man. (There’s other similar items; immunity to frostbite, and +40% damage to fire/ice damage; very spiky in that they do something only in extremely specific situations but when used in the correct situation, they’re very powerful. Combining this with a system where I can deny my enemy access to these tools puts us in a place where the passive, negative play of “I take this toy away from you even though it doesn’t do anything for me” may be technically better than picking a toy you’re excited about, which is, in the technical parlance of game design, bad.)
Where was I? Right. Game’s hard.
I felt I was getting a handle on the item meta after a few games, but even though I’ve played all the characters in the current build a few times, there was no way I was going to memorize what all they do. And trying to figure it out by following along what’s going on in combat, oh boy, that’s a bit of a non-starter. Even though there’s only 6 units involved in combat, the chaos makes my brain hurt. The character design is chunky and evocative of a D&D miniature feel (which is a great choice both for art resource usage and for a fun mood), but even though all characters are well designed in terms of clearly visible source of power and easily recognizable silhouette break on their own, once they come together and do battle, it gets very messy very quickly. This is all a learning curve I’m sure, but I’m 6 hours into learning this game and I still get overwhelmed pretty much every game.
Finally, my least favorite aspect is the central gimmick of the game: it’s real time, but kind of turn based. This is achieved by giving everything really long cooldowns, wind-ups, and telegraphs. (Can anyone who’s not terminally infected with design-speak even make sense of this? Please do ask questions if you have them). This is great on paper, but runs into the same problem as the single worst innovation in the history of cRPGs (yeah didn’t see that one coming, did you?): real time pause combat, as introduced by Baldur’s Gate, the worst cRPG. (Fight me).
Look, I just think Pools of Radiance had superior combat and I still miss it.
Specifically! You give commands that have meaningful delay; at the very least there’s the windup and telegraph delay, sometimes the spell has built in travel time or additional post windup delay, and sometimes there’s walk-into-range-and-cast behavior, which adds unknowable delay to the spell, ESPECIALLY if it’s unit target and the unit you targeted is particularly mobile. Have fun watching your big paladin with the hammer walk awkwardly around the map at a snail’s pace trying to close the distance with the dashing assassin so he can hammer her in the face. It’s not fun.
AOE because a whole other problem. Unless you can see 4 seconds or so into the future, there is no way of knowing if your AOE will do anything (unless the enemy has picked aforementioned immobile builds). Add to this that some AOE has friendly fire on and you’re back to the joy of “oh shit my wizard only just cast the fireball I ordered him to cast roughly four hundred years ago and my entire frontline has walked into the AOE, which the enemy has already vacated. Time to uninstall Baldur’s Gate!”
This is a hundred times more frustrating in a PVP game, of course, where you’re likely to be mashing buttons so you can cast a spell the millisecond it comes off cooldown. Maybe the answer is “don’t pick AOE spells” or “don’t use melee abilities against mobile enemies”, but that feels underwhelming. Additionally, it’s not clear if issuing a different order to your character will interrupt or pause the walk into range behavior. For instance, my paladin has a global taunt that doesn’t require a target (it just makes him invulnerable and taunts every enemy onto him), so when he went walkabouts trying to hit the enemy assassin with his normal skill once, I tried using the ultimate to interrupt him, but from what I could tell he just went back to chasing the assassin after casting his ultimate. No bueno.
That said, I could absolutely feel the strategies building in my brain. From degenerate teamcomps (a double taunt paladin, a double heal healer, and an incredibly fragile but incredibly powerful squid pirate with an on demand invulnerability is my favorite “get ready to have no fun whatsoever, enemy” comp so far) to specific counter interactions (like holding my on demand instant stun from my archer to use whenever the enemy ice mage would start casting Blizzard, prompting the announcer to give me a very satisfying “interrupted”) (which, btw, also plays when you accidentally interrupt your own channeled ults. Oops.) to simple optimizations such as holding the paladin’s DUNK ability, which resets on kill, until the enemy was in range; I felt the good brain juices of “oh I get this now, I’m better at this now”.
How long will this last? Unsure, but there’s potentially a lot of legs here. One thing that’s missing from the strategy level right now is that you cannot react to enemy character picks. Instead you go in with your prebuilt team and are matched up against other prebuilt teams, collectible card game style (the head of design worked on Magic the Gathering, so I see where that might come from). A mode where you go back and forth picking characters and their builds might be fun, especially once there’s more characters in the roster.
This, I think, will be the crucial deciding factor for the game’s success: what release cadence are OMG aiming for and will they be able to deliver? I still think a huge reason League blew up as much as it did was that for the first half year of its life, it received two whole new champions EVERY OTHER WEEK. This is still bizarre to me. I have no idea how they pulled this off; at the time, I worked in community, not design.
You don’t need that many, but at least in the first few months I think more is better here.
Anyway, it’s genuinely exciting to see a truly new genre be attempted. This is a scary thing to do: especially in the live service PVP game space, I can count the commercial games that successfully tried to invent a new genre on one finger. (It’s Hunt: Showdown, which invented the extraction shooter. Tarkov improved on it and Infinity Ward did the Blizzard thing of seeing a great idea in Tarkov hidden behind the most neckbeardy game design ever and polished the shit out of it with DMZ. It’s well worth playing if you like shooting both AIs and humans.)
(I’m not sure if I count Odyssey Interactive’s Omega Strikers as a new genre. I guess it’s a bit of a moba and rocket league mashup? But newish.) (And we don’t know yet if they’ll be successful either, although I of course wish them all the luck in the world. Game was a lot of fun when I tried it out, but never got deep into it)
(And no, Rocket League doesn’t count as a new genre. It was based on Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, itself based on an Unreal Tournament mod.)
Spellcraft is in “Open Alpha” (words don’t mean anything anymore) (if it’s open, it’s not an alpha) right now until April 16. It’s obviously free and well worth checking out if you like hurting your brain meats. I’ve worked with Chris Heintz, Joe Blancato, and Andrew Beegle in the past, so that’s my bias disclaimer.
