EPTI’m not up to date on the latest in business developments but I’m fairly certain the smartest business move made in 2015 was CD Projekt Red releasing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. An epic tale of a man who gives up his job as a monster hunter (in a Fantasy land that’s what you’d get if Middle Earth was run by the Lannisters) to pursue a career in wandering the earth and asking strangers if they’d like to play a card game called Gwent. Some other shit happens too, I think, memory’s a bit fuzzy. All I recall is a part where immediately after helping a man put the restless soul of his miscarried daughter to rest and imploring him to think about what he’s done I could ask him to play Gwent which he cheerfully agreed to. If that doesn’t convince you video games aren’t art then I don’t know what will. Anyway, CD Projekt Red are done making The Witcher games but there’s still a bit more money to be wrung out from the franchise so they figured they’d take Gwent and make it into a standalone online card game. I guess they figured since they beat all the Western RPG makers at their own game they should move on to trying to beat all the Western OCG makers too. And best of fucking luck going up against Blizzard there lads, they’ve repurposed bigger competition than you into fashionable seat cushions.
So Gwent’s not your ordinary card game. Forget all that crap about gaining mana or tempo or card advantage or summoning sickness or life totals or top decking or mad RNG skills, Gwent works on simple yet very unusual rules. You got a deck of 25 cards, mostly creatures that have a strength value and some spells that do other things. Both players start with an 11 card hand and take turns playing one card at a time. Instead of playing a card, players can opt to pass the round, which means they don’t play any more cards. Once both players have passed, or run out of cards, the round ends and whoever has the most strength wins. Whoever wins two rounds first wins the match, and between rounds 2 and 3 you get to draw 3 additional cards. It’s kind of structured like a bidding war except this is an auction where you can undercut your opponent by setting their bids on fire. Also it’s pretty damn fun.
By eschewing the norms of typical card games Gwent gives the player, on average, more interesting games. You don’t get run over by some cunt who shows up with handfuls of 1 drops; if your deck is full of sweet cards you will get to play sweet cards. And with a smaller deck size combined with plenty of mulligans and deck thinning effects your decks will be consistent in whatever it’s trying to do. And there’s a lot of different strategies you can base a deck around. You could play the Nilfgaard faction and enjoy playing minions that go on your opponent’s side but do something really cool in return. You could play Monsters and play disposable minions alongside minions that love to eat other minions. You could play Skellige and spend the first few rounds piling up the graveyard with incredible minions and then bring them back with numerous reanimation effects. Or you could play Scoia’tael and try and abuse minions that stay on the board between rounds. Or you could play Northern Realms who, as of the current patch anyway, can flop around longing for death like a Magikarp. And so much more to discover! Or you could just look for sweet decks on the internet and play those, I guess there’s that too.
Consistency is the game’s strength but I feel it might also be a weakness. To paraphrase Lead Magic: the Gathering designer Mark Rosewater: RNG is good for games since it allows weaker players to beat stronger ones and it makes for a great deal of unpredictability in how games will play out, meaning it’ll take longer for players to get bored. Gwent is very much RNG-lite and generally rewards the more skilled player to a greater degree than a lot of other card games do. The lifespan of the game for most players will come down to how much fun you can squeeze out of all the different decks you’ll get to make and here’s where Gwent cocks it up quite badly.
Now I know this is a common complaint amongst card games, but Gwent’s too fucking expensive to play. I know free to play games survive on whale hunting and not lazy, cheapskate sc2 progamers like myself, but come on. The money to card value ratio is completely fucked. No. Stop. Do not tell me that Magic and Hearthstone are also expensive and therefore it’s ok. Fuck off. These are video games, they should be priced as such. If I pay $100 USD for a video game I should expect to receive at least most of what you have on offer but after you’ve got most of the Bronze cards (which you’ll get for about half of that amount, I’ve checked), getting additional packs adds so little to your collection it’s insulting. Like, here’s the math (which I’ll put in spoilers because math is boring)
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So one keg gives 5 cards. The chance to get a Gold card in a keg is roughly 1 in 10. A Silver is about 1 in 5 and the rest are Bronzes (there’s two categories of Bronze cards, which is confusing, but if you don’t get a Silver or Gold you’re guaranteed a Large Bronze, maybe more).
Kegs are sold in numerous bundle packages, the most efficient being 60 Kegs for $70 USD. So for 60 Kegs you’ll get, on average, 12 Silvers and 6 Golds, out of a possible 103 Silvers and 65 Golds, spread out amongst the 5 factions and a Neutral card pool. The game starts you out with about 12 Silver cards and 10 Golds, but duplicates can still be opened.
Note that these can very easily be cards in decks you might not want to play or already have. Just like Hearthstone you can scrap cards you don’t want into crafting materials in order to get the cards you want. Problem: the scrap economy is fucked too. Scrapping Small Bronze cards give you 5 scrap, Large bronze 10, Silvers 50 and Golds 200. Crafting Silvers costs 200 scrap and Golds a staggering 800. Considering the average keg gives 30 scrap, that means you have to get approximately 27 average kegs to get the value of a single Gold card.
Every deck has to play 4 Gold cards and 6 Silver cards, and certain decks rely heavily on having the right ones available. You can see why I think this is all fucking bullshit, right?
Kegs are sold in numerous bundle packages, the most efficient being 60 Kegs for $70 USD. So for 60 Kegs you’ll get, on average, 12 Silvers and 6 Golds, out of a possible 103 Silvers and 65 Golds, spread out amongst the 5 factions and a Neutral card pool. The game starts you out with about 12 Silver cards and 10 Golds, but duplicates can still be opened.
Note that these can very easily be cards in decks you might not want to play or already have. Just like Hearthstone you can scrap cards you don’t want into crafting materials in order to get the cards you want. Problem: the scrap economy is fucked too. Scrapping Small Bronze cards give you 5 scrap, Large bronze 10, Silvers 50 and Golds 200. Crafting Silvers costs 200 scrap and Golds a staggering 800. Considering the average keg gives 30 scrap, that means you have to get approximately 27 average kegs to get the value of a single Gold card.
Every deck has to play 4 Gold cards and 6 Silver cards, and certain decks rely heavily on having the right ones available. You can see why I think this is all fucking bullshit, right?
This would all be ameliorated somewhat if the Free to Play rewards handed out cards and crafting material at a much greater rate. Currently it can be best compared to the last few drops that must be shaken out after a wee. What would also have helped is a Limited gameplay mode, like Hearthstone’s Arena or Magic’s Booster Draft. Not only would it provide a whole new way to enjoy the game but you’d get to play with all sorts of decks and situations you wouldn’t see normally. Gwent lacks this. There’s a small set of single player challenges which is pretty good for new players but after that you get to hit find match or find unranked casual match (where people play sweet decks anyway).
As it stands you get to enjoy a few early ranks with all the other new players coming to grips with what they have until you hit people who can afford to spend hundreds on sweet net decks and oh fuck now the game’s not fun anymore. I don’t want to scrap 3/5 ‘ths of my collection just to get the one or two more cards required to round out the one or two decks I’ve got since then all I can do is grind those decks out for weeks until I’ve got enough to make the Golds and silvers necessary to get another deck to grind out for weeks and ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Sure I could throw together a weaker deck but I’ve ranked up so high with my good deck I’ll be hitting good players who are actually trying and oh fuck this game.
This is why I predict Gwent, for all it’s charms (and it sure is a charming game, I do love me some Witcher lore and that Slavic folk music inspired soundtrack, fuck yeah blast that shit) will fail to have real longevity for most of us 99 percenter shitmunchers. There’s only so many times I can bear to play my John Calveit Nilfgaard spy deck before I’m just gonna look on Steam for something else to do whilst I drink heavily. Which is a damned shame since I like CD Projekt Red. You don’t get a lot of high quality game development from the Slavic region, and we could sure to do have more successful online card games at the moment. Do at least sample Gwent but prepare to move on sooner than you’d think.
Oh yeah, and what the fuck is with Emhyr Var Emreis not being voiced by Charles Dance? Just use the voice lines you had in Witcher 3 dangit! I’m sure the royalties don’t cost that much.
