Feedback from playing most of the content from v0.16h
Pros:
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Cards are much better now than they were from v0.8. There are now 0 cost cards (which were definitely needed)
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Story writing has gotten better for the newer quests. But there's never going to be any tension, because of your "chosen one" status. Not only do you conveniently find what you need without proper leads, but when you can afford to throw caution to the wind & not be punished, that's when the story makes it too obvious that you are protected by plot armor. In my opinion, this was the biggest problem with Love of Magic.
Areas for Improvement:
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Cards are not accessible enough for a game where the main gameplay is a card game. In my opinion, this is the single biggest problem with the game, because the fun of a card game is from acquiring good cards, improving your deck and fighting opponents. The problem is that the main gameplay loop of fighting monsters in dungeons don't reward you with cards. Nor does it reward you with currency used for buying cards. In fact, there are no card shops. Nor do you get materials that you can use to craft cards. The only ways you get cards is by: smoking Fropweed (a dungeon drop, that yields a very limited pool of cards), one time quest drops, and some repeatable training events. It feels like the main way you get cards is by doing quests, but the reward is one time and unknown.
EDIT: upon playing more and unlocking the tankard, and undergoing more training, there does seem to be a lot more cards than I initially thought. It just wasn't intuitive to me how to get cards. So I just kept doing quests and didn't find many cards that way. You can get quite a few good cards from hanging out with people. It would have been nice if the game hinted that Training, & offering people a drink from the tankard unlocks cards
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Certain stats don't have enough cards that scale with it. Crafting and Lore are the least useful because there are no cards for them. Stealth and Perception has cards, but they all suck (either because they don't do enough for it's cost, or the effect sucks). Magic, Charm, and Piety each have 1-2 cards that are good and the rest are lacking. Combat and Stamina are the two most useful stats in the game, only because there's a bigger card pool, and they have better cards. Meaning that they have more high value cards at a low cost.
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Most archetypes lack support cards to make it viable. This leads to not very much variety when it comes to deck building. It just doesn't feel like cards are designed with combos connected to a win condition in mind. (e.g. Purify it's a heal with no support cards).
<?> How do you design cards that support healing?
- card that draws you cards based on how much you healed this turn.
- Cards that do more dmg based on how much you healed this turn.
- Card that does more dmg based on total healing done throughout the battle.
- Card that doubles healing for 3 turns.
- Card that has 2 effects. A default unconditional effect. Effect 2 is conditional that gets enabled when you reach a certain threshold of healing. Like getting another turn if you've healed a total of 30 HP.
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Cards lack Keyword descriptions when viewing them in the deck builder. (e.g. Courage, Hardened, Predict, Rage, Weakness, Potency, Neglected, Debuff, Mojo). Some card effects generate cards, but you can't see what the generated cards do (Reckless Attack => Wound, Zap => Shocked, Double Throw => Throws). There are more effects, I'm including from temporary cards you can get from Dungeons
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Quests where you have to take a character with you into a Dungeon are annoying. They are annoying because you are forced to run cards that don't fit well with your deck. Adding useless cards to clog up deck flow, in a game with basically no card draw causes runs to be heavily dictated by RNG. I don't know if this was by design to add difficulty, but it's certainly not enjoyable. It's like a card game's version of escort quests
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Gold (money) drop from dungeons is too low and too varied. Most runs yield 0 gold, some runs yield 80+ gold. Chests can drop 1 gold to 80+ gold, but most of the time it's 1-30 gold. So a lot the time, you have to sell Gold/Silver ingots and Potions to make the money needed for quests. I think as a minimum, chests should drop 20 Gold, and enemies should also drop gold.
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Blacksmith Training costs too much Ingots. Costing 10 Ingots for 1 session is insane. The rate of finding ingots from dungeons is 0-3 per run.