Analysis of Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf

Last week, Ilya Eremeev, creative director of A-Steroids, wrote an extensive post on his Facebook page dedicated to Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf. With the kind permission of the author, we publish the material on our pages.

With you again the rubric – a speck in someone else’s eye. This time let’s look into the eye of the Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf game from HeroCraft studio.

Let’s start with the fact that this is one of the most serious recent projects in the App Store, and one of the most powerful products in terms of the level of production from Russian companies in mobile stores in general.

The game has received a feature and the main banner in the App Store in almost 60 countries and a total of about 2,000 thousand positions in ratings around the world. I have collected (and continues to collect) awards from gaming publications, but there is one THING. The average rating is 2.7. Download and grossing indicators are far from impressive, despite such a powerful promo and a loud franchise. This is an interesting case, let’s figure out what mistakes prevented the game from realizing its full potential.

The game has excellent graphics and animation, a clear solid GUI and potentially deep mechanics.

The essence is as follows. You control a squad of space Marines, completing the tasks of the story campaign in turn-based tactical battles with chaos squads. Missions are basically reduced to classic strategic tasks, like “kill all enemies”, “don’t let a certain character die”, “hold a point for a certain time”, “kill the boss” and so on. In addition to the main task, each mission has an additional task – to find and pick up a certain box, for which you will receive an additional reward and an additional golden skull. Golden skulls are an interesting interpretation of the experience.

Your character gains experience by accumulating a certain number of skulls, one skull is given for completing the main task and one for each additional task in the mission. So if you want to swing faster, don’t forget about this box.

The battles take place completely in step-by-step mode and here, in my opinion, lies the first problem – the missions are very long. I spent about 20-30 minutes to complete one mission and reacted extremely painfully if I lost at the end and had to start the mission all over again. The situation is saved by the “runes of life”, which are sold for cash and allow you to restore the main character once per mission. It’s “OK” if the player pays, if not, I’d rather put the game aside than go through a half-hour mission for the third time.

So, let’s go through the problems.

Problem 1. Too long and slow missions

Decision: I have no idea, this is the basis of the design of such games and now it definitely does not make sense to change it. It’s just worth considering for the future and clearly realize that by making such a game pace, you cut off most of the people who are not ready to invest so much time in the game at a time (you cut off 95% of the players).

Let’s move on to mechanics.

Each Space Marine has a deck of cards with actions (as in Hearthstone). There are 33 cards in total, divided into 3 categories: action cards (used immediately after application), equip cards (first you need to equip the card in a special slot and only then it can be used for a separate move) and movement cards (non-combat actions, such as getting additional cards or just movement).

Each turn, a Space Marine can perform 2 actions – use a card or sacrifice it for the sake of movement points.

And then the following problem arises.

Problem 2. Card mechanics

The players do not understand the system of donating cards, comments in the app stores are filled with whining that movement cards come too rarely (and there are, like, 2-3 out of 33) and the battle is very slow: they cannot guess to donate a card.

In addition, the cards themselves are very similar to each other, in pictures, descriptions, effects, plus they are not made in the most informative way. I’ve already been through half of the whole game and I don’t understand the essence of tactics, I just use the most powerful thing I have in damage. But the cards and characters still have a certain Effort parameter that affects the sequence of moves, and each card charges a different amount of this Effort when used.

It is very difficult to count all this, and most importantly – in practice it is almost not necessary, although there was probably a balance tied to it.

Solution:

To spread the functionality of the cards more. Both movement\equip\damage cards and cards within the category. For example, enter cards with DOT, cards with buffs and debuffs, cards with a change of status – disorientation, paralysis, etc. Greatly spread the damage and the number of weapon volleys. Make a clear description of the cards on one page, reduce the importance of the effect and remove it from the main parameters of the cards, put damage instead of it, or vice versa, greatly raise its importance so that it cannot be scored. So far, the most effective tactic is rush, go ahead. I don’t think this is appreciated by fans of tactical games.

We continue. After moving, the character can turn to one of the 4 sides, which will determine the possibilities of his further movement and attack. You can’t attack and walk sideways and backwards.

And this is just…

Problem 3. Stiffness of movement

These are hefty men in armor, I understand, but I feel uncomfortable because of this clumsiness. It’s terrible when I can’t answer a character, not from behind, but from the side. And in order to attack him, I have to spend several moves to get around him. More like masochism than tactics.

Decision:

Get rid of this mechanics. Let the characters move and attack in any direction. With this influence, positions can be left, for example, for side/back damage multipliers.

It would also be worth introducing a counterattack. This is a major change, but turn-based battles with a counterattack feel much more dynamic than without it.

Problem 4. Deck Management

Guys, this is a real pain. Here I am, a man who played Rage of Bahamut, a fan of Blood Brothers with absolutely hellish interfaces, but even there I didn’t cry so much from impotence to understand what was going on, how to assemble a deck. It is not clear which cards are backed up, which are not, how many of them are there, how many more can be added, what I need and what is slag – and this is the fourth problem.

Solution:

Completely redesign the management interface. An attempt to cram the system from Hearthstone, in my opinion, failed.

We need something more visual than a side list. The column of text doesn’t mean anything to me at all, especially coupled with the fact that when I click on a position from the list, I don’t view the card information, but remove it from the deck, and now I can’t even remember what kind of card it was. The same applies to the interface of evolution and splitting of cards (yes, they are here too), it is not clear which cards are quipped and which are not, what can be sprayed and what cannot be, and they are also stacked, some of the cards in which there may be one level of evolution and are quipped, and the second one is not quipped. Complete chaos. It took me a couple of days to figure it out. Most won’t have a couple of days to do it.

Problem 5. Crafting

The idea of crafting, in my opinion, is very interesting here. There are several levels of difficulty of crafting, on which the chance of a high grade, a crafted card depends, but the price also increases the chance of a fail. The joke is that crafting cards is not at maximum difficulty – there is no point. Since only legendaries rule, and it’s really possible to craft them only at maximum difficulty. That is, in fact, it is a choice without a choice, I saw it almost immediately, so the players will understand. If you make 10 options and one of them turns out not to be needed, this is a small problem. If you make 10 options and use only one, this is a big problem in design. In addition, when the card is destroyed, the player does not get anything: I guarantee, this is the moment of a huge raid. It’s worth giving at least something, even if it’s unnecessary, but just taking resources and not giving anything for them – it makes you angry.

Solution:

Spread the chances and profit of the complexity of crafting, removing the unambiguity of the strategy. We will have to calculate whether to give resources when failing – for example, to return 30% of gears, or to give 1-2 of the simplest cards.

And here we turn to heavy artillery.

Problem 6. The amount of content

The game has 3 locations with 5 missions. That’s all. That is, the content is finite, and the saddest thing is that it ends quickly. With due diligence, you can complete the game in a day. This is a paid-game strategy, not free-to-play, that people will play for years. It is clear that resources and deadlines were limited, but in such conditions it was necessary to focus on the generated content, on random encounters, to sharpen the game for re-passing missions, to grind. There are no long-term goals in the game, you can’t get stuck up to your ears and drag all your friends into it.

I know that there are plans to release a PvP add-on that should help this aspect, I really hope so.

Problem 7. Connect

Another problem, judging by the reviews of players, is the need for a constant connection to the Internet. This was done, of course, to protect against fraud and validate actions on the server. The fact is that in “online” games like Blood Brothers or Clash of Clans, this is an outwardly natural requirement: I play with other people, it’s clear why a connection is needed here. But when a heavy, slow, hardcore and, most importantly, singleplayer game requires a constant connection – such a requirement seems unreasonable.

Solutions :

• To position the game as pure online, but then the basic mechanics should be tied to interaction with other players, at least externally.
• Allow you to play offline and protect yourself from hacking in other ways (and if it’s purely offline, then even think about whether to close your eyes to cheaters).
• Combine online and offline modes as it is done, for example, in League of War – a grindow campaign offline, and purchases, PVP, clan activities – online.

In addition, it is worth considering that the popular hardcore franchise is necessarily accompanied by hardcore fans who know better than you what the game should be and they are very demanding of products for their favorite universe.

***

As a summary: Sergey Kozakov, Alexey Sazonov and the entire HeroCraft team have done a great job and launched one of the most powerful mobile games of recent times. I am sure that they have gained a huge experience, and I really hope that, after analyzing the performance, they will be able to either pull the Wolves to a good profit, or use this experience in future projects.