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The Only Thing More Important That First Impressions are Preconceived Notions

I'm back!

So look, I'm one of those people who is, frankly, quite easy to impress. If back in, oh, say, September of 2009 someone were to tell me that there was going to be a Tactical RPG set in the MTG universe, I'd be ecstatic. My interest would be immediately piqued and I would be very excited about a game that I knew literally nothing about. Now what you don't do, is tel me about a game you know I'll like, and then spend the next year in complete silence!

Maybe I'm just spoiled, having sunk my money into gaming companies who actually care about the player base, but the way this game was handled after its announcement of darn near unacceptable.

There is no way that a game as shallow and poorly thought out as this one needed to be shrouded in secrecy for so long. Community forums that mattered? No. Developer feedback? No. Proof the the games still being worked on? No. For months I chalked this one up as vaporware, then January 18th January 19th rolled around.

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Failure to Launch

Magic the Gathering tactics did not launch on time, and that quickly became a real problem. The incident split the interested community into two camps; the first lamenting SOE's failure to do anything correctly, and the second shrugging it off as standard launch bugs. I'm a reasonable person, especially when it comes to situations like these. However, on January 18th I found myself in the first camp. I don't get upset when a game I want to play gets delayed for some reason or another. In fact, I'm an advocate. If Bethesda needs to push back the release date of TES: Skyrim to 2010, great, hopefully it means I'll get a better game from it. When the first thing you tell me about your game in months is the release date, well, you'd better deliver.

It's a long accumulation of frustrations with the development of this game that put me in this mood on their would-be launch day. Added to this by further lack of communication on their end. If a release is going to be delayed, make it clear and obvious and ideally early. Yes, buried in the depths of their graveyard of a forum was an announcement that the launch was having issue. Was the guy who has permissions to update the front page out sick? I really want to play your game! I want to know the strides you've made, and the pitfalls you may have suffered. I want to know the states of the game, why it's being delayed and what you're doing to make it better. I just want you to talk to me...

I'll listen.

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The Longest Work Day

I had just started my day at work when the game actually did launch, and had hours to wait before I could finally get home and start playing. What I was able to do was keep an eye on the forums to see what peoples' initial reaction to the game was. Most of what I read was people having technical issues, getting errors, etc. A combination of my personality and my line of work has given me something of an "attitude" when people complain about things like this. My first line of thought is always, "The software works fine, you just don't know how to use a computer."

So I get home, load the game and am immediately greeted with a mountain of application errors... gravy. I am able to work through them, however, and after a 1.1gb patch download I was on my way to planeswalking the grid-field!

I was brought to the color selection screen, obviously choosing to align myself with blue mana, then taken to the character selection screen. I was under the impression I would have some say in how my character looked, but my choices were Male_01, Male_02 and Female_01, a bit disappointing. After that I was taken to the home screen, which automatically took me to the tutorial section of the game. Before that, I had to change my video settings, badly. The game defaulted me at 600x900 resolution, so I changed that to 1920x1080 and jacked all the video settings to max, because I can.

The tutorials were pleasant and brief, and the engine started making a fair bit of sense. Sorceries cast just as you think they would, often acting the same as their paper counterparts. Creatures are referred to as Figures and can be summoned to any tile adjacent to your planeswalker. Enchantments provide a permanent buff to either yourself or your figures, and mana is spent as you would expect. Cards in general are referred to as Spells, and your hand is essentially your Action Bar. At the start of any game you have five spells, chosen at random, from your spellbook (Library) sitting in your action bar. Every turn, you get a new spell added to your hand, as well as an amount of mana equal to your turn count. That is to say on turn 1 you'll get 1 mana, turn 2 you'll get 2 mana, etc. This mana doesn't carry over between turns, so it's in your best interest to cast whatever spells you can during each of your turns.

Figures in MTGT have five basic stats. Attack works the same as in the card game, but defense is more like your figures health pool than actual defense. By default, your figures do not regenerate health between turns. New stats are Movement, Range and Initiative. Movement is how many tiles your figure can move per turn. Range is how far your figure can attack from, and initiative is how often your figure is able to act. Initiative affects you, well, Initiative Bar on the left side of the screen. If you've played Final Fantasy X you'll be right at home with this concept. It's a simple bar with a portrait of each unit on the battlefield on it, showing when and in what order they will be able to act.

Beyond that the game is fairly straightforward. You gain a spell every turn, gain mana every turn and the amount of things you can do is governed by both your mana pool and your initiative. Speaking of mana, let's talk about spellbooks.

You design your spellbook with any combination of figures, sorceries, enchantments and artifacts, and must meet a minimum of 40 spells. You don't need lands since your mana is generated automatically during your gameplay. The mana you actually receive is based on the color of the spells in your spellbook. For example, I played through the campaign with a UB deck. On turn one I would either gain a single black or blue mana. Turn two I received UB, turn three UUB, turn four UUBB, and so on. Once the campaign was over I took my handful of earned spells and tossed them in to see what would happen. Turn one I got a white mana, turn two WG, turn three WGU, turn four WGUB, then WGUUB, then WGGUUB and so on. It's a bit random, but does its best to evenly distribute mana.

And that's the game! You win by killing your opponent's planeswalker and.. Oh yeah, planeswalkers! Once you reach level six your lowly mage ascends into a planeswalker, allowing you to travel the multiverse and wear loyalty counters. More importantly, it means you can start spending talent points. Played any given MMO lately? Talent points allow you to customize, and I say that loosely, the way your planeswalker behaves during battle. As a blue mage I could spend points to make my Rogues act more frequently, or better my chances at... going first? Yeah, for the most part, these talents are quite boring, and the talent trees themselves aren't particularly well thought out either.

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The Good

Now, I know I opened this article with a very negative tone, but that didn't mean I wasn't actually looking forward to playing it. There's a lot of things I actually really enjoyed about the game. Firstly, you really need to understand what MTGT is not. This game is not Magic the Gathering. It uses spells and creatures, locations and concepts from the card game, but that's where it ends. This is a tactical RPG set in the MTG universe, and no further comparisons should be drawn. I was happy with the mechanics in the game. Figures would gain a defensive bonus for one turn after they were summoned to prevent lockouts, attack of opportunities added a nice dynamic to the combat, and the mana generation felt, for the most part, fairly intuitive. The art, while not top of the line, was nice, and I liked seeing spell effects and figures appear on the battlefield.

I envisioned a whole second paragraph here, but, it's just not happening. Well, I like the quick slide animation between menus.

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The Bad

Alright, let's start with the actual installation. First, the game install starts with a browser plugin... for some reason. Myself and others experienced application errors and Flash errors the first time we started the client, but for me they just went away. Once you're actually in the game, you may need to tinker around with your video options more than you'd like to. In the resolution drop-down box each resolution had between 1-6 instances of that resolution, and none of the other video options were customizable beyond "on" and "off". I had to hop in and out of games a few times to get my settings right, as I was experiencing flickering and text distortion heavily before I found the correct adjustments. The rest of the interface was very buggy as well. The Auction House would freeze on me, the menus would become unresponsive, and sometimes the client would just close.

Once during the night of testing my PC froze bad enough to warrant a hard restart.

Now let's talk about the actual game. Clicking the Play Now button gives you four options. You can participate in a Pickup Game (PUG) which is a casual game against another, similarly skilled player. You can play in a tournament for Gold and boosters. You can play the tutorials again (The least painful of the four choices), or you can play through the single player campaign.

The Solo Campaign has a story. It's not good story and is only there to let you know that your spark has ignited and that you've become a planeswalker. The campaign spans 6 missions, 5 of which reward you with a card. The first mission is a "training" mission, which makes literally no sense at all. You spend the whole round awkwardly moving from one point to another, witnessing pre-scripted "examples" of what you will be doing in missions to come. It felt very out of place. The missions are very short, and somewhat inconsistent. I didn't run into any difficulties until mission 4, which took me three attempts. The first two attempts were struggles against the AI, ultimately leading me to surrender. The third attempt was like punching a child in the face. The AI didn't even try to fight back, didn't cast a single spell, and the round was over in minutes.

Once mission 5 was completed, I received one talent point, and was offered to purchase Chapter 2 of the campaign for $5...

Then there's the game play in general. As I just mentioned there are inconsistencies. People rag on the game for being too random, well, it isn't. Random events are fine, crits, crushing blows, random talent buffs, etc are all part of the game and simply need to be factored in. I'm talking about inconsistent mana generation, AI difficulty, initiative checks and more. It's hard to peg what the game is doing on purpose, and what it's downright failing on. Even after all that though, the game doesn't change. Whether you're playing against a NecroPolymorph deck, a fast Goblin deck or a UB Control deck, every game devolves into the same thing you've seen time and time again. To put it bluntly, the game gets boring.

Speaking of boring, we have talent trees! For one the trees seem entirely too large for a game that will clearly be limiting the amount of talent points you'll actually get to spend. The talents themselves are very uninspired, and have little actual impact on your game. Once again, boring.

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And The Ugly

Tournaments. I feel like I should just end it there, but I 'll go on. Tournaments should be the highlight of this game, instead they're a blight. A draft, for example, costs three booster packs and $2 to enter, just like MTGO. Each booster pack only has six spells in it, so you've already lost money. How much money? $3.99 a pack of course! Once you've entered the draft you'd best hope you win, thanks to the 3-1-1-1 prize structure in place. Even then, winning won't be the first thing on your mind while you're playing, instead it will be the brain-melting lag you'll need to endure while the game takes 45+ seconds to register every single mouse click you try to make!

Lastly, for now, we have SOE's Free To play model. Let me start by saying I'm a F2P advocate. I like the system, it works, and it potentially works well. MTGT, however, is so incredibly limiting that you really don't get anything at all to play for free. Unless you want to start sinking major bucks into this mess of a game there's no realistic way to progress at all, not that there's anything worth building up to in the first place. You can purchase SC (Station Cash) at 1 point per penny, or 100 points for a $1. Station cash, however, only buys you boosters and promo cards (SOE sells singles), if you want to buy cards off the auction house or from other players, you'll need to make a second conversion into Gold. Gold is the in game currency, and you get 20 to start. To buy Gold, it'll cost you $10 per 100 pieces, and singles like Necropotence are already selling for 200 Gold in the auction house. From the solo campaign map, you're able to participate in a Daily Mission, which will award you with 2 Gold and some experience. Daily seems to be subjective, though, as after doing my first daily on the evening of the 19th, I've yet to see another appear for me!

Oh yeah, if you don't live in the US, you can't participate in tournaments, and you should be thankful.

In fact, the number one worst experience I had with this game, were those terrifying two whole minutes it took me to locate and click the Exit button.

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Making Lemonade

I've decided not to rate this game, as I think it's better for the review to speak for itself and let you decide from there. All you have to lose from trying the game is time, oh so valuable time. My personal opinion of this game is not a good one at all. Between the non-existent interaction with their player base, the botched launch, and the end result, it's very unlikely SOE will be seeing any of my digital dollars. Let me put this into context. Last week I made an arrangement with a complete stranger on the internet. He wanted to get rid of some goods, and I told him I would pay him for it. I didn't ask about condition, quantity, shipping confirmation, or anything else that any normal person would ask, and I gave him my money simply because "he told me" the items had shipped. I do stupid things like THAT and I STILL wouldn't invest a penny into this game. Also, thanks a ton for the books Lythand!

I can't in good conscience recommend this game to any but the most masochistic. What I can do is make some of my favorite recommendations for fans of the genre!

Final Fantasy Tactics. An oldie but a goody. This was the first TRPG I ever played, which led me to try Tactics Ogre and just about anything else I could get my hands on during that time period.

 

Disgaea. If FFT was the first TRPG I played, Disgaea was the best I've ever played. In fact, I recommend anything put out by NiS, including Phantom Brave, Grim Grimoire, Omen Sphere and Soul Nomad & the World Eaters.

Culdcept SAGA. Ever wondered what would happen if Magic the Gathering and Monopoly got together and had a baby? Well here ya' go! This came out for the Xbox 360 a few years ago and was actually a blast to play. There's not much staying power with this game, but I found it highly enjoyable while it lasted.

That's it for me this week. Next week I should be back on my regular schedule with my regular content. So until next time!

-Jeff Torres