Forged in Battle
August 14th, 2011
I’ve recently discovered a game called BattleForge. Well, it’s really more of a re-discovery; I remember hearing about this game back when it was still new, but then it just seemed to fall off the radar screen. After playing some ten PvE matches and reading some of the comments on metacritic, I can see a lot of the reasons why. The game has a ton of flaws and I’m pretty near burned out with it already, but the concept as such is still pretty unique.
Long story short, BattleForge is an RTS where you build decks out of various unit, spell and building cards. There are no actual card-like mechanics in the game, like drawing or discarding, which somewhat makes you wonder why they went with the card metaphor in the first place. And it really works hard at that metaphor, with cards flapping and bending almost convincingly when you mouse over their little icons. I suspect the only reason they went with this card system is the money bags they saw Magic: the Gathering pulling in. Now that the game has gone free-to-play, it’s business model is identical to your standard CCG. Like every other deck building video game I’ve seen, BattleForge makes you buy all your cards after giving you a small starter deck. Fortunately, it’s not nearly as expensive as Magic. Fifteen bucks should get you all the cards you really need, unless you absolutely must have all the rarest cards. There’s less than 400 cards in the whole game anyway, so there isn’t all that much collecting you can do.
As a concept there really isn’t anything else like it out there. There aren’t all that many RTS games to begin with, and none let you customize a faction before a match. Sadly, BattleForge fails otherwise on so many levels that it’s likely to accomplish little besides frightening away other devs from exploring this territory. Purely as an RTS its just not a very good game. There is some entertainment to be had in the singleplayer campaign, even though the story is complete nonsense. But at least it does present a decent challenge on the higher difficulty settings. I haven’t had much experience with PvP yet, but it doesn’t look particularly promising either. The players have full map vision at all times, and this design choice alone destroys a lot of potential for strategy. With full map vision there can be no sneak attacks or unexpected comebacks. The map design and node capturing mechanics also serve to simply funnel the players into each other. And of course there are the inevitable balance issues, with rarer cards being more effective and late game monstrosities crushing all life out of earlier units.
What enjoyment there is to be had isn’t easy to get at either. The UI design is downright embarrassing and many cards are overly complicated. Pretty much every unit has 3-4 different abilities, often with descriptions that go on for five lines. With a dozen different critters in your deck, you won’t remember much about what they can do. The game doesn’t really provide any context for the units either, so you won’t really end up caring much about them. Another part of this disconnect problem is some unnecessarily high stat numbers and a certain degree of abstraction that makes it difficult to compare units and figure out how much damage they can do. Each unit card in the game has an attack and defense value, starting in the low hundreds for lowly units, and going up to 4000+ for late game beasts. The defense score seems to translate directly into hit points, but it’s a complete mystery how the attack value relates to actual damage being dealt. Of course, additional stats like attack speed go completely unmentioned.
All in all, BattleForge is largely a lesson in what not to do. But it is interesting to see someone exploring this particular hybrid. I just wish more devs would try out customization models in strategy games, hopefully without blindly sticking to all the established conventions of CCGs. But that’s enough flogging of that tired old horse. I’ll come back to it only once I have something new to add, perhaps even a game of my own that revolutionizes the whole genre. Perhaps.
– Peace and calm seas
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