A few months ago, Gamasutra brought Conan Exiles creative director Joel Bylos onto our Twitch channel to discuss Funcom’s hit online survival game. Recently, Gamasutra’s Bryant Francis and Kris Graft had the pleasure of speaking with Bylos again about the game’s launch on Xbox One’s preview program, as well as the design of the game’s  new Frozen North expansion and what new features can be expected from it.

You can watch the stream embedded above, or click here to see it. And for more developer insights, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

STREAM PARTICIPANTS:

Joel Bylos, creative director of Conan Exiles

Bryant Francis, contributing editor at Gamasutra

Kris Graft, editor-in-chief at Gamasutra

Bryant Francis: The climbing mechanic and world traversal, can you talk about how it’s implemented right now?

Joel Bylos: We don’t have the leeway to give a paraglider, or anything like they have in Zelda, but basically any surface in the world is climbable, unless we deem it not to be, which we’ve done in some cases like dungeons, just to prevent people from exploiting certain puzzle mechanics. Essentially you can walk up to anything in the game, if you hold the jump button you’ll attach to it, you can do it right from the start if you like, and you’ll be pushed into a third-person camera view just to make that work, but basically you can jump up and attach to any of the rocks or cliff faces, and you climb then. Your stamina bar determines the amount of climbing time that you get, and so forth.

We had to refigure a large number of the rocks in the world to make their collision more precise, because otherwise the player would be floating in the air while climbing. And there was areas the players could reach now that would be outside of their theoretical reach before. Pretty much in this game you could reach almost anywhere by building there, we kind of knew what when we were making it, so we did take the time to make sure they looked okay when you got up to them, but now we had to make sure that the actual attach surfaces were fairly close to perfect when you actually got on them.

“We had to refigure a large number of the rocks in the world to make their collision more precise, because otherwise the player would be floating in the air while climbing. “

We had to make sure locations worked well with climbing. We had to make sure locations didn’t break with climbing, like in dungeons.  We knew that some of our puzzles would break so we made some of the dungeon walls unclimbable. We tried to make that realistic by making them slick with water, making them difficult to climb.

A problem we had been trying to solve in the game was that people had been building these bases in places that were basically unreachable and then destroying their staircases each night when they logged off. In PvP, they would build a staircase up to their base […] on top of a very high rock, then they would delete the staircase so players could never get to their base to raid them. It was clever, but it amounted to an unraidable base game, so we decided to add climbing as a way of at least reaching those bases.

Kris Graft: It’s one thing to do this in a game like Zelda, that’s single-player, you can kind of take into account what players might do. But in a MMO game like this, you could be thrown some curveballs.

Joel Bylos: Yeah. But it’s a relatively robust system, it’s one of the most polished systems we’ve launched. It could use some animation polish but it actually works very well, players have not been finding massive exploits or anything like that. It also solved a problem with world traversal with people, who were up on high cliffs, getting down quickly. It’s never that fun if you have to find a way down, it’s much more fun to jump off a cliff. So we have this whole mechanic where you do what we call the ‘heroic plunge,’ where you jump off a cliff and spin and grab the wall on the way down, and you’ll just slide with both your hands.

Kris Graft: That’s how I jump off of cliffs as well.

Joel Bylos: (laughs)

Kris Graft: The other side of the climbing mechanic in Breath of the Wild is the paraglider. Did you consider putting that in, or could something like that be implemented in the future?

Joel Bylos: We’ve discussed things like that. We can’t obviously do paraglider. I mean we could but it’d be kind of lame, it doesn’t really fit the setting that well. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a movie called Yor: Hunter from the Future? It was like an 80s cheesy barbarian movie. In that movie he captures a giant flying lizard creature and uses it as a paraglider, it’s kind of amazing.

[embedded content]
The unforgettable film Yor: Hunter From the Future

So we talk about things like that we talked about being able to skin certain creatures and maybe use them to do something like that. But we’ll see, we haven’t reached that point yet.

Kris Graft: Yeah. You previously said everything has to be ‘super violent,’ I think like skinning a creature, or capturing a creature and then forcing it to be your paraglider…I think that would fit in the Conan world, that’s just my personal opinion though.

Kris Graft: You hear a lot of people say that one of the major advantages of developing on console is that you just have one or two kinds of platforms to get it running on, and if it runs great one, it’s going to run great on all of them, because they’re all the same. And you have definitely found that to be true, right? (sarcasm)

“I was naive enough to actually think that. If it runs on one Xbox One S, it’ll run on all Xbox One S’s, if it’ll run on one Xbox One, it’ll run on all Xbox Ones.”

Joel Bylos: (laughs, sarcastically) Yes, that is definitely our experience. I was naive enough to actually think that. If it runs on one Xbox One S, it’ll run on all Xbox One S’s, if it’ll run on one Xbox One, it’ll run on all Xbox Ones. What we found was, for some reason it might be crashing for someone’s, and it could be not crashing on someone else’s, while they could be running the exact same console. They could have no external hard drives with basically the same setup as you.

So yeah we found that it’s been interesting with the console. I honestly believed that it would run the same for everybody. On the day of launch people were telling me it was crashing constantly. And I was running it at home, and I was crashing almost never, my minimum time-to-fail was like five or six hours. People were telling me they were crashing every minute, every ten minutes. From a development point of view that can be slightly frustrating, because tracking down those errors is also quite hard.

Kris Graft: How successful have you been at tracking down those errors?  Have you been able to do that efficiently?

“When you’re testing for stability you have a MTF, a Minimum Time to Failure, which is basically the average amount of time any of them playing the game before they crashed.”

Joel Bylos: Yeah I think so. We’ve been patching every week, because there can be multiple causes of any crash, right? Patching everything as we go.  Our minimum time to failure on every version, which is how our testing unit gives us feedback.

When you’re testing for stability you have a MTF, a minimum time to failure, which is basically the average amount of time any of them playing the game before they crashed, and that has increased from two hours to seven-and-a-half. Which is obviously a huge stability improvement. Which doesn’t mean on the average that people crash every seven-and-a-half hours, it just means that that’s the minimum before they force the game to crash.

Kris Graft: What reasons have you found that has caused a crash or a bug that you didn’t expect? Like, somebody had Daytona USA installed, and that was the reason that people were experiencing crashes.

Joel Bylos: (laughs) I don’t think we’ve found particularly other games to be the source. We did find people running external hard drives, was one cause, could have been one of the causes. Here’s some juicy stuff.  Before launch, in Europe we had the rating to show full nudity. Dicks on consoles, essentially. The way we worked with Microsoft to figure it out was to have DLC that enabled nudity in Europe, so that people who could download that DLC, in Europe only, to get the nudity on their characters. 

We had set this all up, we had tested this version.  The version we were going to launch with we had tested for two weeks, it was very stable, it wasn’t crashing much, the coders had done a lot of things to it. And we had other versions that were waiting to be basically patched out later, because those were the versions that we’d been testing. And those versions [hadn’t] undergone thourough testing, at least not nearly as thourough testing as normal.

“Microsoft found that there were people getting around and getting the nudity DLC in places that they shouldn’t, and we had to quickly release a version that was newer, and hadn’t been tested well, and we had launch problems.”

So we had been working on them. And then about two days before the launch, we launched on a Wednesday and Microsoft called us on a Monday night, and basically they found a problem in their store, where people in the US were able to get around the region lock and get the DLC for nudity, because the trial had accidentally launched early. People were downloading the game in trial mode well before it was actually launched. A few weird things going on there. So basically people were figuring out a way around [the region lock], so we had to disable the nudity in Europe or else we’d get fined by the ESRB.

So basically we had to disable that version of the trial, that a bunch of European people had downloaded, that had nudity DLC as well. So we had to disable that, and release a build on launch day that had not been tested in the way that the other builds had been.  So on the Tuesday night I had played for six hours with pretty much zero crashing and zero problems. And then on Wednesday we had to quickly change our version.

And so that’s shenanigans, but that’s what happens sometimes. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that Microsoft found that there were people getting around and getting the nudity DLC in places that they shouldn’t, and we had to quickly release a version that was newer, and hadn’t been tested well, and we had launch problems.

“Some people have twenty thousand hours in the game, and some people have a hundred, but they still have an opinion about this stuff, right?”

Joel Bylos: Today I did a temperature test with people. On Fridays we have a meeting with the entire team, where we just talk about what everyone’s been working on, so people all in the loop. Often what I do in those meetings is we thumbs-up/thumbs-down/neutral on a feature, just to see how people feel about things.

And so I did a temperature test today on the dev team, for several of the features that are left to complete for the game.  So it was quite interesting. I was like ‘how do you feel about this feature,’ is it thumbs-up, thumbs-down, neutral, and there’s also, if you’could only pick one of these features on the list, which one would you do? And so, very diverse and interesting results based on the type of player that our devs are. And many of them are very different, there are people who play a game solely in PvE, they like to be on a server with other players, but they don’t like to do PvP.  And they’re not interested in interaction on that level of continually struggling against other people.

There are people who literally are just giant jerks, who go around killing as many people as they can find on a server, and destroying people’s bases, and teabagging them. So it’s interesting to see what people feel about things and what they think is important for the game. And it’s super interesting because some [of our devs] have 20,000 hours in the game, and some people have a hundred, because it’s a product assistant, who gets coffee for the project manager. He might have only played the game for a little bit, he might have only been working a phone job for a few days. But he still has an opinion about this stuff, right?

Kris Graft: That was going to be my next question, about cutting features, about how you get to that decision, about which of your darlings you’re going to kill. Is it just super democratic, like that?

“I try not to do democracy in game development. Design by committee can work, but it’s difficult.”

Joel Bylos: No no no, I try not to do democracy in game development. Design by committee, it can work, but it’s difficult. I think it’s more like design by merit, so people come with really cool ideas and implement them, and then you’re like ‘oh yeah, that was an amazing idea. Great work.’

We don’t democratize it, what we do is, I don’t know if you saw that presentation where they were talking about their feature scorecards? We have a similar system, where basically we say, does this feature market the game? Will it sell copies in the market? Will people buy a game if they see a video of this? That sounds super cynical, but it’s one of many factors, these are all points on our scorecard. So as a marketing feature, is this feature going to cause the current community playing the game to be mad, or happy? Does it add value to that community or does it piss them off?

“We have a system where basically we say, does this feature market the game? Will people buy a game if they see a video of this? As a marketing feature, is this feature going to cause the current community playing the game to be mad, or happy?”

And does the dev team want to work on this feature? Are they excited about this feature? Does this feature meet other development goals by developing it? An example of that is, we have the slavery system with the thralls that you knock out and drag back to your base. That gives us 90 percent of the work for a pet system in the game, having pets that you bring back to your base. That would be an example of a feature that helps development of another feature.

So you have these questions, you give them a point scale, we rate them. I fill out those, I talk to the community manager to get the temperature of the community about each feature, I talk to the marketing team to see what they think, I talk to the developers and get their temperature on things. I make judgment calls on a couple of things like: is this a feature we can do well?

For example, climbing was a feature that I believed we could do well, and we did fairly well with it and I think it meets the standards for our game.  And then there’s stuff like actual estimates, how much time will it take to implement this feature? And then all of those things we put together in a point score, and we look and say, ‘Look, this feature is a minus-six, it’s probably not a good feature to add to the game. This feature is a plus-seven, it’s a no-brainer, we should have it.’

Kris Graft: So it’s the exact same questions that you ask at different points in development, to make these decisions about features?

Joel Bylos: The discussions about which actual features to add to the game, that’s more of a discussion that I have with the executive producer. Once we have a list of features that we think define the vision of the game, that’s when we start asking these questions about them.

For more developer insights, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

Ubisoft plans to buy back up to 4 million shares to fend off a hostile takeover from French media conglomerate Vivendi. 

In a brief press release, the Assassin’s Creed creator explained it’s granted a mandate to an unnamed investment services provider, allowing it to repurchase shares on Ubisoft’s behalf. 

All repurchased shares will then be cancelled by Ubisoft, preventing them from being reissued on the market and potentially purchased by Vivendi. 

It’s another small victory for the studio, which is attempting to secure its independence and push back against Vivendi’s repeated advances. 

Vivendi currently holds a 26 percent stake in Ubisoft, and French law would require the firm to make a mandatory takeover bid once it owns more than 30 percent. 

The threat of a hostile takeover has been looming over Ubisoft for some time now, with Vivendi first buying into the company back in 2015. 

Since then, Ubisoft has come out on the offensive, and has reiterated its desire to remain autonomous time and time again.

It’s a tactic that seems to be working, with Vivendi CEO Stephane Roussel recently revealing the company isn’t sure whether to table a takeover bid or simply sell off its stock and move on. 

The latter would surely be welcomed by Ubisoft’s founding family, the Guillemots, who recently raised their own stake in the company. 

Welcome to another edition of Next Week on Xbox! The holiday gaming season is fast approaching and that means our most-anticipated games of the year are making their way to Xbox One. And with Halloween only a few weeks away, it’s also the perfect time to serve up a couple of spooky titles this week, like the survival horror game The Evil Within 2 and the creepy Decay: The Mare. On the more epic fantasy scale, we’re booking our tickets to return to Mordor and continue the fight against the Dark Lord himself in Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Read on for details on these games and more to find out what’s Next Week on Xbox!

Games

October 10, 2017

• Xbox Play Anywhere Title

Talion and Celebrimbor return in Middle-earth: Shadow of War and aim to forge armies, conquer fortresses, and dominate the land of Mordor from behind enemy lines. With the return of the award-winning Nemesis System powering the unique stories of your followers, in addition to taking on the full power of the Dark Lord Sauron and his army, this epic new story in the ever-expanding Middle-earth saga is one you don’t want to miss. And as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, one purchase gives you a copy on both Xbox One and Windows 10.

Games

October 10, 2017

Take on the role as one of the four misfit members of the Raid gang — Sterling, Rivet, Kurgan or Wolfgang — to shoot, blast, and steal your way through Europe at the height of World War II. With class-based gameplay and authentic weapon customizations, take down the German war machine in this exciting four-player co-op shooter.

Games

October 10, 2017

Welcome to the Danger Zone, a virtual crash testing facility where you’re tasked to survive a variety of challenging and deadly scenarios. With real-world vehicle physics with explosive gameplay, your goal is to cause as much explosive and creative damage as possible.

Games

October 11, 2017

You are the robot Kramer 227 and you must find a way to harvest enough energy to rescue your fellow robot friends before their planet of Aurura crashes in the sun. Gather energy, share with your friends, and escape a dire situation across 20 extensive platforming levels.

Games

October 13, 2017

In this psychological horror game, you play as Sam, an addict who has found himself in the metal institution Reaching Dreams. Hoping to kick his habit and sort his life, something goes terribly wrong and he becomes lost in an endless nightmare.

Games

October 13, 2017

Detective Sebastian Castellanos has lost it all. But when given a chance to save his daughter, he must descend once more into the nightmarish world of STEM. From mastermind Shinji Mikami, The Evil Within 2 is the latest evolution of survival horror where horrifying threats emerge from every corner as the world twists and warps around him. Will Sebastian face adversity head on with weapons and traps, or sneak through the shadows to survive? Prepare to enter a frightening world filled with anxiety-inducing thrills and disturbing moments.

Rogue Trooper Redux is a pretty interesting upcoming release, as it’ll tap into nostalgia while also offering some shooty-bang-bang gaming on the Switch. The good news is that Nintendo fans will no longer need to wait longer than PS4 / Xbox One owners to play it, with development getting ahead of schedule to ensure a shared release date.

It’ll arrive on 17th October in North America, with the same date expected (but not 100% confirmed yet) for Europe; the price will be £19.99 / $24.99. Check out some details and a ‘101’ trailer below.

• A BAFTA-nominated story faithful to the 2000 AD comic and universe of the same name.
• A thrilling singleplayer campaign blending stealth, action, cover-based shooting and epic set pieces. 
• Tactical smarts: Listen out for Helm’s strategic advice and confuse the enemy with distractions and holodecoys.
• Withering firepower: Transform Rogue’s sentient rifle Gunnar into a sentry gun, sniper rifle, mortar, missile launcher and more.
• Powerful upgrades: collect salvage to upgrade weapons and order Bagman to manufacture explosives under fire.
• Two intense co-op modes for 2-4 players online (or in single player offline).

Will you be tempted to give this a try on Nintendo Switch?

Twenty years ago a bizarre amalgamation of card game, board game, and video game first released on the Sega Saturn, and made waves with its strategic depth, addictive gameplay and unique concept. Subsequent titles have shuffled the formula since, but that core blend of number-crunching, dice-rolling and card collecting remained, carving a niche in the market that drew in a dedicated fanbase. Its been nearly ten years since we’ve seen the release of any Culdcept game here in the West, but for anyone who recently dusted off their 3DS to go Metroid hunting, that is about to change.

Depending on your experience with gamepieces, dice and cards, either in digital or tabletop form, Culdcept Revolt can be an extremely daunting experience; downright intimidating at first glance. Competitive card games are increasingly popular nowadays, with many major franchises even offering spin-off titles based around this, but Culdcept is a totally self-contained entity and bears years of history. Despite its intricacies, which are absolutely intact in this latest release, Revolt now brings the series back to the West with confidence, eager to both introduce new players and challenge those more familiar with its addictive gameplay. 

Though it’s drawn fairly accurate comparisons with Monopoly in the past, some may find that Culdcept has more in common with Fortune Street, emphasising multiple pathways and a greater sense of control over the board. Up to four players roll dice each turn to determine how many spaces they move around a variety of different maps, claiming squares as their own by placing guardian monsters on them, which then demand a toll off any other player who subsequently lands on the space. These territories can be upgraded, monsters can be equipped with special items, and magic spells can be employed to help seal victory, all based on your customised selection of cards. Battling comes into play when trying to seize control of more territory or defending your own against invaders. If you’ve ever landed on a pricey hotel in Monopoly and wished you could attempt to tear it down instead of paying, then this is exactly the kind of capitalist catharsis you’ve been looking for.

Each board features between two and four gates, each corresponding to a cardinal direction. Passing through every one of these gates is considered a ‘lap’ of the board, and grants you a magic bonus for your trouble. Magic essentially acts as your currency in game, and is spent on summoning monsters as well as paying any tolls for landing on owned spaces. To win, you simply gather up enough until you reach the predetermined limit, and then race towards the nearest gate to claim victory. Expanding and upgrading your territory adds a steady income of magic, and of course you charge a toll for any player unlucky enough to land on your turf. Gates also heal your battle-weary monsters and activate them again after they become fatigued through use. They’re vital checkpoints that make sure you keep moving around the board, forcing players to put themselves at risk.

While we could go beyond this simplified abbreviation and detail just how each facet of gameplay works, or share our top secret strategies (fat chance), it would be a disservice to Revolt itself, which does a wonderful job of easing the player in slowly but surely. New mechanics are introduced with enough restraint that it never feels overwhelming, and even with such a huge amount of information to dive into there’s a limit on how much is heaped into your lap until you’re more comfortable with the basics. Right from the start there’s an extremely useful explanation of the game’s setting and what the general concept is. Despite how genuinely helpful this can be, it does rely on the tired cliché of amnesia as an extra crutch. 

Your self-titled character has no recollection of their past, but is told that they are a cepter: one who can control the cards of culdcept and perceive hidden pocket dimensions called battle spaces. Lost and confused in a strange city you’re found by a rebel group known as the Free Bats, who operate in secret to fight back against the tyrannical rule of Count Krannis. Under his command cepters are being hunted down and eliminated, while the city gates remain closed, trapping every citizen inside. With a ragtag bunch of heroes and a fiendish villain to fight back against it’s certainly well-worn material, but acts as a solid platform to support plenty of opportunities to engage in battles. We were initially detached from the events of the story but things did pick up, and with rebellion at the heart of the adventure the drive to escape makes it easy to sympathise with many of the characters. 

The single-player campaign is broken up into chapters, each containing the main plotline missions with optional side stories to complete as well. Inevitably, every single little disagreement or challenge throughout the story will result in a card-based confrontation – even among allies – but the gameplay is interesting enough to warrant the repetition. Don’t expect much in the way of variety however, as there’s no opportunity to actually explore environments or interact with NPCs outside of set cutscenes. Your input into the story is confined solely to the board, which is a bit disappointing. There are still some weird quirks of course, with the sudden arrival of a cowboy character early on being a jarring example, and the fact that your evil-doing opponents frequently give you kindly advice about the current map, without any ulterior motive or smarmy attitude whatsoever. The game does an effective job of making you dislike your rivals, so it’s strange to receive helpful tidbits of information from them before charging into battle. 

We have to admit though, it’s usually pretty good advice, and there’s plenty to wrap your head around. Creatures have specific abilities and elemental traits for example, and these can define their purpose as either aggressive invaders or staunch defenders. When forming your deck of fifty cards, which are here named ‘books’, you need to keep in mind the more attack-oriented fire and earth elements, while balancing trickier water and air elements that boast special abilities. Items to help attack and defend – as well as magic spells – are also vital, with powers ranging from something as simple as an extra dice roll, to some game-changing abilities that effect the entire board. There are over 400 different cards to collect in total and it’s important to spend time rearranging and updating your book of cards regularly. This is especially important as certain cards are objectively better than others, making earlier items and creatures obsolete as you progress. There are plenty of slots for different books, encouraging experimentation and adaptive strategy to fit the map, your opponent, and your own preferences.

Returning players will find that there are some key changes to the formula this time around, which may seem subtle at first but go a long way in streamlining the experience and mixing things up a bit. One of the most obvious changes is the way in which you earn cards, which ties into the gradual introduction of mechanics rather than being overwhelmed all at once. They aren’t immediately unlocked upon completing maps like in previous titles, instead you earn money by playing matches, which can then be spent on randomised packs of cards each with a set theme, such as a specific elemental type for example. More of these themes unlock as you progress, granting the chance to find rarer, more powerful cards that in turn allow for very different types of books. 

Smaller tweaks such as the fatigue that afflicts monsters, the fact that you now discard at the end of your turn, and the introduction of new buildings also change things up, but another major addition are the slightly bizarre Evo cards. These are special dragon creatures that ‘age’ through use, allowing you to level them up and partially customise each card to suit your needs. Up to two of them can be in your book at any one time, and keeping them there will add evolution points with each battle you complete. These points are then spent on increasing the card’s strength and HP, adding new abilities or changing its elemental type. It’s an interesting idea that’s pretty well executed, though it’s entirely possible to continue your game with just the standard cards in tow. They’re fun and unique, but not crucial.

The more you play, the more you’ll begin to develop your own style and gain confidence in your book of cards. The AI opponents can put up a stiff challenge, but as is the downfall with many board games luck plays just as much of a part in victory or defeat as raw skill does. There are ways to manipulate the dice roll, and to negate certain traps, but sometimes you’ll just suffer a run of misfortune and fall victim to one bout of bad luck too many. It’s frustrating to see games turn around so quickly on a total whim, but it does admittedly add to the excitement sometimes. You’re always kept on your toes, challenged by new opponents with new books, and being able to see what’s in their hand at all times makes it a tense affair as you try to predict their next move. If anything, the game can move too slowly at times, especially as you wait on multiple AI characters to finish their turns. It’s also a bit of a hassle to restart games if they aren’t going your way, as you need to wait your turn, manually resign, and then load that mission again from scratch.

The simple 2D sprites set against a 3D background are pleasant if not amazing, while more elaborate character art features the impressive work of Kinu Nishimura, known for Code of Princess and the Street Fighter series. The cards themselves are also well illustrated by various artists, while battle animations are restricted to some limited effects that do the job, but pass on more elaborate visuals as creatures clash. We enjoyed being able to zoom in on card art however, as some of the detail is lost on the small-screened handheld. There’s some English voice acting mixed in alongside a forgettable soundtrack, announcing card names and offering encouragement during games, but we ended up turning the sound down and sticking on a podcast when settling into longer play sessions.

Outside of the campaign you can set up customisable single matches for fun or practice against AI opponents, who can display surprising tactical intelligence, as well as comment on specific events within that particular game. If one character trails just behind you in magic then they sure won’t stay quiet about it, goading you with taunts of their encroaching comeback. We’d estimate that a standard game with a limit of 8000 magic takes around thirty minutes to complete on average, but there are plenty of options to mess around with to affect game length, alter card allowances (it’s possible to ban Evo cards entirely, for example), as well as customise the look of your cepter and even the style of dice you roll. 

Of course there are plenty of options when it comes to multiplayer as well, both online and local. For local play you have total control over the game, and can choose from a number of customisation options. Anyone who wants to join in will need to have their own copy of Revolt, however. The online mode itself will actually reward players with a daily bonus just by logging in, ranging from in-game currency to a random card. While online you can enter into a match with friends, or battle other cepters around the world. The Free Match will link you with active players, and sets up three different difficulty levels to choose from. There’s far less customisation here as the game sets its own rules in these arena-style lobbies, but it means that beginners can jump in without much fear of being swarmed by expert players. 

Separate from the in-game shop, there’s also an online store which currently offers up a variety of both free and paid DLC in the form of extra quests and cosmetic items such as outfits or book covers. Some of these items are fairly pricey, but thankfully they don’t have an effect on the game itself, as you can’t buy exclusive cards or pay your way to victory. It’s possible we’ll see additional free DLC in the future, though the main game itself is still a fully-realised experience.