Hasbro's $1 billion bet on internal game development
Hasbro's $1 billion bet on internal game development
Last year was a massive one for Hasbro's video game business, with Monopoly Go and Baldur's Gate 3 providing the toy ma…
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Yeah, because Magic the Gathering: Arena has been managed so well.
Expect any first party titles from Hasbro to be incredibly unstable, crash consistently, and never receive any meaningful post-launch maintenance updates, just more things to sell.
They aimed to do better than MTGO with its spaghetti code made by underpaid developers, and they ended up with the flashier looking Arena with spaghetti code made by underpaid developers. They also made sure it was missing half of the game's cards and the capability to implement much wanted features like more than two player matches and spectator mode.
I'd even take the capability to actually handle regular game actions without 15+ clicks, or consistent audio functionality.
It honestly blows my mind just how much better MTGO is compared to MTG:A. You have to get over an interface from the early 2000s, but it's not like MTG:A does card animations anymore, and the audio call-outs are re-used when they work, so the only thing you really miss are the incredibly obnoxious animated pets which sell for like $15 each. Hasbro really loves to innovate backwards.
I'm an MTGO believer as well, but what regular game actions take you 15+ (I know you're exaggerating) clicks on Arena? The interface isn't perfect on Arena, but it's decently functional most of the time. My gripes with Arena are mainly the monetization strategies and the insane amount of time it takes them to add cards (even with the supposed machine learning to program the cards) and features (practically none get added anymore).
Cat-Oven, Shelly or Bowmaster after a wheel, basically any stack battle that also triggers an on-board effect, trying to resolve Tainted Pact to actually exile your library...
MTGO does it right: you click auto-yield once on a trigger that's going to occur 15+ times in a match, and you basically never have to touch it again. MTG:A sometimes let's you click resolve, but if you need to interact with the stack while there's triggers you'll have to click through them all.
Ah, I pretty much only play draft so I don't run into those kinds of things often. The lack of right clicking really hampers Arena's interface.
And D&D Beyond is another great example - you have shit tons of material and a source that was built by someone else, you buy it and do nothing with it? And it’s not intuitive and lacks basic features?
I’m super excited to see what kind of microtransaction laced minimal effort game we get from them.