What Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game can learn from Slay the Spire

Channel:

Thyworm

Subscribers:

13,700

Published on November 27, 2018 5:00:02 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhpGGE79YPE

Game:

Slay The Spire (2019)

Duration: 10:40

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2

Hi everyone,

This is Thyworm and today, let's take a look at LOTRLCG, a game I've really enjoyed playing. Sadly, this game is currently hardly played by anyone. I'll dive into this game a little bit, try to figure out why I haven't been returning to it lately and the consequences of the current low player base.

I've been following this game since its launch, I bought the Shire Founders Pack and I've played this game for around 24 hours. During all of those hours, I had a lot of fun with it, trying to complete all the different quests with a variation of heroes and decks. Some others did the same, but in the end, not many people played this game it seems, when looking at the Steam Charts.

These stats are absolutely abysmal guys, an all time peak of 417 players on Steam, with a peak of around 60 this month. This game deserves better. And it's not like the developers haven't done or improved anything. They've constantly delivered new patches, balanced the battles, added new cards, new functionality and recently a whole new Encounter, which I still have to play. I will though, and make a video about it.

While I have enjoyed myself quite a bit during playing the lord of the Rings the living card game, at some point this game was out of content. That point was reached after around 20 hours or so. While crafting new decks is fun to some extent, the encounters you play against the AI are always the same and they do become repetitive. The longevity of this game solely depends on the amount of content the developers offer, because this is a PvE card game. After I've freed Bilbo 15 times, I'm kind of done.

This is the main reason as to why this game fails to attract larger crowds at once. You are simply finished at some point and then waiting for more content. It's hard to keep players engaged in those periods in between.

So let's have a look at another favorite game of mine, also a PvE card game, which rakes in 10.000 players on average. Slay the Spire, an absolutely terrific game. Now, you can't just compare these two, I get that, but where LOTR fails in keeping players engaged, Slay the Spire succeeds.

Slay the Spire has a few elements that keep this game fresh. First the game design itself, with randomly generated worlds. This is obviously not possible for LOTR, so let's not bother about that. Slay the Spire also has other features though, which LOTR could implement, or implement better, in order to increase player engagement.

Take for example the leader boards. Those are being climbed on a daily basis by both casuals and hardcore players. It's fun to see how you compete against other players and how insane some of those other players are. It also gives you something to strive towards, perhaps, trying to improve yourself and trying out different decks in doing so.

Slay the Spire has interesting daily challenge, which push players to the limits to once again climb the leader boards, but they also provide an additional challenge. LOTR is lackluster in this regard, and has just got some challenges in place so players can earn some cheap valor. There's nothing wrong with this, but what LOTR currently lacks is something fresh on a daily, or even weekly basis, to have players return to the game, try out new things and try to complete the challenge. Think about the tavern brawl in Hearthstone for example.

Another feature I could personally think of is some sort of endless survival mode. I might be breaking some lore here, but surely somewhere in the Lord of the Rings universe there is a location to be found that was held for ages, but finally overrun by Saurons forces. Osgiliath, maybe? It would be cool to receive a random deck, put some threat reducing cards in there to keep the whole thing going, and see if you as a player are able to repell the attackers. Then put a score on it, based on amount of rounds survived and losses, or maybe fate events, and create some leaderboards. Id play a mode like that for many days.

Back to the current state of the game though. I don't want to sketch a gloomy scenario here, that's not what this video is about. There's also a bit of hope.

After the developers put out a brand new encounter 3 days ago, the player numbers have gone up a little, from on average 15 to around 50. In not too long though, the numbers will probably fall again. That's not a problem in itself of course, but I'm mainly worried about the business model of Fantasy flight Interactive. Will they be able to support this game with this few people playing it?

I hope so, because whenever I do play the game, I'm having a lot of fun with it. I think that this game is a good example of great development in Early Access, intensive cooperation with the community, it offers a cool LOTR experience with its amazing voice acting, and you're getting a lot of bang for your buck if you're just buying the Shire Founders pack, for 8 euro's. So if this game does sound like fun to you, give it a go for those 8 euro's.

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