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New year, new stories

Welcome to the new year!

We are so excited that you are all joining us for another year of nonsense and nonsensibility. This month we wanted to give a development update on co-op and competitive scenario play, as well as talk a little bit about working with the established characters from the Sentinels canon in this new medium.

Real quick: not everything is finalized, so some things mentioned here and in previous posts may see changes before the game ships.

We are rocketing through scenario development for co-op in the hopes of getting everything ready for art next month. We have three mission arcs with three or four scenarios in each in the core box, and three more mission arcs in the day-one expansion. So far, we’re on to “final” playtesting on two mission arcs, and are chugging through the third arc.

Co-op scenarios in Prime War are going to be objective-driven fights, with a strategic element similar to the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game. The player characters (as not everyone is a “hero” these days) are coming up against Adversaries that challenge them to think in a variety of ways to thwart the various plots and schemes throughout the various realities that we explore in Prime War. That’s not to say that there aren’t some scenarios that focus on the players plowing through waves of minions; however, most scenarios use that as a backdrop for shutting down portals, escorting civilians, analyzing infections, rescuing familiar faces, or dishing out some damage to the Big Bad. We want to engage many playstyles in our cooperative missions, so there’s options for every character to shine in some capacity, showing off why they were chosen by the Prime Aspects.

PvP scenarios in Prime War look a little different. We want to pit two teams against each other through multiple match types. The core box features a series of Capture the Flag matches, King of the Hill and Capture Point matches, and some neat variations on the classic Deathmatch-style match type. We’re working through these internally at the moment, and will be bringing these to playtesters as co-op playtesting winds down.

Each of the characters in the Sentinel Comics canon is fascinating in their own way, and we’ve been incredibly privileged to be allowed to play around in this sandbox. When we were first working on these characters, we were looking to represent three major things: who they were; what they have become; and how it feels to read about these characters as a fan. With only a character board and seven unique cards, it was essential to capture the most memorable aspects of each character while portraying how they show up in a primarily combat-centric setting. Some characters jumped out right away, telling us exactly how they would be expressed (Tempest, Blood Countess, Argent Adept), and some took a little more digging (Haka, Man-Grove); however, they’ve each been boiled down to the greatest hits to keep every card fresh and useful in a variety of situations.

We’re excited and anxious about the stories we’re telling through the scenarios and the characters themselves, and we can’t wait to have you all join in the fun we’ve been having! Thank you all for your continued interest and support!

Smith at the Forge

-P.S. Feel free to chime in with what you want to hear about next! We’re cooking up one about how we translated some of the characters from the SotM card game, but that might get detailed and therefore delayed until some other things become public.

The Con Days Are Over, the Con Days are Done

We had an excellent weekend at PAX Unplugged demo-ing the co-op mode of Prime War, and we’re very grateful for everyone who came out to play with us!

Since our last showing at Gen Con, we’ve gone to St. Louis to meet with Greater Than Games, finalized a lot of character work, and revamped the threat system for Co-op play.

Co-op’s major change from the Gen Con preview is that threats can now act either before or after a player’s action. Previously, the threats always acted before a player, and were able to interrupt player’s choices pretty significantly; now, the majority of Threat cards activate after the player’s action, and only truly surprising or significant threats act before the player. We also simplified the threat’s targeting structure, allowing players to manipulate who is being targeted by which threats and reducing the amount of “ganging up” that was seen at Gen Con. All of these changes led to a system that is now much more friendly and fun! The playtesters have been working through the first mission arc of the co-op story (the first scenario of which we demoed at PAX Unplugged), and everything seems to be going very well so far.

The characters have been fairly solid, without changes, for about a month now, with playtesters reporting a fairly even win rate in competitive play with characters regardless of allies or enemy teams. Currently, we are toying with some enhancements to character’s methods of movement, as most scenario play sees a lot of use from the movement card and we wanted to make sure players never feel like they are “wasting” a card play. This will necessitate another round of re-balancing; however, these enhancements are not intended to shake up the combat style or complexity of a character, so the level of impact on balance and power level should be fairly minor, and allow for rapid iteration and finalization.

We got to play a “high level” competitive match while we were in St. Louis, which only whetted our appetite for the potential competitive scene. We brought the Prime Aspect’s Boons into play, giving every character an interesting and powerful augmentation to their own abilities and allowing for more varied and clever tactical choices to be made by each team. While we were there, we also tested our mettle against some of the Bosses of Prime War’s co-operative mode, taking the fight to some recognizable, but wildly different, faces from across the disparate realities. There was also an incredibly productive meeting about the graphic design of the iconography and layout, as well as the component design of the maps, scenario books, threat and environment tokens, and box shape.

Now that we’re not constantly cramming for Cons, there should be a more regular structure to our updates here, many apologies for being in the dark for the last few months. Feel free to let us know what you want to hear about, and we might make that the focus of our next post!

I cannot express enough thanks to the playtesters who have gotten us this far, and the intrepid souls who ventured into the Block with us this weekend to try out Co-op! You are all super in my book.

–Smith at the Forge

Gen Con Debrief

Whew! Everyone’s home, mostly recovered from Con Crud and lost sleep, and ready to get back at it!

We are extremely grateful to everyone who came by the >G demo room to check out Prime War; your experiences and feedback was invaluable to our process moving forward. We learned a few things about the “best” way to demo Prime War that will influence the structure of the rulebook, as well as what we bring to PAX Unplugged later this year. We got a chance to run two dozen or so team deathmatch games, including a small handful of 3v3 matches that were truly a spectacle to behold!

Several of you were brave enough to try out Co-op play, and we are incredibly grateful for your time and patience. Many of you expressed your excitement that your were able to fight alongside your friends, and some were disappointed in the timing of some of the enemies’ actions. We’ve taken all of the feedback we’ve gotten from everyone and are looking to tweak some of how the threats behave in order to reduce the frequency of dead rounds. Being Knocked Down is a staple of the game, and should be present in the co-operative play; however, it is currently almost always preventing player actions, whereas that is much less common in PvP play.

We’re excited to start a new round of playtesting in the coming weeks, with major foci on polishing the core box characters and finalizing the co-op threat system. We will also start introducing more scenario play, built from the modular environmental objective system that some of you got to see.

Once again, excessive amounts of gratitude for those of you who came to play Prime War, we are truly overwhelmed by your graciousness and enthusiasm!

Until next time,
–Smith at the Forge

Prime War Announcement, some sytem changes, and LFG turns 1

The official announcement has gone out from our publisher, and it’s incredibly exciting, and in all honesty, a little surreal. The impostor syndrome hits with some regularity, but this is real, this is happening, and we couldn’t be more proud!

We spent several days in town with GTG at the end of June, and had incredibly good progress. We were able to play through the entire roster of characters – including the core box characters two and three times each in some cases – with shining feedback in almost every case. Very little of the core roster changed, with most changes coming in small tweaks to the dice for some abilities that needed some balance help one way or another. We played through multiple scenario matches, some of which went over excellently, some that need another nudge in a different direction, and others that just need some more playtests to find a little more balance.

Cooperative play underwent a fairly major change involving the timing of when adversaries act in relation to the players’ characters. Having done most of our testing with 2-4 characters, we were a little floored when we sat down and they asked us if we could all play a six-player game. A good number of hours later, we modified how adversaries take actions in order to reduce the overhead of managing a target-rich environment, and played a setup that scales even better from 2-6 players than we thought possible.

Before we went to St. Louis, we had been playing with a new concept to help track the victory state of the game, as well as giving characters some way of feeling re-invigorated after they had been Knocked Down. We introduced a Trophy system where each character has a unique Trophy card with distinctive art, placed in a very specific area of the character’s board. When the character is knocked down, they would hand their trophy to the opposing team, revealing their Rally ability on their board. The character would therefore have a new, more desperate, enraged, or determined portrait that reflects their dire circumstances, as well as access to their new ability that will help them regain their footing and come back swinging, even in the late-game stages of a match. The opponents gain a clear, physical representation of how close they are to victory, as all matches’ win conditions are now centered around Trophies, and how they can be acquired. When we introduced this new addition to the system, it seemed to flow well and give players more motivation, as the victory tracking was no longer abstract tallies but a personal, characteristic piece of their chosen character.

Since our last post, we have made one further shift in the dice. No one liked the blanks on the d12s. Players enjoyed being able to take matters into their own hands and maximize their possibility of success, and having an absolute failure with no other effect wasn’t interesting, especially in the context of our largest die class. We chose to change the three blank faces to one hit alongside two conditional vitals, one each for Support and Opportunity. We also switched out a Hit face on the d4 for an opportunity, making the d4 the least optimal die, but easy to tack onto other rolls for an extra edge.

Also, we were formed one year ago today, so that’s exciting! We’ve had a roller coaster of a year, and are only further looking forward to what the future holds for Prime War and Lore Forge Games!