As a professional Shadowverse player, I've played a lot of new digital card games whenever they release. The new Riot Games card game Legends of Runeterra is still a long way away until official release and it shows. However I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of things about this game and I have no doubt that the details that weren't so great should be ironed out by next year.
This blog is more like... Everything Wrong with Legends of Runeterra (but should be fixed before launch so not a big deal)
I will not be commenting on game balance.
Monetization
Riot really emphasized wanting to make Legends of Runeterra an accessible game that didn't require money to play and didn't put big spenders (whales) at a large advantage.
So far there are NO purchasable random packs and instead you can purchase Wildcards that can be used to craft any card of the stated rarity.
Calculating using the base price using the 650 coin for $5 base price, this comes out to 1.3 coins per cent.
At this highest price:
Common wildcards cost 11.5 cents each,
Rare wildcards cost 30.8 cents each,
Epic wildcards cost $1.15 each,
and Champion wildcards cost $3.08 each.
Because of the set number of wildcards purchasable per week, you can currently only spend a maximum of $15.23 to clear out the entire stock.
Riot has implemented a system that dissuades users from spending obscene amounts of money on the game. That's incredible.
The biggest issue with this system is hoarding wildcards.
If the game is trying to limit the number of wildcards purchasable at once, the obvious solution is to buy all the wildcards possible every week.
By the time a new set of cards comes out, "whale" players will have an even larger advantage over most players if they are able to craft every single card immediately while everyone else must earn cards through other means.
A $100 coin pack gets you 15000 coins, or up to 30 champion cards + 20 epic cards. The price to keep the wildcard shop stock emptied is $13.20 a week. If there is an expansion every 3 months and 4 weeks in each month, the MAXIMUM money able to be spent is about $158.40 per expansion.
Buying ALL Champion and Epic Wildcards will cost $11 a week or $132 an expansion.
Buying ALL Champion Wildcards will cost $8 a week or $96 an expansion.
It's great that coin prices are relatively affordable. However that also means that there will be more "whales".
Wildcards are a great concept, but Riot will have to be extra careful to make sure players spending less can participate meaningfully. With the multi-step progression system they've introduced so far with Quests, Region rewards, and Vaults, it looks like the game is on the right path. If everyone is getting a lot of cards, everyone should be satisfied with the system.
Sound
League of Legends has always had awful sound effects, especially in menus. The default settings for sfx are EXTREMELY LOUD.
Why does an explosion have to go off every time something is clicked?
Hopefully extra menu items will be added to make it possible to lower menu sound effects separately from in-game sound effects.
Another useful feature would be if you could hear a short clip of dialogue when the Dialogue Volume option is adjusted.
Menus
Sometimes the game is unresponsive when clicking through the menus quickly. I have no doubt that issues like this will be solved over time.
Home menu is boring. I'm sure they'll add stuff.
I personally want a larger emphasis on a player avatar. If Poros will be on the side during every game, having the Poro buddy in the Home screen would be nice.
The Play menu and Collection menus are identical. (Another obvious place where they will add stuff.) Hopefully the additions don't add too many unnecessary mouse clicks while navigating the menu.
Why can't you check the deck without going to Edit Deck?
Delete Deck when you're in the Collection screen is in the same spot as Edit deck when you're in the Play screen.
When I get fancy new cards, please let me click on cards to see what they do.
I would personally like if BOTH left click and right click zoomed into cards on this screen.
Especially during the starting tutorial when you incrementally get a lot of cards, it would have been cool to check them out since you don't even have access to the Collection page yet.
Speaking of the Collection page and Deck builder... it sucks.
There are no ways to look at your entire decklist at once.
There are no ways to check the ability of a unit from the decklist.
There are no ways to check the Level Up form of a Champion from the decklist.
There are no ways to add additional copies of a card from the decklist.
There are no ways to jump to a card in your collection from your decklist.
You cannot look at your decklist and unowned cards at the same time.
Mousing over the factions at the top left does not do anything.
There are no ways to quickly craft an unowned card and add to deck. You must Show Unowned, craft the card, go back to hide unowned cards, then find the card again and add it to the deck.
Cards have this weird yellow plus sign you can click on to zoom in... unless it doesn't.
What is this and why doesn't it appear on certain cards?
You can check the ability of a card without zooming into a card if and only if there are less than the maximum available copies of the card in the deck. (Sorry, I know the cursor is not showing up in screen shots)
In-game
I have no clue what cards are in my hand without mousing over.
This is an issue when you can't tell if a card is even an iconic champion from League of Legends.
Card art is very small in comparison to the rest of the board.
In fact, for certain cards like Cithria, the full art image of her when attacking and blocking makes her image even smaller.
Full card art is cool, but there is too much detail and you can't tell what's on the card at a glance.
It's incredibly unintuitive that there is a maximum of 6 board spaces, since cards in the attack motion can change in width.
You still need to click OK for spells that aren't targeted.
Some animations for cards like Avalanche and Trueshot barrage should be a little bit faster.
Personally, I would like if most animations like for mana going into spell mana were faster, but overall I'm very happy with the play speed of the game so far.
It definitely feels much faster and smoother to play compared to a game like Hearthstone.
I know I've just been nitpicking about the game non-stop but the truth is that the rest of the game feels really good. I'm really looking forward to playing more Legends of Runeterra this week and when the game is updated in the future.
