Qt3 Games Podcast: the 2012 summer Summoner Wars wars

Posted by on July 25, 2012 in Game Podcasts

Is Summoner Wars a truly awful game, or just an awful game? Tom Chick debates Dave Perkins on the merits of this latest port of a tabletop game to the iOS. After the dust has settled, Jason McMaster joins in to talk Zynga stock, Fez patches, Blood Bowl injuries, Neuroshima Hex DLC, and jerks who are good at Age of Empires III. Plus the latest on Guild Wars 2, Secret World, and a few jabs at that Batman movie for good measure. If you listen to just one Qt3 Games Podcast this week, make it this one!

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  • Tim James

    Good discussion on Summoner Wars. Tom is sure to come around once he gets over a few little issues. He can’t resist asymmetry and brain food. Plus he didn’t even know you can kill your own units. Even babies know that.

  • Mark L

    Summoner wars cannot use iconography because the abilities are unique to each unit. For example, there aren’t 5 different units that have Sluggish. There’s just the 1.

  • Mark L

    Actually, now that I think about it, they could do it for archery, trample, and flight. There are very few examples of the latter two, though, such that icons might make things more confusing rather than less. Still, icons for archers would help, and they are quite common.

  • tomchick

    Mark, I don’t mean to armchair design too much, but I go back to Small World, which I mentioned on the podcast. Each race and modifier has a unique ability, but the developer still managed to express those abilities as an icon to serve as a quick visual reminder when you’re looking at the tiles. It’s not a substitute for knowing what the ability does, but it’s a visual shorthand to remind you once you’ve read up on the unit.

    I don’t mean to be too harsh on Summoner Wars’ implementation, but for a game that’s ultimately pretty simple, I feel there are better ways that simplicity could have been expressed. I feel Summoner Wars should have been a lot more elegant than it currently is.

  • sid

    I am trying to parse out Tom’s dislike for Summoner Wars (dice + card randomness, crappy board) vs. the dislike for the app (poor interface design, lack of undo). Maybe 20-80? I am not a big fan of SW, but I think the poor initial brush with the physical game followed the lack of design of the app hit Tom below the belt. There is now a pretty spiff real board that you can get which increases the enjoyment of the game to a surprising extent. So Tom, if you get a chance to play face to face on that, it may improve your perception of the game.

  • Mark O’Brien

    There is an icon for archers, though, right? Melee units have a sword icon for their attack. Archers have a bow icon.

  • Mark O’Brien

    Not to disagree with you, but it’s probably worth mentioning that they do use icons for some special abilities when they confer a status on a unit. That’s a nice idea which they should have expanded for units in general.

  • Mark O’Brien

    That doesn’t stop them using icons to represent temporary status as the result of an effect of an ability, right, like being only temporarily precise? I suppose they’d need a bewildering number of icons.

    In most card games, the card art is sufficient as a mnemonic (in fact you could say that’s the main function of card art). The fact that it’s hard to remember what cards do what in Summoner Wars may be a sign that the card art is too generic or insufficiently prominent.

    I wonder, Tom, do you find it any easier to remember what the really distinct looking cards do, like for example the Fire Drake thing the Phoenix Elves have, or the lionesses the Jungle Elves have?

  • Jonathan

    I’ll be skipping my purchase of Fez after listening to this weeks post. This forge heads up!

  • tomchick

    You’re probably right, Sid. One of the reasons I haven’t reviewed it is that I don’t feel I’ve given it a fair shake yet, and I’m still very much in the first impressions stage of the game.

  • KVFinn

    On Fez and MS cert policy:

    One million in revenue. In development 5 years. 2 people, a third person part time + some contract work. Let’s say 3 people to keep it simple and to account for other misc expenses.

    MS cut 30% takes it down to 660k.

    3 people / 5 years = 44k a year per person.

    Essentially a year of income to patch the game.

    And the second issue on whether MS policy is even aiming for the right thing… What’s so bad about patches? What chance do non super successful games even have? So many games get on IOS and Steam get endlessly patched… and it is awesome! New features and updates all the time. Tom even talks about how he loves seeing updates to games on IOS with new features and improvements. There’s a dearth of such games on XBLA directly due to MS policy.

  • Chris H.

    Uhhhh….two minutes into the podcast and Tom is asserting that somehow DaVe Perkins doesn’t have a “V” in his name…and for whatever reason Perkins seems to agree with that?

  • http://twitter.com/CHGardiner Chris Gardiner

    Thanks to the preturnatural generosity of one Jason Theophilus McMaster, I got to play in the GW2 beta, too. My laptop creaked under the load, but I was hugely impressed – can’t wait for the full release! Will there be some sort of Qt3 guild, do you think?

  • tomchick

    Oh, man, how did that happen? I was just casting about for some way to grief McMaster. We obviously need to have longer rehearsals!

  • Dave Perkins

    I wasn’t really listening when Tom spoke.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-McMaster/607680289 Jason McMaster

    It’s for the best

  • anon

    They want to foster an environment where any update not strictly a bug fix is a purchase, in fact they force such updates to have a cost(though it could be as low as 1$(as is the case with Bastion’s DLC). Hopefully they won’t change their policies next gen and they’ll become even more irrelevant and finally unable to force exclusives.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-McMaster/607680289 Jason McMaster

    I would imagine so. If nothing else, I always start one and then abandon it when I get bored. I’m classy like that!