Recently one of my computers broke down while the other one was being fixed. This happened just three days before I got that one back. Because of that, I had to go a while without proper internet, social media, anime, or other services that computers provide. During that time, I bought a game on my PS4 that came with a 2-for-1 deal over PSN. That game is Yugioh! Legact of the Duelist.
I don't know if it's nostalgia or if this is just a legitimately good game but this is the first game in a long time that I've managed to play for hours on end and focus so hard on beating and getting proper strategies for. Because of that, I want to talk about this game for a little while, specifically why I think giving this game endless support is a good idea.
First and foremost, I want to bring up that this game was released in 2015 for PS4 and XB1 and just four months ago on Steam. This game, at base, currently has just around 7000 cards with another 3 thousand inside the 14 DLC packs. This is legitimately one of the reasons I think this game could be endlessly supported. But to talk about why that is I must first go into detail about Yugioh as a trading card game.
Yugioh the trading card game was not always a thing. Once upon a time, there was only a Shounen Jump manga called Yugioh which featured the characters of the original anime that were just attending a regular middle school. This initial manga series was later turned into an anime that is now known in the west as "Yugioh Season 0."
During this time, the manga was a general slice of life where the protagonist, Yugi Muto, had a spirit inside his Millenium Puzzle that had magical powers. Two games of particular importance were shown during this time: the trading card game dual monsters and the board game capsule monsters. Each one of these games featured one match with a Kaiba brother, Seto and Mokuba respectively.
However, the card game duel monsters ended up becoming so popular that the rest of the manga would focus on it and an actual card game would be made for it. This is how the yugioh trading card game spawned.
This was well back before the 2000's when Shounen Jump was still giving out magazines in Krogers all across America, or at least in Texas, where I live.
Since then, Yugioh's popularity has fluctuated somewhat but the overall amount has remained relatively high, so much so that the card game has caused a number of card series within the card game. And no, I'm not referring to the anime, although there are 5 in total.
You have the Dark Magician Series, which consists Dark Magician, Magician of Black Chaos, Dark Magician of Chaos, Sorcerer of Dark Magic, Dark Paladin, Dark Magic Attack, Dark Magic Curtain, and others.
You have the Gaia series, which consists of Gaia the Fierce Knight, Swift Gaia the Fierce Knight, Gaia the Polar Knight, Gaia the Dragon Champion, Charging Gaia the Fierce Knights, and others as well.
Then you have the Blue Eyes series, the Red Eyes series, the Magician Girl series, the HERO series, which is divided into Elemental Heroes, Destiny Heroes, Evil Heroes, and Masked Heroes.
You have the Black Luster Soldier series, the Toon series, the Cyber series with at least one Sub-series known as Cyber Dragon, the Ojama series, the Kuriboh series, the Vehicroid series, the Crystal Beasts, the Mirror Force series, and even the Greed series.
Now, the video game Legacy of the Duelists has a total of around 10 thousand cards including DLC but the actual physical card game has well more than that. Many cards, particularly many of the new ones are not present in the game, not even in DLC. And that's where things start to get a little interesting.
You see, back when I was a kid, making the trading card game was far easier than making a standalone yugioh video game that had as much content as the physical game on an ongoing basis. Ignoring device limitations, which was very real, the bigger issue was that at that time most video games had a set amount of content they could offer and it could not expand no matter what. This was because of how Expansion Packs worked.
Expansion Packs were what DLC was called before DLC was a mainstream term. Back then, when you bought a game, usually for PC, you could buy any expansions that were available by buying a disk that would install that content into the game provided you already had it.
Some games had expansions on consoles as well, particularly Ninja Gaiden on the XBox had the Hurricane Pack. However, for most console and PC games, if you wanted to add to a game or rework its content after its release, all you could do was re-release with a special edition, like DMC3SE or Ninja Gaiden Black, and hope things went well.
The advent of high speed internet access changed that. With access to high speed downloading in particular, you can now download patches that either fix bugs or balancing issues, or at least make directories for Expansions that you would make later down the line. Then, once that was done, you could upload your DLC and people could buy it and download it to increase gameplay time.
For many games, adding DLC for a game endlessly, while certainly doable, is not something that is feasible for a long time. Sure, you can add characters, story lines, and movesets for the game for as long as the game data can hold it but, eventually, you reach a point where you have to make a sequel in order to continue the story line that was finished in this one. Yugioh! Legacy of the Duelist does not have that limitation.
First, let's discuss device power because that's the most important thing. The entire base game is 2 GB. That's how much data it takes up in the hard drive. Bearing in mind, this does not include DLC. Now, given how limited the graphics are most of the time, I can only assume this game is that big to begin with because of the number of cards. Just for comparison's sake, an update for Uncharted 4 is 12 GB. An UPDATE is for Uncharted 4 is 6 times the size of Yugioh! Legacy of the Duelist the full game. From what I gathered the 14 DLC packs in total contain an additional 3000 cards. If the cards and what they do is 1.5 out of 2 GB that means that each individual card roughly takes up 224 kB. So the additional cards will only be an additional 658 MB.
Since the PS4 and XBox One each have a harddrive that contains at minimum 500 GB, hard drive space clearly isn't an issue, and neither is it for an average PC gamer. The game probably culls, too, which means that even if the full game eventually exceeds 8 GB's the PS4 and XB1 clearly have enough RAM to support it as well.
But then there's the issue of resolving content ideas and, don't worry, that's covered, too. First off, the base game has a total of around 23 different Booster Packs across the five series. 5 for the first four and 3 for Ark V. The current DLC packs also introduce content that is not in the base game, particularly story content and dueling opponents from the finished series. I didn't recognize all of them but I did recognize a number of characters you can add from Yugioh, GX, and 5d's.
Just as well, Konami is keeping the physical card game alive which means cards, card series, card packs, booster packs, and structure decks are still constantly being made. This means that Legacy of the Duelist will never run out of ideas for cards so long as the card game remains active. If they make a new Yugioh! Anime, that will also solve a lot of issues with creating duels with DLC only cards.
They can even make What-If scenarios where characters from one part of the series duel a character from another part of the series. Just as an example, what if Aster Phoenix dueled Jack Atlas?
The counter argument I heard to this was that they will eventually have to stop making content for this game so they can make new games and profit off those. I, however, have two counter arguments for that. First and foremost, this game is very cheap, you can tell by the way it looks and the way it plays that it is a very structured game where a majority of the cards fall into a few different blueprints. Because of that, making cards for this game so long as there are new cards to add will be much less expensive to make and more profitable for Konami than if they make a new Yugioh game that has far less to offer.
The other counter argument I have is that having Deep Ocean make DLC for this game for as long as Yugioh lasts won't stop Konami from making other Yugioh! games, just that those other Yugioh! games will have to be for other devices. Legacy of the Duelist is already on PS4, XB1, and Steam. They can still make other games for Mac and Linux, they can still make other games for Mobile and Handheld. But having both work at the same time will increase their revenue and allow them to make more of the card game.
One last counter argument I have heard is that the video games don't make as much money as the card game. To that I respond, the people who are playing the video games will likely save up money for the DLC and the people who only play the card game never bought the video games to begin with so it's not affecting them at all.
At least think this over before you decide that I'm just blowing smoke. Have a wonderful idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment