Deconstruyendo la galaxia de los héroes
Durante las últimas semanas he estado trabajando con Miska Katkoff de Deconstructor of Fun para armar una deconstrucción profunda de Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. Ahora está publicado en Deconstructor of Fun .
Lanzado a finales del año pasado, “Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes” de Capital Games de EA es un nuevo titular en las listas estáticas de mayor recaudación. En los EE. UU., Galaxy of Heroes inicialmente mantuvo el ranking de las 10 mejores descargas y alcanzó el puesto 6 en recaudación general. Desde que se calmó el entusiasmo por la película, el rango de descarga del juego disminuyó. Aún así, el juego ha mantenido su clasificación entre los 20 juegos con mayor recaudación. Esto nos dice una cosa: el juego mantiene enganchados a sus jugadores. Este juego tiene el potencial de permanecer en las listas de mayores ingresos por un tiempo. Especialmente porque la licencia de Star Wars no desaparecerá durante los próximos años.
Los juegos con licencia han aparecido en todas partes recientemente y muchos han logrado un gran éxito. Se han lanzado varios juegos de Star Wars, pero a pesar de la solidez de la licencia, ninguno se ha mantenido realmente en las listas de ingresos. “Star Wars Uprising” de Kabam, “Star Wars Commander” de Disney o “Star Wars: Force Collection” de Konami son entradas notables, pero ninguna pareció despegar cuando se lanzó la nueva película en diciembre… excepto Galaxy of Heroes de EA.
EA hizo lo que Kabam, Disney y Konami no hicieron. Crearon un juego que dura años. Lo hicieron con una fórmula probada de juego gratuito. Construyeron el juego sobre un bucle central sólido y probado. Reforzaron este ciclo con una batalla estratégica profunda y un metajuego en evolución. Este juego retendrá a los jugadores durante años porque está bien hecho, es profundo y complejo.
Bucle central
En esencia, Galaxy of Heroes es un juego de rol por turnos con un metajuego de estilo de cartas coleccionables. Es muy similar a Summoner's War, Heroes Charge y varios otros juegos de rol móviles. Los jugadores luchan en batallas pequeñas para recolectar el botín. El botín viene en muchas formas, pero en última instancia está ahí para brindarle al jugador recursos para mejorar sus personajes. Los personajes mejorados dan acceso a batallas más grandes y difíciles, lo que posteriormente significa un mejor botín.
El juego comienza regalándote dos personajes: Chewbacca y un Jedi. Con estos personajes comenzarás a librar tus primeras batallas. Cada batalla te recompensa con créditos y droides de entrenamiento. Al usarlos, puedes actualizar rápidamente a tu Jedi y a Chewbacca a niveles más altos, lo que te permitirá vencer batallas más difíciles. Al principio, el juego parece rápido porque puedes jugar y mejorar tu equipo constantemente. Con el tiempo, el juego restringe tus sesiones de juego: te has quedado sin energía y necesitas volver a jugar más.
Este es un bucle de batalla y actualización bastante estándar que se usa en la mayoría de los juegos. Las batallas te dan recompensas, y las recompensas te permiten mejorar, la energía marca el ritmo de las batallas. Después de completar este ciclo unas cuantas veces, las cosas empiezan a complicarse más...
Con el tiempo, el juego te presiona para que empieces a coleccionar nuevos héroes. Tienes un pequeño equipo de héroes del lado oscuro (Jedi, Chewbacca, etc.), pero para poder luchar en las batallas del “lado oscuro”, necesitas un equipo de héroes del lado oscuro. A medida que las batallas del lado luminoso empiezan a volverse demasiado difíciles, casi te ves obligado a empezar a coleccionar héroes del lado oscuro.
Para recolectar nuevos héroes, los jugadores recolectan fragmentos. Cada personaje tiene su propio fragmento y el jugador debe recolectar un conjunto grande de ellos para desbloquearlo con éxito. Los fragmentos se pueden recolectar uno a la vez al trabajar en niveles de campaña específicos, o puedes obtenerlos rápidamente comprando tarjetas de datos que recompensan los fragmentos de un personaje aleatorio (una mecánica de gacha).
Pero tener un núcleo central fuerte es sólo el comienzo. Para que el juego dure años, debes comenzar a desarrollar este ciclo central, aumentando la complejidad y manteniéndolo interesante. EA logró esto creando un sistema de batalla estratégico y un metajuego en evolución que desbloquea lentamente la profundidad. Echemos un vistazo más de cerca a cada uno ahora.
La batalla
La jugabilidad principal de Galaxy of Heroes es la batalla. El sistema de batalla se basa en el habitual sistema de RPG por turnos. Al igual que Final Fantasy (y cientos de otros juegos de rol similares), el juego gira en torno a elegir tu equipo, luchar contra oleadas de enemigos y optimizar tu estrategia para mantener vivo a tu equipo.
Sistema de batalla y controles
Las mecánicas de batalla en sí son un sistema de juego de rol por turnos bastante tradicional. Cada bando tiene un equipo de hasta 6 héroes. El objetivo de la batalla es derrotar a los personajes contrarios antes de que ellos derroten al tuyo. Para derrotar a un personaje, debes agotar su salud. Para agotar su salud, deberás atacarlos con tu propio equipo de personajes.
Para decidir cuándo es el turno de atacar de cada personaje, cada personaje tiene un indicador de velocidad debajo de su barra de salud (una barra azul). Cuanto más rápido sea el personaje, más rápido se llenará esta barra azul, lo que significa que con más frecuencia podrá atacar en la batalla.
En la mayoría de las batallas, debes enfrentarte a 3 oleadas de enemigos. La última oleada suele contener un jefe más difícil. Esto aumenta lentamente la tensión en la batalla y exige que tu estrategia y tus personajes puedan sobrevivir a todas las oleadas. En total, cada batalla suele durar entre 2 y 3 minutos. Aunque esto suele depender de lo fácil que sea la batalla.
Los controles del juego son bastante simples: en cada turno, se selecciona un personaje para realizar un ataque. Puedes elegir a qué oponente quieres que apunte este personaje y elegir qué habilidad quieres que use.
Comparing this battle system to the competition, this game actually requires more taps, and more choices to move the battle along. This goes against what most modern mobile RPG games have moved towards. Most new RPG games go for automated battles which minimal interaction.
Contrast Galaxy of Heroes battle with Heroes Charge and you can clearly see the difference. In Heroes Charge, each character is automatically attacking and receiving damage. You only need to trigger the special abilities during the battle.
Galaxy of Heroes asks for much more interaction during the battle and demands the player to make strategic choices. Every few seconds you need to make a decision about who a character will attack and which ability you will use. Overall this design choice makes each battle feel more strategic and demands that each choice matters. But this focus on constant strategic choice can only work if the strategy stays interesting. EA attempts to do this by making the use of abilities interesting.
Strategy through Abilities
The strategy in battle develops when you consider the variety of characters you can collect:
Each character has a different purpose in battle. For example, Kylo Ren is an attacker, while the Jedi Consular is a Healer. As a player you must strategize between these two different uses of characters. In a typical situation in battle, you have to decide which character you should attack first. Attack the enemy healer first, and you prevent them from regenerating health. Or take out their strongest attacker, who next turn could kill one of your team members. Not always an easy choice.
In battle, a character can use the basic attack as many times as they like, but each special ability is on a cooldown timer. Using the character’s ability will disable using the ability for the next 1 or more turns. This forces the player to think strategically about when they use their abilities. Use a healing ability now, or wait until the next attack? Use an ability that damages multiple enemies now, or wait until the boss appears? The strategy really comes out in choosing when to use these abilities.
Overall these abilities are very deep and offer nice strategic moments on how to optimize their usage:
In this example, my Admiral Ackbar has the ability “It’s a Trap!”. But the actual benefit of this ability is useful only if my team has a bunch of negative status effects. So the Admiral is excellent for dealing with situations where enemies’ special abilities give multiple negative status effects, but in other cases, this is a pretty weak ability. Similar to gameplay in Hearthstone, the game really comes down to getting the best impact out of your special abilities and minimizing the impact of your opponents.
Additionally, certain abilities focus on certain types of characters. For example, some abilities benefit only Jedis, others could punish Droid characters. Thus making the strategy involved in winning a battle not just to be about the decisions you make inside the battle, but also which characters you bring into the battle.
And this is really what the game ultimately becomes about. Players get matchmade against difficult opponents and attempt to strategize who they bring to the battle and how best to use these characters’ abilities to win against difficult opponents.
Pick Your Team: Types Synergies
Instead of going for a single character RPG (ex. Diablo, Dungeon Hunter) Galaxy of Heroes went with a 5 character squad (plus one additional character that can be borrowed from friends). This design decision supports their core loop: they want as many opportunities to push the player to collect and upgrade many different characters.
As a player, it also adds to the fun of the strategy outside the battle. Because of the depth in the core battle, the decision of who to bring is not always as simple as just choosing your 5 best characters. So many decisions must be made: Who best benefits from being together on the same team? Who are my opponents weak against? Can I counter their best characters? Do I have enough healers to deal with their high-level attackers? Do I have enough Tanks to take the damage they are going to throw at me? This level of decision making is only possible with a multi-character team combined with the strategy of the battle.
To make this choice interesting, they needed mechanics that challenged the players’ assumptions of what the perfect team would be. Using Types and Synergies accomplished this. Because each character has a type (Jedi, Droid, Human) and some abilities specifically counter or aid these types, it asks the players to form teams that have the best synergy together. Very similar to Contest of Champions. Players seek to have a good balance between Attackers, Healers, Tanks and Support as well as having a good balance between Jedi, Droids, Humans and others.
On top of this, players will want to find teams that directly counter an opposing team, so if the team has a very strong Jedi Healer, going for a counter-Jedi such as Count Dooku is a good plan. But of course just having a Count Dooku isn’t enough — you need to ensure Dooku is upgraded to the level necessary to defeat the Jedi.
So overall you can see that even for a traditional RPG game, EA has ensured there is enough strategy here to make collecting and upgrading many heroes an integral part of winning difficult battles.
The Battle isn’t the Fun part
Despite all this strategy, rarely are players challenged by it. Most of the battles are trivial. As a result, the RPG battling system gets stale pretty quick. This is usually inevitable in an RPG system and something that is expected by the audience. This is a by-product of the Grinding nature of the game. Players expect that there will be thousands of battles that they need to grind through to get to their ultimate goal.
Comparing this to Heroes Charge’s automated battle, I’m a bigger fan of Heroes Charge’s system over Galaxy of Heroes. This is subjective, but although Galaxy of Heroes feels more strategic than Heroes Charge because it’s turn based, most choices remain a bore. As a player, these battles are better off focusing on the part that is interesting: choosing when to trigger special abilities. Heroes Charge does that by only asking the player to trigger the special abilities, not make a choice every turn.
Regardless of the battle system, even Heroes Charge becomes a bore after battling the hundredth time. So both Heroes Charge and Galaxy of Heroes both use a method to both monetize players experiencing this boredom.
Galaxy of Heroes has a currency called Sim Tickets. Using Sim Tickets, players can auto-play through battles they know are too easy and a waste of time. This currency is easy to get, so players quickly get used to auto-winning previous levels to collect materials when they need to. However, Sim Tickets also uses up the energy and cooldown timers for levels. So grinding too much on a single level that you need shards or materials from will quickly pull up a pay gate. A smart decision to increase monetization and pace players from grinding too much on a single level.
Also, Sim Tokens can only be used on levels that have been “3 starred” — levels which you have defeated without losing a single character on your team. Thus: their Autoplay feels earned. You earned the right to auto-win because you completed this level with no issue.
As a player, this feels great. During a session, I can strategize where I grind to collect the loot that I need. It feels good that I have an opt-in way to speed through these battles that doesn’t feel like cheating or that I’m fast-forwarding through the game. I can quickly get materials and resources needed to upgrade my heroes, and only battle when I need to. As a result, the battles that I do enter feel exciting and are worth my time.
Visuals and Audio
The visuals in the game can best be described as “Economic”. Not to insult EA, but these guys had a tall, tall order. They needed to model, animate and texture the many star wars characters in the game, and make them all look good on mobile. Comparing this game to Contest of Champions, Contest clearly did a much better job in making each character look unique and their animations bring out the traits of each character. However, Galaxy of Heroes looks like they took every shortcut they could to keep the costs down.
It’s clearly visible in-game when most Jedis all animate and attack in the exact same way. Many characters share the exact same animation rig and animate the same way in battle. It’s a clever shortcut, but it’s noticeable.
Here you can clearly see Darth Vader’s model has some shortcuts to keep his model from getting too far away from the rig they wanted to use. The models themselves are also very low poly. Which just adds to the economical feeling.
Audio, on the other hand, is a great fan service. Using the best practices of the licenses, all nostalgia is here if you turn up the volume. Many of the key theme songs play in the background, lightsabers have that timeless sound as they hit the enemy, and even when playing in some stages the alarm sounds of the death star can be heard in the background. EA clearly spared no expense in ensuring that by the audio players would be immersed in the world of Star Wars.
The Key: The Core Supports the Loop
Overall, as a player, the battles are interesting but get stale quickly. The overall battle system is far from innovative. It feels very similar to the way that battles work in many turn-based RPGs.
RPGs in general, are a tried and true Free-to-play mechanic, so I can’t fault EA Games for going with such a traditional system. RPGs provide a nice light strategy for the player that can build up complexity over time.
However most importantly: RPG battles set the expectation for the player for a lot of upgradeable stats. RPG systems are great for communicating the importance of upgrading and making meta-decisions. You can’t win battles unless you’ve upgraded your characters. This pushes the focus of the players’ attention to be on where money is made: on upgrading and collecting characters.
Metagame
This brings us to the metagame. EA designed a metagame system that stays interesting for years due to two key reasons:
Firstly player is given a variety of ways to battle. As a player, I can choose and optimize my grind in many different ways.
Secondly, they built an upgrade system that lasts. Just to upgrade a single character fully takes months, and is a massive undertaking. To build up a collection of many characters would take years.
Lots of Ways to Battle
The goal of any great metagame is to introduce complexity slowly over time, to ease the player into the game but also keep it interesting. Galaxy of Heroes delivers on this by slowly unlocking new modes which layer new challenges and each unlocks their own unique rewards. There is a total of 6 different modes that you slowly unlock:
#1: Dark + Light Campaigns
This campaign is the main focus of the game. Players engage in increasingly difficult battles to test their team against AI opponents. The only restriction is that the Light Side battles can only be fought with Light side heroes, and the Dark Side battles can only be fought with Dark Side heroes. These battles start off very easy but ramp up the difficulty quickly. Each battle rewards the player with the major currencies (outlined later) but these battles are mostly for collecting randomly dropping gear. Each level can drop very specific gear which is needed to upgrade specific characters. So as a player you want to unlock all the levels to be able to collect all the materials you may need for upgrades.
#2: Cantina Battles
Cantina battles allow you to use any character (light side or dark side) in your team. These missions are much more challenging than the campaign, but reward the player with Ability Upgrade Materials (outlined later) instead of Gear, and reward different character shards giving a different reason to play. This mode also uses its own energy system, so when you’re done with the Campaign, you can further extend your session by playing in this mode.
#3: Challenges
Unlocked later after Cantina Battles you get the Challenge Mode. Challenge Mode allows you to enter in newly designed challenges every day to reward with the major upgrade currencies: Droids, Ability Materials, and Gear. These competitions reset every day, giving the player more reasons to come back every day and compete.
#4: PvP Arena
PvP Multiplayer is unlocked fairly late in the game, but this mode allows the player to compete against other player’s characters in a ladder system. This mode gives prizes once per day based on your rank in the multiplayer arena. Players move up the ladder by competing often against teams above their rank. This system benefits players with high-level squads, but also demands that players have to play often in order to defend their rank.
Interestingly this mode does not have energy. You can compete in this mode as often as you’d like. However, after each battle, there is a cooldown timer of 5 minutes which prevents you from playing again quickly. This simple cooldown prevents players from burning out on this mode.
#5: Events
Events keep the game feeling fresh by cycling specific competitions into the game on calendar cycles. Each event asks the player to bring in specific character types, further pushing players to collect and upgrade. In the example here, the Grand Master Training requires only “Jedi” type players. It also gives a reward you cannot get in any other mode — Yoda shards to help you unlock the Yoda character.
#6: Galactic War
Galactic War is the final mode you unlock, all the way at level 40. By the time you’ve reached this far in the game, you should have plenty of characters and are looking for a new challenge. This mode is a war of attrition — the damage you take in each battle carries with you to the next. In this way, having a huge library of characters is extremely beneficial. The more characters you have, the higher level they are, the farther you get in this mode. The farther you get — the higher the rewards. And just like in all the previous modes, the rewards you receive here are unique. The specific characters and materials can only be found here.
The Key: All these modes keep the game fresh, and support the loop
The player experience here is great. As a player, I slowly level up and unlock new modes. Even weeks into the game you can find yourself unlocking a brand new mode in the game that all of a sudden feels very different from what you’ve played before.
But furthermore, each of these modes support the core loop in different ways. Each mode demands that the player collect more characters and upgrade those characters to the highest level. This is what you want out of your metagame design: everything being built to support the core loop AND a way to change the game over time to keep things interesting.
Upgrade System: It’s a Long Way to the Top
In a typical RPG game, the element that designers have to manage is their players upgrading their characters to their maximum level too fast. To counteract this, Galaxy of Heroes creates a long, complex road the player must take to fully upgrade each character.
Taking their influence from games like Heroes Charge, Galaxy of Heroes has a similarly complex system made of multiple parts. Each system can be done in parallel, and each system is important.
To outline this, here is the path to get the best Darth Vader in the game: Character Unlock System
First, in order to unlock Darth Vader as a character, you need to collect 80 Shards.You typically get a few shards each day from grinding the Dark Side Battles or completing daily goals. So 80 Shards will take you a lot of time and effort. Otherwise, you could pay a ton of money and see if I get darth vader in the premium gacha… but this is rare, expensive, and no guarantee.
After weeks of hard work, you can get 80 shards. But if you want Vader to grow to the highest possible level… you’re going to need a 7 star Darth Vader. That, of course, will take a lot longer:
Star Promotion System
According to this, it would take 1.88 Million Credits and 320 Shards to be able to upgrade Vader to the maximum level. This will take a long, long time.
But okay, in this game you don’t NEED a 7-star Vader to play the game, you can progress in the game with Vader and slowly grow his star level as time goes on. Star Wars thus includes 3 other training systems which can be progressed in parallel:
XP Training System
To actually grow Vader to have better stats, you must spend Training Droids to increase their level. Overall this system feels really fast compared to most RPG games. You can quickly gain 10+ levels using droids easily collected from most battles. However, your character’s level is capped based on your actual Account Player level. So in order to have the highest level Darth Vader, your overall account level has to be high (forcing you to actually play through the game).
Gear System
On top of a star system and XP training system, Galaxy of Heroes also includes a gear system. As explained before, each battle drops loot in the form of materials. Each material is needed to fill up slots in each character’s gear. When you fill up all the slots on your character… Upgrade it! And all the slots are empty again! Asking you to go back to the drawing board to find all the gear once again.
Overall this system feels like a small Kompu-Gacha (complete a set by collecting random things). But to pace this system, as time goes by, the gear gets exponentially more difficult to find. So to get to Gear Level 10 on a character will take exponentially longer to complete.
Ability System
Last but not least each of a character’s abilities can be upgraded separately by collecting ability upgrade materials. So just to add an additional progression layer, you also need to be upgrading your abilities by collecting materials.
The Key: Complexity that lasts for Years!
So going through all 4 of these systems: Star System, XP Training, Gear Slots and Ability Upgrades, you’ve finally landed the best Darth Vader. This, of course, takes months to do while being hyper-engaged and focused only on Vader. But keep in mind that this game requires at least 5 unique characters to play at the highest level — you need to be doing this for multiple characters!
Additionally, different modes, events, and battles require a different collection of characters. Darth Vader may not be the best character for every battle! You need a lot more than 5 characters at the highest level to compete!
Overall you can clearly see here that the upgrade system is complex, but serves its ultimate purpose: this game lasts for years. Instead of offering a linear, obvious path for players to slowly upgrade their heroes, Galaxy of Heroes offers many parallel systems which give players short term and long term goals. Multiply this out by having many different characters to always be collecting, and this game constantly has tasks and things for the player which give the feeling of progression. This is the way that Galaxy of Heroes stays interesting for years.
Retention Drivers
Just looking at their performance on the Grossing Charts, we can predict that Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes can keep players playing for a long time. So how did they do it?
To look at retention we have to look at what drives sessions in the short-term, the mid-term and the long-term overall aspiration. These drivers must change and be as visible to the player as possible to give a clear roadmap of how to reach the end game.
Short-Term: Daily Activities + Session Length
Daily Activities
Great daily sessions on mobile are marked by a clear session goal. A mobile game should present the player with clear goals as soon as possible when opening up the game. Clear session goals means that players will work to achieve that goal each day, and feel good about leaving when accomplishing it.
Galaxy of Heroes heavily incentivizes completing the Daily Activities to progress fastest. These activities ask the player to engage, at least a few times, in all major systems and modes in the game: Play a few dark side campaign missions, play a few cantina battles, play some arena battles, etc. Each item on this list rewards the player, giving a great feeling to coming back each day and accomplishing each task. Beyond this, accomplishing everything that is on this list will give a “Daily Activities Completion” reward. This further rewards the player for completing everything on the list. What’s great is that this all forces me to actually play to receive my rewards, further pushing players to engage longer each day.
There is always something to do
Remember when everyone thought that mobile games should only have short sessions? That you need to be able to kick the player out of the game before they played too much? Throw out that rule.
Total daily session length is a far better indicator for a successful free to play game than any other. Looking at games like Contest of Champions, Clash Royale, Mobile Strike and now Galaxy of Heroes, it’s obvious that games that support long, long session length are dominating the top grossing charts.
But how do you do this without players getting bored of your systems or consuming your content too fast?Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes can support Long Sessions because:
Firstly, Their content is very inexpensive to produce (thanks to the core gameplay). Each level does not take hours for a game designer to create, just small adjustments in a spreadsheet.
Secondly, they’ve designed so many modes into the game that use the same core, but challenge the player in slightly different ways. This keeps the game fresh.
As outlined above, in a typical session I can play in up to 6 different modes. Each of these modes I can play multiple battles each lasting up to 3 minutes. Each mode has its own form of energy, so if I run out of energy in one mode, I can move to the others. By the time I’ve completed each mode, another mode has its energy almost replenished. In many cases as well, a “Daily Energy Boost” comes into my inbox which gives me an even
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