When I was working on Forge as a personal, pet project I
didn't mind adding buggy cards. I knew which of the cards were buggy and
generally they just made me smile when a bug happened during the game. Generally
the bugs were mildly annoying but nothing more than that. (If the bug
caused the game to crash, I didn't smile.) And the Forge developers continued
to add cards that were a little bit buggy. By “buggy cards” I mean the
cards would work under "normal circumstances" but not when things got
complicated.
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| (Random cool card picture) |
This rule-of-thumb has worked well for a while but it now
that Forge has 8,437 things could be changed.
The only reason that I included buggy cards to begin with was because
Forge didn’t have many cards. And the
more cards it has equals more fun. Now
all of the buggy cards could be removed and the player could optionally use
them by changing an option.
I started thinking about buggy cards after recently reading this post on the
Wagic blog. One paragraph caught my
attention:
[start quote]
I’m also proud to think that in Wagic, when we say a card is
supported, you are very unlikely to find a bug with it, and if you do, we
acknowledge it’s a bug, we won’t say “no, we couldn’t do better than that with
this card”. When we can’t fix the bug, we “downgrade” the card. It is still in
the game, but you have to enable a special option (the “grade”) in order to
play with it.
This way, by default, a card that is not good enough will not
appear in your game experience. For example, you won’t officially find the
Planeswalkers in Wagic, because we think they do not reach the “quality bar” we
expect them to reach…but it doesn’t prevent you from downloading them in a
“workaround” version. So, when we say we support 7700 cards, we could actually
say we support 8000 cards, but 300 of them were not considered “good enough” to
be in the default settings.
[end quote]
I thought it was a very good way to deal with buggy
cards. Of course the level of “bugginess”
is hard to tell. Does a non-buggy card mean
that it is 100% rules compliant and works correctly in all situations? And to further complicated the situation some
cards appear buggy only when other new cards are added.
Wagic is a great implementation of Magic with rules
enforcement. Wagic’s primary platform is
the Sony PSP but it also runs on Windows, Linux, and Nokia N900 (maemo). Wagic for Windows features mouse support or you
can use the plain, old keyboard. I think
you can also use your gamepad if you use an external program to remap your
keyboard to your gamepad.
Keep on tapping (and winning),
mtgrares
Although Wagic has some good rules enforcement, I feel it can't compare to Forge when it comes to making a deck and story mode, considering you can't just start a quest on a whim and have it start without any problems. I say this after having realized how obnoxious Wagic could be when it came to adding campaigns.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous: Wagic's Stroy mode allow you to write your own scenario and your own rules. You can for example set a series of challenges/enigmas and make a story our of it.
ReplyDeleteI must admit don't know how it compares to Forge which I haven't checked in a while, but yes, under these circumstances, since Wagic's Stroy mode practically allow you to create an entirely new game, it's not necessarily "easy" to create one.
As far as playing a Story made by somebody else, you just have to copy a folder, it shouldn't be too hard in theory. I understand that there are a few bugs but we are trying to fix them.
Since the campaign mode in forge and the Story mode in Wagic are not aiming at doing the same thing, this might be where your frustration is coming from?
I'm open to suggestions though, if you have specific pain points :)
rares: Forge ended up beating Wagic in number of cards, but we'll be back ;)
Stroy -> Story
ReplyDeleteI apologize if I sounded overly critical of Wagic, it's a great program as well. My frustrations must have stemmed from my attempts at the many different programs available to play Magic, and I specifically wanted to play against computers in an immediately accessible story mode. I will say that if a story mode that continued after the tutorial was included, I would have been much more inclined to continue on with Wagic, as the interface was excellent.
ReplyDeleteI love Wagic. I used to play it all the time before I discovered Forge. I love the graphical interface, I love the open variety of the card shop, and I love "unlocking" players and sets. However, I wish this game would update more often. It's sad to see a set come and go without a new version of Wagic to play it on. And planewalker support is not a small feature of Forge :p So I play both games, and I enjoy when they pick up features from each other.
ReplyDelete