Nintendo Chills Mobile Ambitions After Animal Crossing Success
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-21/ninten...
bloomberg.comPosted Jun 22, 2020, 2:44 AM UTC
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bloomberg.comI wonder if this’ll change anything for Feh ongoing.
It’s exciting to see the switch succeeding so well though. My mother, sister, and a coworker all bought switches at the start of this quarantine. My mom alone has already put over 600 hours on her island on Animal Crossing, and she’s not even close to what I would call a gamer.
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Port feh to the switch cowards.
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I think FEH would get major backlash on any platform except mobile. Gacha games (FEH included) are structured to HEAVILY lean on pay-two-win mechanics. Not only is summoning bottlenecked unless you spend real money, but every single competitive mode is structured to reward highly merged rare heroes that are effectively impossible for F2P players to keep up with. That kind of thing gets a pass on mobile, since the mobile market is a degenerate race to the bottom with 0 standards, but console gamers are usually a bit more picky. Even simple lootboxes have resulted in severer backlash at times, and gacha games are the lootbox concept expanding to an entire game and then injected with steroids.
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Is that why no one can find it? j/k.
Seriously I'd buy one IF I COULD FIND ONE.
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Doubt it. It seems to be about making new ones, not maintaining old ones.
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Still want a FEH-verse console spinoff so that these characters are still alive when FEH eventually dies
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Honestly I’d be down for this, I feel that the feh stories have some really cool potential but it’s held back because it’s a mobile game
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I think Zenith characters as a whole can be it's own games
Let's say the game shut down at the ends of Book 8 or 9 It will be long enough to be it's own games without the help of characters in the series
Book 1 can adapt a bit the rest already capable of relied on itself since Book 2
It would help fixing up a screentime problem in FEH
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Pocket Camp do well as much as DL?
quite sursprising but even I play it a bit in waiting for New Horizon and it is legit relax AC experienced
DL on the others hands is MEGA OOF for a game this sub keep "Praising" over and over
and while it's not reach 1 year I still look forward how last year mobile titles do (DR., Kart and Pokemon Masters)
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Cygames really doesn't know how to market DL, and despite what you see on Reddit, the game has pretty much always been referred to as the reject sibling of Granblue and Princess Connect.
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I feel like DL really, really tripped at the starting gate. Matchmaking issues (wings, # of hosts vs. joiners), comically low rates, the awful feeling of rolling a 5* wyrmprint and losing your pity rate, dupe adventurers being basically worthless, samey raid -> facility -> raid events, and not much being done to prepare players for harder content (even as low as regular dragon trials or Imperial Assualt) which only exacerbated the matchmaking woes. They've definitely put a lot of work in fixing these problems over time, but they probably lost whatever momentum and novelty that "Nintendo partners with well-known mobile company to make a new gacha" had.
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Mediocre pull rates on top of backbreaking pitybreakers, in a game that is heavily grind-based with massive difficulty spikes? Not exactly most whales' cup of tea. Add on to that a nonexistent marketing campaign and a slow, mostly endgame focused content output and, well... you get the kind of following DL has. Extremely devoted, but also not especially big, and often likely to lose new players from the sheer wall of time it takes to get to where most of the new content is being added.
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I wrote this in a DL sub thread a couple of days ago. The main problem for DL revenue wise is that it treats paying customers like crap. I was active from last year's FEH collab until this year's.
- It started with the HDT2 weapons making all previous ingot (a purchasable mat) uses on 5T3 weapons a complete waste — the power creep was so insane making 5T3 weapons completely useless once the HDT2s were out. And no apologies whatsoever from Cygames for this. Sorry, but you had your fun with the 5T3s, suckers.
- HDT2 weapons getting power creeped by 6T1s after just a few months. Too bad if you bought ingots for them too, suckers.
- Mana Spirals arbitrarily making some units relevant, others obsolete. If your fav unit is irrelevant and impossible to PUB with, too bad. Go spend $$$ on the new units instead, suckers.
- Any f2p who can spend hours and hours grinding out weapons will have more powerful units. There is no other way to get the mats for the 6T2 weapons. No amount of spending can make up the difference.
So what’s the incentive to spend? Weapons get power creeped whenever they feel like it. Adventurers become irrelevant whenever they feel like it. And the game, at least when I stopped, was just an endless grind to get more powerful... so you can grind some more.
The numbers speak for themselves. Last I checked, DL has plunged to below 800th in the Japanese charts in terms of monthly gross spending.
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From what I understand of DL, there isn't really much to enticing spending whether its content or having an adventurer to do it, which may or maynot why they have been releasing more powerful Galas ( from what I heard Gala mars just invalidates most fire dragons )
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This.
Normally spending for characters in gacha games are done for love of the character or for gameplay reasons. In FEH, we see this happen when players attempt to +10 characters: they usually only do this for characters they particularly love
DL kinda hits the awkward middle ground of neither. Few of the characters are used narratively well enough to make you develop attachment to them, and the nature of DL’s ‘meta’ makes gameplay chasing kinda futile
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Probably doesn't help that the co-op nature of the game tends to breed its own toxicity and meta-elitism. Trying to do endgame content but don't have the optimal character with their optimal dragon maxed? Guess you're stuck playing support then or else you'll struggle to find players who'll take you.
Not every room is like this, of course, but you'll definitely run into a lot of very picky players.
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There's nothing worth to spend on DL. You don't have to whale because the game is way too generous with resources, the "best" value pack gets you a uh... merge in Feh terms for a dragon, (4 merges + base copy and the dragon is maxed), but this pack is grossly overpriced when we get those same exact materials to merge from events constantly.
Premium currency price is comically worse than feh's orb value and with no need to spend even whales get to have an easy time.
The actual best thing you can buy is dream summons which guarantees a 5* Adventurer or Dragon of your choice and those come in every few months.
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The resource generosity is offset and nullified by awful rates, dragons in the summoning pool and the fact that adventurer dupes are useless. No fodder or merges, and after a while you'll have so much Eldwater 8500 more won't make a difference.
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The dupe issue is huge. I've gotten a handful of new units in months, yet my number of dupes is more than double that.
There's no point pulling.
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And it's depressing as fuck. 3* and 4* adventurers/dragons are all dupes and useless unless you've just started playing, and then a random 5* pops up and pity breaks you. And most of the times it's an old dragon that was either never good to begin with (how the hell are crap like Simurgh or Liger still 5*) or has been powercrept to hell.
Not to mention the fact that you could pull Wyrmprints as well, that literally made me quit. I came back only when they removed them.
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While true this doesnt change the fact that there's nothing worthwile to spend on. Even if you don't have enough summoning resources the diamantium rates are so bad that spending 1200 for a tenfold sounds horrid.
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Definitely, it's not only a bad summoning experience, but also a bad business model. If they make a pack with G!Cleo I'd be lying if I say I'd never think about buying it though. I probably spent the equivalent of 100k wyrmite on her and still nothing.
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Interesting. They're saying Gachas are the most lucrative business model but Fire Emblem is the only Nintendo franchise they can make a Gacha out of. I'm sure if Nintendo had another Gacha eligible series they'd make another Gacha game asap.
I think revenue from the game will continue to drop. I don't think the game will die, at least not for a while yet since if nothing else I think Nintendo finds value in it just keeping the brand name out there (and occasionally advertising for new games), but I don't expect the game to get any better really. I feel like they'll put the minimum amount of effort they can into the game while making as much as possible from it.
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Fire Emblem is the only Nintendo franchise they can make a Gacha out of.
Pokémon could work.
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Masters try but I don't think it's clicked
I like that Masters focus more on Trainers now but for a series that focus on characters less than monsters it wouldn't be a good deal to most players
not to mention how the games is require big phone spec
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The problem with Pokemon is than the game can run on recent phones, that limits a lot the game in my opinion
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I'm just quoting the article on this one.
“You need an active long-running franchise with hundreds of attractive characters to make a good gacha game and then you’d need to keep adding new characters each month to retain players,” Yasuda said. “Fire Emblem is the only Nintendo franchise capable of doing that.”
I think Pokemon has a Gacha don't they? But ownership of Pokemon is split so it might not count in the same way.
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There is Pokemon Masters but the game tie Pokemon with Trainers
You can't just pulled for Metagross You have to pulled for Steven+Metagross and so on
so despite having over 800 pokemons the choice will be limit by Trainers characters spread for entire series
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so despite having over 800 pokemons the choice will be limit by Trainers characters spread for entire series
They've been addressing this issue by releasing the same characters in different clothes and with different pokemon.
Right now the Pokemon Masters subreddit is eagerly expecting Swimsuit Cynthia to drop sometime this summer.
The devs have also recently introduced egg mechanics.
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is that not Pokemon Masters
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pokemon could be MASSIVE if they wren't stubborn about using fan-made concepts.
Moemon is literally a fortune that Nintendo/Pokemon Company refuses to redeem. It could spawn its own sub-franchise.
But no. The one pokemon gacha, they focused on TRAINERS instead of the creatures...
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Masters isn't even the first Gacha attempt. But yeah, Masters sucks, they gutted the gameplay just like they did for Go, leaving everything good about Pokemon on consoles.
I don't know who is in charge of all these additional experiences for Pokemon, but very, very few have worked, and none have worked consistently on Mobile. At the least they could leverage Ranger or Mystery Dungeon on smartphones, they were moderately popular.
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Pokémon is managed by TPC on mobile.
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To be entirely honest, FEH would have to be doing truly awfully to die. The game costs pennies to make compared to its profit margins, even when compared to other mobile gachas (especially Nintendo's own).
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Agreed 100%! When I said "not for a while" I really meant a while. Obviously some day they'll stop supporting the game, but it won't be any time soon.
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They tried with Mario in Mario Kart Tour, and now Peach has more alts than Camilla because they can't add more characters at the moment because they would ran out of them pretty quickly
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They actually flat out lied there, they have tried (multiple times) to make Gacha out of Pokemon - their issue is that the games have sucked horribly each time, because they are too goddamn stupid to bring over a proper Pokemon formula (proper battles, move learning, level to 100, stuff like that.)
Masters gutted the gameplay and went for an active battle system just so they could market multiplayer (which is absolutely terrible, they even had to add a way to play multiplayer content solo it was so bad), so of course nobody is particularly interested. Go gutted the gameplay too - once the novelty wore off, the playerbase imploded (and granted, it isn't Gacha, but this is Pokemon we are talking about - if it wasn't so horribly mismanaged and with horrible design choices, it would be holding its own with FEH no problem.)
There aren't many other franchises that Nintendo could leverage - Mario has a lot of characters, but nowhere near enough for a proper gacha (unless there was a good reason to go for each enemy type, and even then its finite.) Metroid had hunters, but it's way too limited. F-Zero might have worked if the franchise hadn't essentially been abandoned. Pikmen, limited, Yoshi and Kirby fare no better. Its basically just Fire Emblem and Pokemon - if they knew how to do Pokemon the right way.
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Xenoblade is another, especially considering XB2 legitimately had its own offline gacha system baked into the game already
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I mean, yes, it had a gacha style system, but it's not the same as a mobile game. You don't, at any time, get given the option to exchange money for currency to summon with.
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Its basically the same with the money option removed though. My point being is that it would actually work when transitioning into an actual mobile game because the systems are already in place
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They actually flat out lied there, they have tried (multiple times) to make Gacha out of Pokemon - their issue is that the games have sucked horribly each time, because they are too goddamn stupid to bring over a proper Pokemon formula (proper battles, move learning, level to 100, stuff like that.)
No, they didn't lie about anything, even more when this isn't Nintendo saying it. Outside of that, no Pokémon games are released by Nintendo on mobile but by TPC. Masters is licensed by TPC to DeNA which handles it and Go to Niantic, who also handles it.
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TPC still falls under the Nintendo umbrella though.
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I feel like this means more that their going to not be releasing that many, if any, mobile games in the forseeable future and doesn't really say anything about support for it's current mobile line up. definitely not FEH at any rate since it's one of the top earners behind the pokemon games.
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I'll wait for how Last Year games perform
I still think those titles are the reason FEH forced to make FEH pass to patch up the fuck up of those
They're not gonna admit that Mario and Pokemon failed
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Nintendo will obviously not admit if a Pokemon mobile game failed, since they do not publish those games on mobile and are not incharge of any decision about them, they only get money from them as share holders of TPC.
Like The Rumble Rush game that came out last year is being shut down next month for example.
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I think Mario Kart tour will have pretty decent profit margins, it's got a really big install base and people are still active on it even if it's not the most talked about.
masters definitely underperformed though
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mario kart tour is quickly crashing and bruning though. It demands you to pull the next big thing almost every week, only has two gamemodes one of which is the hit-or-miss online, and they release new courses at a snail's pace.
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I wonder how much CYL 4 will make in comparison to the previous CYL
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Me too. We also have to consider how the pandemic (and ensuing economic fallout) will impact it too. It’s inevitable that it won’t make as much as it could have last year.
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Then again people voted the shit out of the lords (with Lysithea) I don't remember how the first/2nd place votes compare with the previous years. If it's the highest I assume people will be splurging, as seen by the people who +10ed Edelgard.
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That’s a good point! Ultimately idk if there’s any way we can predict how things go down this year. Sure to be interesting lol
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I'm not surprised at all at Fire Emblem Heroes doing the best(outside of pocket camp when AC has the new game and accidental quarantine + game about getting out and exploring the world success.)
It's like the only actually fun gacha game out there plus you can build anyone to be super powerful? I feel like if Nintendo advertised it more it'd get more attention and players.
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I'm legit surprised that even with Feh Pass (wich is a very viable monetization model for light spenders and could've meant a big revenue boost) this year earnings is still lesser than last year.
What's the most likely explnation for this? Is this year particularly unexciting, was last year like super exciting or what?
D-Did... Did we actually kill Feh Pass revenue when we complained about it on the Feh Channel....?
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There is pandemic for one lol. Second the game is getting older and they don't do much to bring in new players.
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FEH Pass is probably the only reason revenue is as good as it is so far. Without it, I would imagine the figure for this year looking far worse.
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Nah I doubt that, if anything sparking is more responsible because of how hard they spiked new heroes banners up in rankings. For having the 2nd and 3rd place cyl females, the 3H banner performed worse than both Fallen and the Fates banner. Pretty sure the awakening banner had a higher peak too. Honestly I'm rather certain both the pass and forma souls performed below expectations while sparking exceeded them. Best I can hope for is that IS takes the appropriate lessons from that.
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Pretty sure the Fates one had a higher spikes because of the orb packs
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Highly doubt that it's the packs since the previous NY ones didn't have nearly as much of a big effect and not to mention the next couple sets of new heroes had similar peaks even without orb packs. Whales will buy orbs regardless on whether or not there's a pack and I doubt much dolphins would break over Naga of all things unless they were already planning on buying a pack of orbs, though admittedly I can see many going for the Tiki pack since it's cheaper and came with grails. Still think sparkable distant/close foil did more for the banner than any of the orb packs though.
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A lot of factors likely, but one is that for as many characters that FE has, there's not a lot that're actually guaranteed to sell. When comparing the YoY revenue from Feb to May, that period from last year had a lot of beast units which caused a lot of excitement over a new unit type, compared to 2020 where its New Heroes banners seemed to have rather lackluster sales (besides maybe the 3H banner, I don't have the data for that).
Funny enough, if you look at the rankings and sales data, you can actually trace the original dip in rankings to November 2018: the month that AR was first introduced, which apparently caused a lot of whales to leave (and IS to monetize mythics as basically damage control).
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Thanks, this is super valuable info massive props for doing the research and thinking about the topic
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Why did AR caused them to leave?
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Never thought I'd read the reason for leaving the game is because it isn't P2W enough... lol
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I wish they would do a bigger budget version of a Feh style game on switch. Do the entire series crossover thing, but not in a game where F2P mechanics demand powercreep and rarity that preclude people from getting or using certain characters. Just let people build there actual favorites from across the series with actual satisfying progression and put them on a team. Trim away the mode bloat that piles up in these free mobile games and just keep the most fun and tactical and rewarding stuff. I'd buy it for an upfront price.
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FEH-specific things:
-19% YoY revenue from February to May
$154m in 2019
Was worried for feh for a second until I saw how awful the other Nintendo IP’s are doing lmao. Feh will definitely be the last mobile game they’ll stop supporting.
While I never expected FEH to compete with the big dogs out there, seeing the other Nintendo titles make me sad ( big F for Mario run )
Poorly ran things tend to have poor results.
Been saying this for ages. Funnily enough gets me downvoted more often than not, too many are straight up in denial
It can't be help unlike the others Mario Run is not a live service
the game is like any others Switch title but cheaper and on Mobile
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If anyone's worried about FEH getting canceled let me reassure you: with that kind of profits there's no way it's ending anytime soon. Even though revenue is declining, it's still making way too much to end.
Let's do some hypothetical math to demonstrate: say FEH has fifty full-time people working on it that each make $100,000 a year, and they only work on FEH. This is definitely not true, but its a stretch for an example. Now, they commission 150 Hero art sets a year at $2,000 each. Each VA for each Hero gets $500 for the 150 Heroes, in Japanese and English. And they pay a CG studio for the semi-yearly trailers a million dollars a year. This total comes to $5,000,000 for staff, $300,000 for art, $150,000 for VA work, a million for the trailers, and you get $6,450,000. There's probably some other expenses that I'm not considering, but I also doubt the art and staff cost that much either.
Bottom-line: FEH definitely costs less than $10,000,000 a year, and is for-sure cheaper to make than pretty much any of Nintendo's other mobile titles. They might not be making any new mobile games, but they'd be fools to kill any mobile titles that are still turning profits, especially the one that's getting the most bang for their bucks.
Personally I think Nintendo needs to give IS a bit of a wake up call since it's felt like they've been phoning it in for quite a while. While it doesn't directly translate into the game itself, I think all the mistranslations, "intern-kun" moments, and buggy weapon designs are a sign that the FEH team just doesn't really care about the game outside of it's money making potential if they aren't willing to put in the effort to fix these issues before they happen.
It might be doing well now, but I can't imagine any project with an unmotivated team behind it managing to retain our interest in the long term. I'd love nothing more than for Heroes to be insanely successful, but for the last year or so I just can't really feel any kind of interest coming from the devs.
having a bug doesn't mean Devs doesn't care
LOL got a bug to fixed almost every patch, Payday got a lots of glitchy things to do every damn patch and you can't say they don't care about the games because they are not
Coding/Programming are not easy things to do
bug in FEH appears little and most of the time it's not make it unplayable like people overexaggerated
and for mistranslation It has nothing to do with IS it's on NoA
mistake can happened and because they care that's why They fixed it up
I'm not trying to imply coding is easy. Obviously I don't know their development process, I just think it would be easy to do simple play testing to catch issues like Clarisse's bow not working before release.
As for the mistranslations, I know that it's NoA's problem but at the end of the day it's still a matter of IS's game. I can't imagine it's all that difficult for them to file at least a complaint telling NoA to get their translations in order. I think that these minor issues do add up over time and make it that more likely that they cut more corners down the line.
I don't quite share the view that, "they fix something so they care." Instead I see it as something that they're expected to do as developers of a game that makes millions of dollars.
Obviously we can't know how many things they fix behind the scenes, but at least on the surface level it's felt like they're phoning it in and I think most people would look at this year's anniversary as an example of that. A personal nitpick of the anniversary I have is that they didn't bother to make a new castle theme like they did for the second anniversary. I can't imagine it being all that difficult to make themes, so I can't help but feel like the devs just didn't feel like putting the extra mile to give this year's already anemic anniversary at least a little bit of flair.
Yeah but you're citing games that have far more variables that can lead to several bugs, FEH's environment is far easier to test stuff out in.
I have a feeling these oversights are being caused by quarantine screwing schedules up.
I’m sure it definitely played some kind of role, though intern-kun moments have been around much longer. Hopefully the slip ups will get under control once things clear up.
Honestly, I don’t even care about these bugs. Not a bit. I just log in, collect my free orbs, and enjoy the art. The gameplay has gotten way too bloated and skill inheritance destroyed reasons to find use for units that had decent skills that were otherwise bad instead of just inheriting those skills to better units to swap in when required.
Maxxing out units is also such a chore since feathers acquire at such a slow rate. I’ve been casually playing (ftp) since the beginning and I have a +10 Brave Lyn that I somehow lucked into, along with +10 Claire, Est, and Sakura. I have about 90k feathers atm and I’ve basically given up on +10ing anybody else, it’s just a pain in the ass and luck of the draw to get a 5* and avoid paying feathers.
The art coming out of Heroes (and Cipher) is great, but to me that’s all it’s good for anymore.
I think a lot of people share that sentiment and it definitely seems like the art is Heroes’s greatest strength (along with fan content). I’m definitely in that boat and mainly play just to collect orbs to +10 my favorite characters. Skill inheritance is a double edged sword in my mind. It lets people make passion projects but obviously is going to result in cancerous units at the same time.
I think Heroes is in a bit of a strange place where there isn’t a clear direction IS should have gone with it to avoid ending up in this catch 22 between passion players and min maxers.
Getting canceled is not the only bad fate for a gacha game, it can be turned into a zombie game where no effort is put into it whatsoever and just let people throw cash at it for as long as possible. That's the route I can definitely see this game going in if they continue this path they are on.
need better banners and better choices of resplendent heroes or just more of them released each time. so far only bought the pass for Cordelia and Lyn. can't whle if there's noting to whale for. i got my new anna but not much else this year.