My thoughts on present and future fest games

Battle for the Bonfire:
I don't like Battle for the Bonfire. But I may be in a minority there.

It feels prototypical to me. It was the first of the festival minigames to be designed, IIRC, and it shows. Battle for the Bonfire's mechanics have less depth than those of the other festivals, and it's generally less fleshed out. It doesn't help that Wynndev couldn't get to updating it this cycle. It's still a fine minigame, but the large player requirements mean that oftentimes, you simply can't play. 10-player parties are just too much and they take forever to form, especially if, say, you're looking at 8 people wanting to play, or 16. Really, the 16 player situation is worse, because you could easily miss several of the rounds by pure chance. Unfortunately, fixing that issue would require rebuilding the map from scratch, and quite possibly some of the mechanics, and that's a lot of work and playtesting to put in in the few months you have for festival dev.

I can't see ways to expand it like with BtB, Blizzard, and CtH, other than adding more buffs. And the buffs aren't really a major element of the game. They're pretty major, but you can get away without using them much (except for the jump buff, which is by far the strongest). I'd say taking a second look at them could be good, especially the range and power buffs, which are unique IIRC in that they apply automatically instead of appearing as an item. (All the buffs being items is especially difficult to work with, as you run into a problem where you physically cannot use some of your buffs if you have too many - which also throws a wrench into the 'add more buffs' expansion plan, which also has the issue of causing either too many buffs to spawn or making any given buff too rare to play around.)
Banish the Beyond:
Honestly, no problems here. The balancing is delicate, but Banish the Beyond is fantastic. I should have played it more. To be unfair to the devs, it's the only one of the minigames which is based on a real-life game, so a lot of the game design is already done.

Expansion is, as can be clearly seen, new perks and spirits. The perk selection has gotten bigger with the additions to the perk pool, but you can't do that forever, unless you start adding rerolls and such. I'd say that spirit selection would also need to expand over time. A new map would be a large expansion. Might be pretty cool to see a new one, although I wonder what the theme would be. We have underground and surface, so perhaps an aerial or sea map, or something gimmicky?

(As an aside, the mystery designers really borked up on incorporating the minigame into the mystery, because that guarantees that people will be doing the minigame only for the mystery, and probably screwing with a lot of parties when they don't get the map they want. I know this because I did it personally, because I was in a rush at the end of the festival (I'd procrastinated on the mystery) and really did not want to spend 15 minutes on every unlucky roll of the dice. Also, people who didn't interact with the minigame are fresh out of luck in the mystery, as without having encountered the Vermin - a luck-based event which, for a new player, would require probably at least half a dozen round - you couldn't complete the mystery. This shouldn't happen next time.)
Blizzard Minigames:
(All minigames should be always available if they aren't already, one spotlighted with bonus gifts, pfinder should try to make larger parties or otherwise be geared towards big play)
God, I cannot remember how these work normally. My ideal system would be all minigames being available at all times, with one being spotlighted each day with, say, 2x gift yield, and there's a randomiser option to throw the party into a random game after completing the current one. I'm not sure how close the system is to that. The regular Pfinder should be geared to making larger parties (5? 7?), and I'd suggest adding a 'Festival' category to the types of Pfinder party, with an icon that changes depending on the ongoing festival.

Expansion of Blizzard minigames is obviously going to be mainly just designing new games. If it was at all possible, my dream would be Wynndev creating larger versions of the minigame maps and hosting occasional mass parties (perhaps similar to the other fests' +50 Fest Ticket events?) for large amounts of players to compete at the same time. With the whole server, you could make, say, 20 person or 50 person parties for these larger maps. It would be really cool.
Claim to Heroism
Heroes is personally my favorite minigame, but I'm aware that that's not something held by everyone. I think a definite issue with it is that it's not at all friendly to inexperienced people, especially with how PVP centric it is. The most efficient way to generate resources is to kill other players (and that's just about the only way to get enough to make it to Hero), which obviously means that either there will be players in the lobby who are getting just about nothing, or everybody will be constantly losing resources to others. Killing other players is, at most, net neutral, and in any case, the game being 'kill or be killed' means that there aren't really any alternate playstyles (BftB and BtB are both much better in this respect). The problem isn't an extreme issue since you still get half the resources you collected if you die, but I still think it's a significant issue. I'm not sure how one would go about fixing it, though (other than maybe making players less squishy or something).

Another noticeable issue is that there's very little ability to turn the game around in the second phase. The hero is *powerful*, and often wins, while in Spirits, the players have already won when they reach the second phase (it's just a matter of whether they manage to escape), and in Bonfire, the buffs for winning the first phase aren't overwhelming.

I don't remember the minigame quite so well, but I remember that picking the dagger or spear was crucial, because they had movement abilities, which made them pretty powerful. I don't remember if it was actually nonviable to not pick one of those as your first weapon, though.

For the matter of expansions, Heroes has, so far, been given an extra hero. I don't really like the idea of just adding a new hero or two every time Heroes rolls around, though (also, how many heroes can you really pull from?). The obvious additional target for expansion is songs, as players already can't get all of them in a single round, but I'd be more interested in seeing a relik being added to the weapon pool. (I proposed this once on the forums. Like the class, it would be mechanically unusual - the weapon would have a single charge, and launch a totem when used, which would have a health pool and deal damage in a wide radius, passively. Vanishing would render you immune to the effect.)

 

god i hate claim to heroism
kill mobs simulator
very unfun, and unforgiving to learn

the points about BftB, Btb, and Blizzard are good though.

 

Wynnter fair suggestion +1
BftB suggestion +0.75
BtB +0.5
Mystery suggestion +1.5
CtH +0.4
Relik Suggestion+1
ad pol

 

poll has been the add...