“With mobile esports on the rise, this is a great opportunity for us,” he says. For a studio that strives to create console gaming experiences on mobile platforms, taking pride in the graphical fidelity of their titles, esports seems to be too good an opportunity to miss. Judging by the studio’s ten-year history, a break into esports seems like an obvious next step. With mobile games seeing increasing success in esports, Rabas is eager to get involved. Madfinger has plans beyond just making their games more welcoming to casual players, of course. This works for the balancing, and it works for creating some charisma for each of the heroes.’ On top of that, it also helps the metagame, because if you have a lot of heroes, people will choose different heroes based on different strategies, which could lead to some really entertaining situations.” The upcoming Shadowgun Wargames is a team shooter with an obvious debt to Overwatch We were playing the games that are out there and thought, ‘Okay, so this is like what Overwatch is doing. “So for War Games we decided to do things differently. “In Legends, we found that the PvP was hard to balance, because of all the various combinations” says Rabas. Of course, Blizzard’s enormous success with Overwatch has seen hero shooters become the fashion in recent years, but there was an additional, more practical reason for the change. The game’s launch trailer featured a selection of the game’s heroes, most prominently a fast-moving, time-rewinding character – you’d have to be blind to miss the obvious Overwatch influences. Perhaps the most visible change in War Games, and what Madfinger hopes will make the game more welcoming to new players, is the introduction of a hero-based system. So from the beginning it’s all about the entertainment, having a fun experience with the game – and then they slowly get attracted to the metagame, and the competitive experience and they’ll start looking for new challenges.” We want to keep them motivated, so we have to take care with it so they are slowly encouraged to try out the competitive side of the game. “With Legends, you had people who kept losing to the bots, and never progressed to the PvP because they thought they weren’t good enough. “We’re using machine learning for the bots,” he continues. We want the game to be easy to learn, hard to master.” So we’re being very careful about that now. We were just throwing players straight into a match and they were like ‘screw this’ and left the game. Turns out it was too hardcore, our day one retention rate was very low. We basically knew nothing about how free to play was working, or the applied behaviours, and we were just working based on our own opinions. “Deadzone had two problems,” says Rabas, “it didn’t have good KPIs, and it was too hardcore. The Madfinger team at its offices in Brno, Czech Republic It’s this attitude of evolution and change that has informed the studio’s upcoming game, Shadowgun War Games, which, as Rabas explains, has been designed off the feedback the team got from the previous Shadowgun games, Deadzone and Legends, and the mistakes they made along the way in their development. Taking all of that to create an environment for them.” I love that you can evolve the game, change it, that you are working with the players – trying to understand their needs, their behaviours, their emotions. “I love the free-to-play design,” says Rabas, “and when I say that, I mean the proper free-to-play design, not this milking, psychological thing that you see. To counteract this, Rabas has a clear image of the kind of free to play games he wants to make, and how the format can benefit the company’s work:
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