September Community Video: 5-Stars & Silver Surfer

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

SEPTEMBER COMMUNITY VIDEO – More Silver Surfer & 5-Star Details From The Game Designers

In this month’s Community Video, Demiurge’s Will Jennings-Hess and Miles Benjamin are back to offer exciting details on the introduction of the all-new 5-Star rarity, the arrival of Silver Surfer and new systems and features on the way to help players gain and cover their 4-Stars!



You can WATCH IT HERE.

You can read a transcript of the video below:

September Community Video Transcript:

Introduction

Will - Hey everybody, welcome to the September Community Video.

Miles - And this is an exciting one!

Will - Really exciting one.

Miles - Because we're here to talk about this guy. (Gestures to comic cover)

Will - Yeah! I'm Will Jennings-Hess, I'm a designer of Marvel Puzzle Quest.

Miles - And I'm Miles Benjamin, also a designer on Marvel Puzzle Quest.

Will - So (points at comic cover) this is the Silver Surfer.

Miles - Is this the actual comic?

Will - Yeah.

Miles - Yeah!

Will - This is the trade.

Miles - Ah, this is the trade.

Will - But it's the right cover, yeah.

Miles - It's the right cover. And he's coming to the game.

Will - He's going to have 5 stars.

Miles - Which is, you know, a lot to get to fit on that little [display] bar but we did it.

Will - Yeah, we did it.

Miles - But, that's not all.

Will - We want to tell you a lot more about 5-Stars and what else is coming to the game soon.

Will - So, this video is directed mostly at veteran players who have been playing for a while and are working on 4-Stars to whom Silver Surfer is most relevant.

Will - We've got lots of new stuff coming through the rest of the year for everybody, but today we want to talk about how the experience for the most advanced players are changing, what we call the elder game.

The Elder Game

Miles - The elder game, that sort of higher level of play… We've added to it, we've expanded it… I mean, so much content over the past couple of years.

Miles - This game has been out for two years, almost two full years. And we've added new characters, new events, new types of gameplay, but that sort of end level goal of getting your 4-Stars and maxing out your 4-Stars has never really changed a whole lot.

Miles - And so what we're trying to do is really add a whole new level of gameplay for all those older players who want something new and want to keep pushing.

Will - Yeah. You've seen we've been preparing for this for a little while, and you've seen some of the stuff we've done to prepare for that.

Will - We've been releasing more 4-Stars, so that gameplay at the 4-Star level is more rich and more varied. And in order to support that we've also increased the rate at which it's possible to get 4-Stars and the number of different places that you can get 4-Stars.

Will - So you've seen some changes along those lines. For example, there's a bump to the 4-Star drop rate in Heroic packs and Event packs a couple of months back. We'll be doing that again at the start of Season XIX, but there's also more big changes coming to that.

Miles - Because we're going to add, in addition to a way to get these new 5-Stars, we're going to add new ways to get new 4-Stars. And the biggest one, we've got a couple planned, but the one we're here to talk about today is a new type of store called the Legendary Store.

Legendary Store

Miles - It's actually a little bit of a misnomer because you can't buy anything at this store.

Miles - But we have these packs, and they're these Legendary packs and it's a guaranteed 4-Star or better. Which means you have a good chance of getting a 5-Star, namely the Silver Surfer.

Miles - Starting out, we're going to have him at 5% of the packs, but as soon as we add another 5-Star we're going to be bumping him up, so the pack will be 90% 4-Stars, 10% 5-Stars, which is really exciting.

Miles - They feel great to open up. I've been gifting them to myself just to open them on the debug server.

Will - It feels really good.

Miles - Yeah.

Will - So again, it's opening up with Silver Surfer at 5% of the packs, then when we add another 2-Star character it'll go up to 10.

Miles – 5-Star character.

Will – 5-Star character, yeah. Whew, 2-Stars. No. no. No 2-Stars in that pack.

Miles - Yeah.

Will - So, more than just this guy (points to Silver Surfer) is gonna be a 5-Star. We're not ready to announce who the other 5-Stars are going to be yet, but they're coming.

Will - We're planning an initial batch of three 5-Stars, so there'll be some initial variety at the 5-Star level.

Miles - Because it's no fun if everybody just has Silver Surfer.

Will - Right.

Will - So we'll be rolling those out at about one a month through November, and after that initial batch of three are out we'll take a look and evaluate and see how people are earning these characters, what the impact on the game has been and then decide what the right rate for 5 stars are going forward.

Legendary Tokens

Miles - So, we mentioned earlier that we've got this Legendary Store where you can't buy anything, so how do I get Legendary Tokens? We're going to be adding them to a bunch of places in the game.

Miles - The first one is for every 40 pack... 42 pack we're going to be dropping by 2, so everything's back to a 40 pack. So you're going to get 40 covers and a Legendary Token with every 40 pack. So that's really exciting.

Miles - We're also going to be adding a whole bunch of new missions to Deadpool's Daily Quest. So every 5 day, or fifth day of Deadpool's Daily Quest there's going to be a special 4-Star required mission that's going to be a unique, one-on-one fight for that 4-Star versus someone who we've decided is a good challenge for them. Maybe it's a comic adversary, maybe it's a sort of interesting opposite powers, but that will be a guaranteed Legendary Pack if you can manage to beat that.

Will - That means they're all different, there's one for every…

Miles - Yeah, every, every 4-Star's gonna have their own unique fight. Which is exciting.

Miles - We've been playing them in the office. We've spent a lot of time with coming up with who is the most interesting to fight for each 4-Star.

Miles - And we're going to be adding them to PVP rewards, and PVE rewards.

Will - Season rewards…

Miles - End of season rewards. And so they're gonna start appearing all over the game, and your job is to seek them out, get your hands on them. Because like I said, they're the only way to get 5-Stars.

Will - And there'll be more ways to get Legendary Tokens coming in the future. But that's where they will be initially.

5-Star Difference

Will - You've noticed from what Miles has said that the way to get 5-Stars is a little bit different than the way you get any other characters in the game.

Will - And we're really trying to make 5-Stars different. Make them feel different in the way you get them, they feel different in the way they progress.

Will - We've set them up so that getting 5-Stars and getting a bunch of 5-Stars is a real long-term goal and getting one of them feels really special.

Miles - Yeah, and because they're going to be very rare, we've made them a lot more valuable.

Miles - You know, so with 2-Stars, 3-Stars, 4-Stars, they take about eight to ten covers, depending on who it is, and which covers you have, before they start outshining the tier before them.

Miles - So your 3-Stars start becoming better than your maxed out 2-Stars at about ten covers.

Miles - And getting ten covers of 5-Stars is going to take you a while, so we want to make sure that with just one or two covers that the 5-Star is going to be useful.

Miles - Could be definitely on your B-team, and by the time you’ve got three or four covers he's going to be a good candidate for your A-team.

Miles - So they're going to be useful right away to anyone that gets them. So getting one cover is a big deal.

Will - And we've tried to pace that out so that, you know, it's… Players, you guys are really inventive and really good at this game and so I don't want to make too many promises about this, but it's going to be pretty unlikely that you'll see many, if any, maxed out Silver Surfers for a little while after they come out.

Miles - And one thing to know that we changed with Silver Surfer is that in order to level up his abilities, you have to have the cover.

Will - That's right, yeah.

Miles - So, you really gotta earn it, no cheating, no foolies, you gotta…

Will - You gotta find that cover.

Miles - Exactly.

Silver Surfer

Miles - A little about Silver Surfer himself.

Will - Oh yeah.

Miles - He's our first character with a surf board. He's silver, he looks great, very sparkly. What else about him?

Miles - I guess his premiere ability is the Silver Singularity, it's a black hole that he makes on the board, and his other two powers are designed to complement that.

Miles - So the black hole gets placed on the board and every turn it consumes the tiles around it, generating AP for the team. And his other two abilities are powers that make Charged tiles as a side effect.

Miles - So you can make these Charged tiles and then put the black hole down to generate AP for his team. So it's a new way for AP generators. I don't think we've done anything like this before so…

Will - There's a lot of strategy required, to pick where on the board, and what AP you're trying to get and trying to plan ahead to see what tiles are going to get sucked in, it's pretty cool.

Miles - Exactly.

Miles - So hopefully everybody has fun playing with him.

Will - Oh, did you talk about his stun, the Blue ability?

Miles - Oh yeah, so it's, as an active, it's a self-heal and makes some Charged tiles as I said, but also he's immune to stun. He's our only playable character who is immune to stunning. So I think that's also a very exciting trait about him.

Will - Yeah, you'll see that as we go into our 5-Stars going forward, we're trying to amp up how different they are from each other.

Miles - Yeah.

Will - So we're trying to do the kind of rock paper scissors gameplay more to the fore.

Miles - So some exciting stuff to come.

Will - Yeah.

Will - There's a whole bunch more that we're working on right now that we'll be announcing to you, probably in the next video, so lots more stuff to come, particularly relating to this elder game stuff, but also more features for everybody through the end of 2015. It's gonna be a great year.

Miles - Cool. I think that's all we got.

Will - Thanks for listening.

Miles - Thanks for watching, and thanks for playing!

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