When I first started playing Squad Busters, I was kind of in love with it. Now that three weeks has passed by, I'm still playing, but the Honeymoon is over and I'm starting to think about what's next for the game.
The basic loop of the game is you play in a 10-person free-for-all and place 1st through 10th for the match. After this you are given rewards based on your performance and unlock progress to more worlds to play, more characters to play with, and a strengthening of your squad. That's it, and that's ok because if that base game isn't fun, no one will keep playing your game.
When I was first playing the game, I was dominating! As I should be. Mobile game designers always look at the win-loss ratios of your first few game sessions. If you're not destroying things and feeling good, then the game has less chance to hook you.
I'm to the point now where I'm only placing in the Top 5 (the real goal) of the match every few games, and I'm starting to feel the pinch to spend real-world money for a little boost. Now, as long as I accept that I'm not always going to place in the top 5 and that I'm content to just accept lowered rewards for my gameplay, it's really no big deal. I can keep playing.
In the future as I unlock even more units and more high-level worlds, the chances are that the pinch will be felt even more fully as the divide between those who pay and those who don't grows. It is what it is and that's the life of playing free-to-play mobile games. Now, to be sure, strategy can trump another player's wallet, but I'm not to that point yet. I haven't watched any YouTube guides at all. I'm sure if I did, I could increase my win-loss ratio, but I just don't know if I care that much about winning yet.
What I really think is that this game is too new and needs more depth, more modes, and more ways to play. That's gotta be the goal, right? You want to keep updating your game and adding more synergistic systems and modes to keep people engaged. Here are a few suggestions I would make if I was on the design team.
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1- Give me a reason to build my base -- as you play the game, it gives you hammers to unlock little decorations you can put around your house. This is pure vanity and something really only you will see. I can't invite anyone to my house and the placement nodes for decorating are all pre-determined. It's boring and unneeded, but it is a hint at something better.
You could swing a number of directions with this. You could make decorations become static daily reward spawners or sources for active buffs to help gameplay. You could also make bases something that other players could visit, perhaps even raid someday. Supercell could definitely mix Clash of Clans into this game if they wanted to, but it'd have to be executed differently since there's so much that goes into character building rather than base building. Hmm.
What I know is that it's currently the weakest point of the game and therefore the strongest candidate for something interesting.
2- Cooperative mode -- Everything in Squad Busters so far is competitive. Imagine if instead of competing for resources as things were destroyed, that instead we were gathering resources to BUILD something together. The more we cooperate, the more everyone wins. Destroying stuff in the outskirts and then bringing it into the center to unlock a gem mine or cool statue would be really fun . . . and especially if I had a guild to do it with.
Cooperative modes and guilds go hand in hand for mobile games. It'd be a nice layer to add to the game.
3- Make Some Special Fusions -- it's pretty easy to understand that if I have 3 heroes of one type, they fuse into a stronger version of that hero. That's a no-brainer to understand, but what if I could fuse together 3 different types of heroes to make a special kind of mutant? I think it'd be pretty fun to combine a common Greg Woodsman with a rare Hog Rider mounted unit and a legendary Mortis undead unit to create a Headless Horseman Mega Unit. In this way, you create special fusions that you have to learn -- you'd be on the hunt for making the right combinations, which would be a lot of fun.
Granted, that's a lot of work for everyone (artist, designers, programmers) to come up with special fusion characters and combinations, but the fun factor would be amazing.
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I'm sure there's a lot more you could do with this game, and now it's really just a matter of "Will this game be successful enough that we see them develop it more?" I certainly hope so. If not, the game probably needs more teeth to keep me logging back in for more than a month or two.
Happy Dueling!
2 comments:
I dunno, it's not my experience that mobile games innovate more than iterating on their theme in order to keep moving the bar and keep you p(l)aying.
I've been burnt by games like AFK Journey, FF Brave Exvius and Idle Champions... I just have trouble letting myself play F2P games. Oh yeah, Star Trek Online, too. I spent so much money in that game.
Totally valid. And to that point, I expect to see more heroes added to the lineup and more battle passes, but the base of the game really needs to be strengthened.
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