Pros: High level of deck customization, interesting battlefield lane mechanics, fun campaign
Cons: Graphics and animations (outside of cutscenes) are a little dull
We played the beta of Bethesda’s new card collecting game The Elder Scrolls: Legends (TES:L), a free to play title that sees players heading to the realm of Tamriel where they can build their own decks of mudcrabs et al and battle each other in ranked and unranked play. For our playthrough of the game we headed pretty heavily into the campaign/tutorial mode, which was quite extensive and did a good job of teaching us the nuances of the game.
Don’t get us wrong, Bethesda have far from broken the mould when it comes to making a CCG and lots of the same mechanics you see in other TCGs/CCGs are still there; battling to reduce an enemy hero to zero hitpoints, building up Magicka (mana) to field your different Unit (creature), Action (spell), Support (artifact) and item cards. We’ve seen the core features of this game in practically every other card game on the market, which is fine, but there are a few twists and tweaks to the mechanics that we think will most definitely add an extra element of strategy.
So instead of covering all the mechanics that make up a TCG/CCG (which could literally be an article on its own) we’ll focus on what we found that was a little different from the norm.
Deck building, kind of an important part of any card game, typically you find that cards are designated to a particular faction, you choose your faction and by proxy are bound to set types of cards. TES:L does things a little differently, following on with the idea of it linking to the RPG all cards are (in general) assigned an Attribute which determines the kind of card it is, such as Strength cards being about dealing damage, whereas Intelligence can focus on building up your Magicka. There are five Attributes (Willpower, Agility and Endurance being the other three) and when building a deck players choose up to two of these Attributes to determine their deck, ie. if you go for Endurance-Willpower then you can only put Endurance and Willpower cards into your deck (or Neutral cards that have no Attribute, or some cards that have two and require the deck being made up of both types). As a quick reference for players as to the type of deck the different combinations have been named “Classes”, such as our Endurance-Willpower being a Spellsword, whereas Endurance-Strength would be a Warrior. Pretty nifty.
Combat is a cross between your standard Hearthstone/Magic the Gathering style battlefield and Might & Magic: Duel of Champions lane based battlefield. Legends has two lanes that players place multiple units into, if you have a unit in one lane and your opponent places a unit in the other, then neither unit can attack the other (in general, there may be certain cards that allow this). Furthermore the left hand lane is the Field Lane and acts like a normal lane, however the right hand lane is the Shadow Lane and units placed in there gain “cover”, essentially it means units in the lane cannot attack you for one turn so you potentially get the chance to place down units that could be killed in one hit without them necessarily being killed the moment they’re placed. Spells can still attack units in cover, but this two lane and cover mechanic really made the game feel completely different to what we are used to and we found ourselves having to debate not only what card we were playing, but where. The tutorial/campaign mode actually included a random level where we were fighting on a pirate ship in a storm, the result being that the Shadow Lane mechanic was switched for a storm and each turn one of the opponents units would randomly switch lanes; a fun mechanic and we’d love to see more of this kind of thing in the standard game.
Some of the other things in the campaign that we really liked was the different choices between acts that we had whilst the main narrator was telling our story, such as after killing a bunch of spiders in a battle “Our hero found an elven merchant struggling in a cocoon” and you could choose whether to free him or steal from him; each choice giving you a different type of card. Whilst the levels are repeatable we’d love it if they extend the campaign into an ongoing PVE campaign mode as we’ve seen in other more recent TCGs.
Finally the Runes system was an interesting addition, there’s nothing worse than getting in a sticky situation and suddenly the enemy makes a single good play which completely turns things around leaving you with no defenses and little health. In a game each hero has 30 hitpoints, when you lose hitpoints then at every 5 you lose a Rune (ie. going under 25 hitpoints, then 20, 15, etc.). Upon losing a Rune you instantly draw a card from your deck to put in your hand, furthermore if your card has the “Paragon” trait then you can play it for free. This little addition to the game ensures that decks can’t simply build up to one huge cheese tactic that, once played, you can’t recover from.
We were really happy with The Elder Scrolls: Legends, whilst at first it seemed like another fairly standard CCG, as the little details and nuances were revealed we actually got to see just how much customization there is. No card is bound to a specific class, which means you can always make a deck from your cards and none really ever go to waste (unlike other games where you might unlock cards for a faction you don’t have access to). The varied decks, the 2 lanes with cover mechanics, the strategic potential with runes, there’s a lot to this game and we think it’s definitely going to be a winner.
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