UFS Design Breakdown: Team K'

I ended up having less time than I expected to get this one done but here is the second entry into this series, this time focusing on the character cards of Team K'.

But first, some trivia about our favorite hero team leader (at least mine), in french the Dash is pronounced "Prime", which made K' a lot cooler to pronounce. K Prime does sounds kinda cooler right?

Best WAIFU right here!

Anyway... Back to Team K.

So what I'm going to do is first analyze the team as a whole. KOF XIII, for all the ill I have harnessed for this expansion set, still had the great idea of making the teams matter either through the symbols, some shared abilities, or some team-only cards. And then I will finish the article with K'. The two other characters will be analyzed in the next article.

The Team

I'm sure they won't forever forget about Vanessa. she will be back, right??..

First off, I think the very first thing everyone will notice about that team is pretty clear.

6-27

It has to be a joke, right? Part of me want to believe that all members of the team having the exact same hand size and max vitality is simply a mistake done during the making of the spoilers, the other is seriously considering that this similitude was intended...

I won't linger too long on why this is silly as I expect that most here know why you shouldn't just copy-paste those values, but still I need to point that handsize and max vitality are the very first things that will define a character in the player's head. Mess those two values up, either by giving a bulky character a very low max vitality or the opposite, and you are well on your way to create a terrible card. And frankly, who could ever justify Kula Diamond having the exact same health as freaking Maxima!

Look at this giant cybernetic MONSTER!!!

The team also sports an ability that is shared among all its members:

"E(4+): If you block this attack, your block gains 'Breaker: 1'."

I kinda like and hate this ability. Love because the ability is about Breaker, a keyword that first came to the game with the first SNK set. Since it was a SNK set signature keyword, along with Desperation, with a pretty big push in Fortunes and Glory, the set where K' was introduced to the game. Thus having the team care about Breaker is kind of a nice touch. Hate because once again it does it in the worst possible way.

To begin, the ever-present (4-5+) cost... As I have said in the previous article, one of the biggest problems of the KoF XIII set is that the costs are all wrong.

Somehow, Team K' is supposed to care about Breaker. But now they shouldn't care for it enough to the point of a (4+) check being needed. The message being sent here is kinda schizophrenic.

And this ability takes a slot on a character card that could use a more distinctive ability. Although I can commend the idea of making the member of a team share some kind of effects, this shouldn't be forced to the point of it either surcharging or worse diluting the character and this is exactly what this ability does to the members of Team K' as I will show.

This ability is also tied to another big flaw of the set, Theme. But I will come back to this later in the article.

Character Card: K'

Now, the flagship hero of the NESTS era, K freaking Prime!

K' has a special place when it comes to the KoF mythos in my opinion. I started playing KoF back in 1999 (yea time flies) and was introduced to the series thinking K' was its "main character".

It was quite the discovery to learn that he was actually the SECOND main character of the series, Kyo being actually the closest thing to a main character. After years of Ryu never aging up and Mr. Bison still going after him, discovering a fighting game series where the plot evolved to the point of the main character changing was an eye-opener.

Since that day I ditched Street Fighter for King of Fighters and to this day King of Fighters is the superior game in my book.

So yes, K' does have a special place in my heart and that to the point of him being the first character I wanted to build a competitive deck around.

Quite the great card!

K' and his support in Fortunes and Glory was quite the well designed character. He was able to empower attacks with low damage as long as you kept the momentum coming, and he could seriously hamper the opponent with his control check manipulation. Overall a fair character, simple, and with some depth. Although his Signing could have been better with a less expensive E, but nothing game-breaking here.

That plus the resemblance of the ability to an ability I've always liked in Pokemon, Technician. This ability in Pokemon allows you to empower attacks that are too weak to be viable but still had great effects like reducing the opponent's speed or attack. Thus with this ability some Pokemon were able to use attacks that did a great job at controlling the battlefield.

K' E allows him to do just that. Many attacks would hypothetically pay for a very powerful effect by having reduced damage. K' E allows you to make the damage viable and then profit from the potent effects without worrying about your offense. Quite the nice touch.

Pretty much lots of fun ahead if it was not for those two:

 

Now all you had to do was auto-include those two and call it a day...

But that's a story for another time.

Pretty much, Fortunes and Glory K' provides a pretty good standard to which we can compare RoT K',

HELP!! MY HAND IS ON FIRE!!!

Since we have already covered the two big elephants in the room, the max vitality and handsize AND the the shared ability, we could go straight for the last ability.

But before I will talk about what I consider the greatest thing about this card, its support.

RoT K' support is by far the best support I have seen on a character of the set.

  

Can someone say COMBO??

The focus on a theme, on a mechanic here is great, but more importantly those cards tell a story, a story about how you could pulverize your opponent in the most combotastic way possible.

That coupled with the natural affinity of the character for combo cards? What's not to love!

The foundations too are great and they do a way better job playing around the team's true theme than any of the support of the other members of the team, Kula and Maxima.

Oh shoot! You mean I have to get this foundation back to my hand?? The pain!

So overall K' support shows that the character's Theme IS combo, and it also shows something more that I will discuss later.

And now to the last ability

Unlike the other parts of the card, this one is pretty much okay. The focus on combo is well-made, the cost is a bit heavy but the effect provided here is potent enough to warrant such a cost, recursion being quite the powerful thing in UFS and the cost offering ways to play around it (let's bounce that face down foundation or that one that is super easy to play again) unlike a (4-5+).

But once again problems arise when it comes to sticking to the theme. Suddenly the need to have the next combo card have -3 difficulty, or -3 difficulty to its block modifier...
As much as the first one could be useful, the other part of the ability once again dilute the card.

Is it there to push the breaker theme? The theme pushed by a terribly gated ability? When the card screams "let me care about Combo only"... Even the -3 difficulty is unneeded there and if anything would have made a great second ability a better one than the shared E(4+).

E, discard 1 momentum: If this attack deals damage, your next combo attack this turn gets -3 difficulty.

E, Add 2 foundations from your staging area to your hand: Add 1 combo card with a difficulty of 5 or less from your discard pile to your hand. Playable once per turn.

And here we have a cleaner, simpler, more focused card.

Also notice that the new E allow for more Signing than the Breaker E.

As I said earlier in the article, the ability messes with the Theme of the card, and that with the best intention possible, trying to create a team's theme. In the next article I will discuss why even that attempt was flawed, as a hint, it had to do with the second thing K' support showed. Until then, keep Breaking!

+1 block and Breaker 2?? That one will leave a mark!

UFS Design Breakdown: Start of a Series

First thing first, I used to be a pretty enthusiastic fan of UFS quite a while ago, I daresay I was probably among those who were the most interested in the game in Europe, but life happening and all that jazz I've been out of the loop for at least a year.

But then I heard about a Megaman set being released soon, then I learned that UFS was still around and they released 3 sets, about King of Fighters, about freaking KING OF FIGHTERS XIII???

Best game EVER, in the best series EVER!!! And no I'm not biased.

How the hell did I not stumble upon this sooner???

To explain, I follow the Fighting Game Community pretty closely and especially when it comes to King of Fighters XIII.

And yet I never ever heard about UFS releasing KOF XIII sets....

But anyway, now what I truly want to talk about here is those new characters that came with the KOF XIII set and what happened when I saw them and examined them.

And for that I will need to surprisingly talk about Red Horizon.

Red Horizon, the Pinnacle of UFS design

Here is Lily, if you have been playing the game for a long time you definitely know her.

At the end of her gun, she sees dead people!...

Lily, in addition to being quite the foxy lady, is what I would consider one of the very best characters ever made in UFS.

Now, I imagine some of you are likely either rolling your eyes or trying to remember a Top 8 she has been in.

The thing is Lily is not one of the very best characters when it comes to power, but she is one of the very best characters ever made when it comes to Design.

The Design of Lily

So, what makes the card so great? Pretty simple, really. It will list some core aspects that make the card a well-designed one. I will later explain why those aspects are important.

Simplicity - the card is simple and yet has a strong theme, remember that because I'm going to reference this point a lot in the article.

Theme - the card has a great theme and convey that theme well. Lily shoots empty foundations in her enemy's card pool, and she enjoys doing that so much it makes her dish out more powerful attacks. Just her mere presence has an effect on the type of deck you play AND the attacks you play.

Self-Reliance - this quality is also going to be referenced a lot. Pretty much, the character has everything already in to function and that without depending on an opponent who is hellbent on making sure she loses... Her F allow her to trigger her E, and of course that E helps her to do what she has to do, get the enemy dead.

Signing - she signs her attacks. In a game whose uniqueness comes from attacks it is important to have effects that revolve around them, either through the buffing of them, or affecting them one way or the other. Not only that, the character has great signing in that her abilities are playable often and affect the game often.

Depth - despite the simplicity, the card is more deep than it seems. Her abilities plays well with Reversal, even though she doesn't rely on it, her E also allow to enhance a lot of attacks and thus plays well with Multiples or rushs.

Overall, she is a fair and solid package, full of synergy, simple and yet deep, with a strong theme, and she allows for plenty of deck creativity around her (Reversal, foundation control, ect...)

Now the truly great thing about the design of Lily is that every character in Red Horizon was designed that way!

  

As you can see, they were all quite simple and had effects that not only were Self-Reliant, but more importantly "signed" their attacks, and where still deep enough to allow plenty of deck ideas and interactions in play (trying to get around Kaden's Stuns and Breakers...)

The notable exception among those characters is Nehtali, and that because she lacked a real cohesive theme. That could be seen through all her cards, sometimes they care about control checks, sometimes about zones, sometimes about literally control, etc...

Anyway, now comes the fun part, let's compare Lily to a character in the King of Fighters XIII set.

KOF XIII Characters

Unfortunately MANY of the KOF XIII characters are lacking in multiple of those core aspects. It seems like somewhere after the release of Red Horizon, UFS decided to a total u-turn in the way they design cards and proceeded to discard many of the great things Red Horizon did right.

So now I'm gonna show you one of the worst offenders. But bear in mind that essentially ALL characters in the KOF XIII set , save for some notable exceptions that I will list later, are in the same boat. Due to her similarities with Lily it will be easier to see the major differences between KOF XIII and Red Horizon.

Here is King.

She used to be a bad gu... girl.

As you can see she shares the same mechanic as Lily, she wants to send cards in her opponent's card pool and if you do so, she likes it.

Except that, unlike Lily, she does it in all the wrong ways.

The R

First off, the way she sends cards in her opponent's card pool is horribly gated. It's dependent on a quite high control check combined with a condition (playing kicks, which in itself is okay). Those costs alone would be okay but combined together they would function ONLY if we were talking about a finisher-like ability. Together they are certainly not suited for something the character is expected to do often and dependent upon to do her things! This reduce King self-reliance a lot in that she is dependent on other, better cards to do that job well enough.

Compare that to Lily who has a clear, simple and yet quite hefty price to do her thing! Lily will have multiple occasions to do what she wants to do and that when her user wishes so. King's user will have to go through the frustration of setting up that ability only to see it fails.

And this shows the first problem with a lot of KOF XIII characters, the costs are just wrong. They impede Signing and Self-Reliance in that they don't allow the character to impact the game his or her way or worse are just essentially worse-than-foundation redux when they should be the opposite. See the members of Team Fatal Fury for other examples, or Clark and Ralf, and if you don't see it, do not worry I plan on discussing those in details in future articles.

The First F

Second,  something you should have noticed is that odd First F. Gain 1 vitality, and if you happen to be at max vitality, you increase that max vitality...

What is that ability even doing there??? Simple, it's filling the "resource-quota".

Let me explain. As you can see the ability is quite inconsequential, which IS quite a problem when we are talking about a CHARACTER ability. How is it inconsequential?

- Again as with the R, the ability is horribly gated. Reduced to a once per turn First keyword, and that for what? You'd think something powerful, with some impact? Nope, 1 more vitality. If you look at the characters in RH you will notice that all "once per turn" effects have an impact.

- And more importantly, the ability has a very very weak theme. King can hardly be associated with life gain, if anything she is a pretty dark character (or at least used to be) which is defined by her fluid martial art (Water is a nice match here), but that's not the crucial point, the thing that need to be noticed here is that the ability was likely added because King has the Life symbol of Women's Team and for no other reason.
This reason right here is the cause for the weak theme of the ability, it has no real reason to be there other than the "resource-quota". The "resource-quota" has been the cause of many bad cards overflowing with useless abilities in UFS history. I plan on devoting an article in the future about all the cards that have been its tormented victims... Anyway, as you can see I do consider that a problem, and that for a very important reason in design, "Less is More". I will talk about it later, but pretty much, that ability could have been removed from the character and King would have been a better, more focused character thanks to it.

- And finally, the ability is under-developed. There is zero synergy in either her cards or her others abilities with it. And to better show that here a version of King where this life gain could have been possible and where it would not only have impact but a strong theme:

R (5+): Unchanged

E Commit: If this attack deals damage, you gain vitality equals to the amount of cards in your opponent's card pool. If you end up at maximum vitality, increase your maximum vitality by the amount of cards in your opponent's card pool (up to X).

Now the life gain gives a strong theme to King but it also has synergy with the R, it becomes something core to the character instead of just something tackled on with no real purpose.

But now the real question would be, does King needs Life Gain? That's something I will leave you to decide.

Again compare that to Lily which has no useless ability added in just because she has 3 symbols, whose abilities are cohesive and synergistic...

The E

And now for the third ability... Now the problem here is pretty simple again, the cost, a recurring problem with KOF XIII.

A "Commit" here means that the ability is less likely to affect the game, which is NOT good for a character ability and I will give plenty of reasons why in the next section. But since the ability has quite the impact as it can be used as a finisher the problem wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't for the fact that the other ability of King is also gated by that control check and condition...

Let's compare that with Lily's E and the difference is pretty clear here, Lily can affect gameplay way more often, she has more presence and that directly thanks to her character card. In the end it's all about making the character card feels like the character card, as something profoundly defining and I will explain in the next section why this is important.

In the End

What we have with King is... a mess. A mess of theme, abilities, costs, and gameplay... And the problem is that she is far from the worst of the bunch, I picked her because she is the closest character to Lily, all members of Team Fatal Fury suffer from those problems at a significantly higher degree...

King is merely a glorified foundation, funny enough all of Lily's cards do a better job than her at what she is supposed to be about...

 

Why Are All Those Things Important?

So why does Signing, Theme,  Self-Reliance and all that jazz matter?

Because of a little game named Hearthstone.

Hearthstone? More like RNGStone! Amirite??

Hearthstone is an interesting game, and for sure one of the most inspired things Blizzard has pulled for quite some time! The game is a Magic-redux if anything, but one that has been made with simplicity and readability in mind.

Sure, the game can barely compare to Magic or even UFS when it comes to depth and demonstration of skills, the absence of Instants or Responses, the lack of interaction when it's the opponent's turn, etc...

But still the game is played by Hundred of Thousands! And tournaments are becoming more and more popular. So Blizzard must have done at least one thing right here?

That thing, or actually those things are Simplicity, Signing, Self-Reliance, Theme, and Depth (maybe not that much on that last one).

Simplicity - Hearthstone is simple, each card is really easy to understand and concise to a point. You will rarely see cards that do too many things (looking at you King) and when they do they are synergies between those effects (for example Abomination's Taunt and it's Deathrattle effect). But overall every card in is simple, even the most powerful ones (Malygos for example).

Signing - The Class powers are the best example of how signing benefits a game. Each class is defined by a once per turn power they can use for very little mana. For example, The Hunter can deals 2 damage to the opponent for 2, The Warlock can draw a card for 2 life and 2 mana (OP I know!), and The Warrior can gain 2 "temporary" life (Armor actually).

Now what is REALLY fantastic about those powers is that despite their simplicity and low power, they do a GREAT job distinguishing each class to each other, Warrior's power makes the Warrior enduring, Warlock's power is a control's player best friend, Hunter's power screams for an aggro deck.

With simple BUT frequently usable powers, Blizzard managed to give a distinct gameplay, theme, game style to each class! From there all cards in each class arsenal play around those powers, for example a card will allow the Warrior to deal damage equal to the amount of temporary life he has. The power is essential to the character, the gameplay, AND power of the class. And it frequently affect the game to further convey all those aspects.

Self-Reliance - And we come back again to the Class Powers. Each one of those is self-reliant in that they are not directly dependent on the opponent. This makes sure that whenever the player feels like using the power he can do so with the assurance that whatever result that will come out of it, it will take HIS performance into account instead of leaving it into the hands of the opponent.

Theme - And again each Class has a well-defined and unique theme. Warriors are about damage and mid-range, Warlocks about control and cards in hand, etc... and then you have the Class Cards, cards that can only be used by the corresponding class, which makes sure each Class has its own unique ways to deal with the game. 

For example, both Warrior and Paladin have cards that deal with 3+ more minions/creatures, but where the Warrior will make ALL creatures fight to the death until one random lucky survivor is out, the Paladin will make all creatures power reduced to 1, allowing its power that summon a tons of 1 power creatures to shine. 

Again here theme is preserved to the point that even if two classes use the same neutral cards they will do so in different ways (a more aggressive or a more control-ish way).

Depth- Finally, despite that simplicity, the game has plenty of depth. Although the prevalence of Legendaries makes it difficult for beginners to thrive in high-level play, still players are confronted with plenty of decisions during a game, and thank to the simplicity of said decisions and results, making the right choice becomes that important and it becomes that hard to outsmart the opponent.

Pretty much Hearthstone is the proof, if Magic was not enough, that simplicity and gameplay design have a lot to do with the success of a card game. People enjoy the game's simplicity and the easy to relate to classes and cards. Magic was already a strong advocates of all those strong aspects with its reduction in complexity started after Time Spiral and the addition of strongly-themed Planewalkers, and the Colors and their well-defined identities.

Back to UFS

Now the sad thing is that UFS also shared that adherence to those core aspects and that thanks to what was by far the most well-designed set that has ever graced UFS, Red Horizon.

Red Horizon was the first time in a long time where UFS has succeeded in making characters that were charismatic, had a strong cohesive theme, were SIMPLE and also for once did not sacrifice everything in order to adhere to their resource symbols. Lily's abilities are far from Death-like and Reese's ones are far from Good-like, but still they each did their best conveying what their character was about and defining them better than the resource symbols ever did.

Pretty much, everybody was having a lot of fun until that guy showed up:

President of the US of A and also Destroyer of Good Design!

But that's a story for another time.

Back to KOF XIII. The set suffers from a resurgence of the problems that plagued the game since its inception, messy characters, resource symbols diluting or messing up everything, and again a vibrant lack of theme. I hope I've given enough proof of that, but if that's not the case I plan on making more articles that will further develop my point.

But now everything is not doom and gloom. If anything the game seems to be back to more sound designs and that through the new Megaman set:

Pixel Art!! Yeah!!

Wait! It can't be that simple, there must be a 5 lines R ability with a 5+ check hidden somewhere!!??

I just hope this is a trend we will get to experience for the next Red Horizon and King of Fighters sets.

So now, I plan on further examining more cards from UFS's history and expanding on how those core aspects apply to those cards and UFS. This is only a part of a series of articles that I hope will last and will make ways for a lot of interesting discussions.

If there is a subject you would like me to tackle on next time feel free to ask. If you think all of this is a bunch of bollocks and KOF XIII is the best design ever, please do tell me about it!

Wrath of Heroes: Not much hope!

The Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes Beta started. As one who has followed this game since the very first Beta, and even invested some important amount of time trying to better understand or promote this game I have to say, I have now few hopes for the future of this game.

This game is riddled with problems from the ground up. But more importantly, the team behind the game is severely lacking:

1. The team doesn't understand what Free2Play really means, they basically just saw an opportunity to milk people out of their money, the ridiculous prices are a good indication of that. They -want- you to feel obliged to buy characters.

2. The gameplay is not the team's priority. They are more busy taking care of superficial aspect of the game instead of focusing on the REAL aspects that will get people to play. The fact that the game is zerg'y and simplistic is a good indication of that. They -want- people to feel like 'winners' when all they are doing is farm kills in group and counting on their friends. (I can't wait until they realize people who don't/can't find good warbands won't stick with the game).

3. The game design is an afterthought. The fact that tactics/masteries introduce a Pay2Win element, the wasted/broken perks that could have saved the game from the 5 abilities boredom. The fact that they can't realize that the variety in heroes was their advantage and decided to start a Open Beta with only 5 heroes! Those guys have no clue what they are doing, they are too busy thinking of all the money they will get from those addicted MMO PvPers.

This game has a long road ahead, even if they introduce more characters. It will just become a giant zerg farm where time and who you know is more valued than skills.