Believe it or not PoxNora is a worthy IP known by many but a lot of them, like myself, stopped playing because of the power creep and the game being too complicated and overwhelming to get back to (the sheer amount of new ability icons to learn in order to jump in and play is just too much). There's a lot of potential for this IP; the new owners of the game should realize this. What you're catering to are very die hard fans but they're few. Keep supporting PoxNora of course, those die hard fans deserve it. But please bring back its sequel and make it happen. It's a win/win situation, you'll get all of the fans back plus new people and you're not going to lose anything if the Kickstarter fails. PoxNora 2 should stick to the same game design and not try to innovate too much. The changes required should be a new engine created from its foundation addressing all the issues of the original game. You can even use the same Art Asset (the 2D card art) if needed. Why is this a good idea? New and Old players will be able to get the chance to play this game without feeling overwhelmed by the HUGE library of runes. Instead, it's going to be a fresh start with mostly basic abilities and a healthy, not intimidating, number of runes to choose from for each race. New and Old people will be attracted to the game again and experience its glory that once was. Price the runes/services reasonably so you don't turn off many people. Simplify some of the mechanics that were complicated for no good reason (it doesn't add depth, only inconvenience) but keep the general concept and general core mechanics the same. Please, make it happen. I'm even willing to help you for free if you want to.
why and how would pox 2 be an improvement on pox 1. that is honestly the one and only question i'd demand an answer to before throwing my money at pox 2. here are a few things i'd want to see on release. - laddered pvp : i've seen a few ladder systems in games recently, one of the systems includes 20 tiers of play, each win nets you 2 points and a loss loses you 1 point, at 5 points you move up a tier and gain a currency reward. you can never move down a tier till the rank reset which doesn't move you to the bottom tier it just knocks you down 10 tiers, I want to be clear their was no limit on how many tier 1's you could have and their was no "best player" just tier 1 players. the hope would be that you'd play players of your tier I assume they likely have a system in place like pox to pair out of tier if the wait is long enough but I always faced players of my tier. - draft tournaments : modern online draft tournaments do an interesting system for games like pox, you pick a faction and draft a deck from cards given to you usually in sets of 3, you do this alone and end up with a deck of the faction you want. you now play this deck in essentially it's own format against other players decks drafted in the same way when ever you want. you can do this until you've lost 3 games. your prize is determined by the amount of times you won before this. you don't keep the cards you draft and thus I assume it by passes some gambling laws maybe but the prizes make up for it usually. -high-lander tournaments: free but with decent rewards as alternative to ranked. - training league - one of the dumbest decisions ever made by poxnora devs through out it's history was to destroy the training league, the training league at one point had over 1000 players on it's own, these were free to play players for the most part that fed into ranked as they got board of starter decks, but also was a good place to practice pvp in a somewhat even environment. without this getting into ranked is far to daunting of a task. -play formats - unlimited and block/standard for pvp. in case you don't know the terms, essentially unlimited would be what we have now, block would restricted to the last few sets + a rotation of runes that would cycle in and out of a core set from older rune pools. - trading : revamped to be more streamlined and in client - you could post a rune you want to trade with runes you are open to take in response to it, players could make offers as usual or accept your straight trades with no interaction from you. - release revamp/ranked revamp : so currently we work on an expansions system. I think that should be reworked. one game I played used a system where every month each faction of their game would get a few new cards/runes and depending on your tier at the time of the release you would get some or all of these runes for free, so you struggled to hit the higher tiers to get the free items at each release. they still have major expansions but this cycle of free runes works very well to encourage play, an made it very tough to hit tier 1. - mechanic changes : how would we tweak pox to prevent some of the issues of current, I mean apparently all it takes is an 8 speed champ for all hell to break loose in the current iteration of pox, maybe something can be done so their isn't so much stress on the current system to prevent these issues. perhaps instead of fighting over fonts you deploy fonts for nora with a shrine ability and it deploys like a relic, but these would work much like the current fonts do(captuing/contesting/nora gain/deployment) with the addition that you could destroy them as an alternative to capturing them. in addition perhaps the maps could have features that we could fight over. perhaps the the frozen lake map could have a point that turns all the water to ice, or melts all the snow/ice entirely, or causes lava to erupt turning all the water to lava, i'm not sure but their are things that could be done their. with the fonts being designed in this manner speed wouldn't matter quite as much since the players would decide the locations of the fonts, and ultimately the battles would take a form that to me is quite hard to predict atm, if someone rushes center map perhaps you build your font setup farther back in a defensive formation, what if they wall up with fonts? well maybe you need to start picking off their fonts or maybe their needs to be a limit on how many fonts you can deploy at one time. perhaps you change the game mechanics up from ap to an action system. attacking is one action, moving is one action. you get two actions a turn to do as you wish, not e honestly I could go on but if they wanted to just rebrand pox as pox 2 I wouldn't be all that interested unless they had a solid plan for it
I already addressed it in a general way. Let me repeat. 1) PoxNora 1 is too complicated with thousands of runes it is extremely hard to attract old and new players to come back to the game; I am an old player with a huge collection maybe I paid thousands of dollars on this game and even I can't really get into it without having to pay attention to all these new abilities and units; it's too much let alone you're addressing new players of wider audiance. 2) The client is ancient (I can't even see Bane Shift with my 3440x1440 screen resolution) there are many limitations to the client that can be addressed in the next sequel. 3) The sequel doesn't necessary replace the game; but it should be targeted towards people who want to enjoy poxnora without all the above flaws and is a completely separate experience with its new rules and certain mechanics changes which makes it a new experience yet keeps the same core game design concept. This can't be explained without writing a design document but I believe it gives you a rough idea on what I'd expect from a sequel. 4) There's a market for a game like PoxNora; where it's a combination of TACTICAL tabletop-like game combined with TCG elements (creating your own deck, drawing cards). The champions, spells, equipment and artifact idea should be kept; it's very well designed. Problem is, no one is going to be interested in PoxNora because of the above reasons and because it's old and infested with people already invested in it with thousands of dollars so it's hard for new people to consider joining everyone here. With proper PRing, the kickstarter can be successful. Do you think new people would want to play PoxNora as it is more than they'd try it when it's starting fresh with more QoL and more new-player friendly set?
well to your point 1) that will never exactly change, pox 1 used to only have a handful of runes but after 10 years it has tons of them it would happen again in pox 2, but that's why i suggested a block format and an unlimited format to resolve this issue without needing to make pox 3 in 5 years. problem is the population of the current prevents this from being an option in pox 1 2) they are currently making a new client I believe, this point specifically doesn't really require them to make a new pox version by itself. 3 and 4 seem to all hinge on the appealing to new people because you made a better client, which very well may be true. although 3 mentions new mechanics so that may be something. if all pox 2 had was a new client i'd rather them just make the new client with pox 1 and find a decent way to advertise, but a rebrand might be required just to bring people in so I don't know i'm not exactly a marketing guy, that's not my field.
Guys your information is way out of date. Look at the recent announcement and preview posts- the new client is coming for PC and ps4 and pack costs are being adjusted (they are like hearthstone packs now). There hasn't been a patch since August because they've been working on the new client. If we're lucky, we'll get a release date sometime this week. Or sometime soon.
I mentioned the new client and was fully aware of it. that said i'm unaware of what features the new client will have, so I brought up my concerns without taking it into consideration.
wheres the nolike button, use same art pox 2 wont kill pox 1 honest when pox 1 dies... sell back all the same runes to old players they used to own in pox 1. profit
Calisk, stop tripping man. The only thing stopping a Pox 2.0 from happening is the feeling some people have that they are "entitled" to this dying game, or to the virtual cards they acquired throughout the years. A graphic update alone is needed a lot, kids these days see Pox and they think its a game made in the 60's. It would be awesome for Pox to have a newest version of itself, specially with the PS release coming. Also, I'd support it and help the kickstarter.
graphic update is a good point should of put that on the list. doesn't change the point that I will not support a pox reskin, which is what we will get if they don't present a plan on what will change.
Ok. To each his own. But I feel that this would allow an influx of old and new players, I can't see a reason why not to do it except budget constraints.
I'd just like to point out that you don't have to have the flashiest visuals out there to be successful - Battle for Wesnoth is a good proof of that as a F2P Turn Based Strategy that is over a decade old, yet still has a huge playerbase and gets constantly updated. (although it's an open source community project, which also helps its longevity). Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic remained alive for 11 years without any support from Triumph Studios and through the sheer will of its community and it was such a strong support Triumph brought AoW3 to their doorstep in 2014 and released a steam version of AoW 2 and AoW 1. What I'm saying is that as long as the community wants its game to thrive, it will without having to hunt for the CoD kids, who think the game is good only if it has explosions straight out of Michael Bay's movies.
I absolutely support this. Just imagine Poxnora, the game we all know and love, except better in some unspecified way, and with developers who have learned those lessons that we all agree on as the right takeaways from the experiment that was Poxnora. I can start on the application for kickstarter right now, does anybody here know how to code or make art?
I've been a long term game/web developer for 10 years now. If I could of worked on pox from canada i'd of applied long ago but they cannot do remote work( I asked ).
