Faeria is a little bit Hearthstone, but it's trying to create its own identity
Faeria is card-battling game with lighthearted fantasy art and online matches focused on quick, bite-sized fights. That might sound familiar if you know even the first thing about Blizzard’s megalithic Hearthstone, and the developers of Faeria are very upfront about the similarities the games share and the differences they’re making to distinguish themselves. The game hit Kickstarter in 2013 and has gone through quite an evolution both in response to similar games and the demands of the community. As you might expect, you build a deck of cards with varying abilities, attack values, and health, and try to make an arrangement that outdoes your opponent’s layout and does damage to them directly.
What makes Faeria different is its land-building system. Instead of laying cards on static board, you drop land tiles to play those cards. Putting down tiles of certain colors will let you play more powerful cards, and you’ll need to build decks around the land types of your choice. We got the chance to play a bit of the game and ask about its current state and where it’s going heading into the final release later this year.
GameWatcher: When it comes to online card-based strategy games, there’s obviously one very big, very popular game dominating that space. What sets Faeria apart?
Emilien Eloy: That’s a good question. I’m guessing you’re referring to Hearthstone right now, which definitely makes sense. It’s fair to point out that Faeria has been in development for at least as long as Hearthstone. We even changed the game when Hearthstone came out, and stuff like that just opened the market for us in a way we didn’t expect. It’s a very good thing for us. It’s not like we’re seeing Hearthstone as an evil corporation or game, it’s been a driver from our side.
The key difference between Faeria and Hearthstone is the fact that our game is way more strategic, in the sense that we have added a layer of the lands. You basically have control of the lands, so you have a board control in Faeria that you don’t really feel in Hearthstone. Some people actually in Hearthstone feel like they do, but when they play Faeria they feel differently about the depth that has been added to that.
One other difference, also, is the fact that the resources are something you control. On each map you have four faeria wells that you can gather from to increase your faeria pool each turn, which means that you have to make actually more deeper strategic thinking when saving faeria as opposed to Hearthstone which incentivizes you to play mana each turn.
GameWatcher: Are players generally benefited more to stick to one or two land types, or vary it up a bit more?
Emilien Eloy: The game design has been built up to incentivize players to draft at least two colors. Each color has its strengths and can be mixed with at least one other color. Most decks we have right now are dual-color, but we’ve seen three colors at the GO Faeria Clash, the first big tournament we did, and it went actually very well. But it’s probably too brain-intensive for most people, because it actually reduces your choices. The land is a resource that you need to think about very carefully and two different colors is already something. So yeah, we are pushing, and will be pushing that in the future also.
GameWatcher: How does the crafting system work?
Emilien Eloy: So crafting is actually the same as Hearthstone. Basically you can disenchant cards and craft them for a value that is higher than if you were to draw them randomly from booster packs.
GameWatcher: The brief bit of time I spent with the game wasn’t enough to unlock the Pandora option. What does that mode consist of?
Emilien Eloy: Pandora is basically your draft mode, which has been very popular in games like Magic, Hearthstone, and other card games. You come into a mode where you need to draft 30 cards. Each time you see five cards and you need to pick one. One of the key things that we have with Pandora is that we are removing one color. When you start your draft, one color you will never see, to allow player to have a much better focus on two colors or three colors, and not four colors which would be way too much for a 30 card deck.
One of the key things we did also with Pandora is we wanted to increase the feeling of craziness. Of basically getting really fun with the game, because of the fact that we have the board the game is inherently a bit slower than Hearthstone. We are working hard on making it better for both game design and animation, which is something we obviously lack right now in Early Access.
What we introduced with that is artifacts. Artifacts are cards on the top of your deck. So when you start playing, you will draw artifacts at some point. An artifact can be a card that doesn’t do anything, or cards that make you draw fantastic cards for both players. They’re all symmetrical, so if you draft an artifact, the result of the artifact will go to each player’s hand or affect both players at the same time. It increases the opportunity for players to come back and go this way.
GameWatcher: Are there plans for additional modes beyond what’s currently in the game?
Emilien Eloy: The solo mode is in a state that’s not ideal right now under the free-to-play release later this year. So this is definitely one of the focuses we want to make also. Basically, it’s providing the player a solo mode with achievements to do. Right now it’s just about teaching the player what the game is and how it should be played, but a solo mode is something we want to focus on also.
One of the other modes we have in mind and we’ve already been working on is the tournament mode. Right now we have an integrated tournament mode for events that we work with. It’s in a very early shape, but basically it allows you to choose your three decks that you will play during a tournament, lock them, and it creates a lobby that you can play for the tournament. So it’s easier for tournament organizers to do tournaments with us because everything because everything is built-in inside the game at this point.
The goal is actually to extend those features to have a full-on tournament mode inside the game. Let’s say it’s 8PM, you came back from work, you want to play, and you feel like you’re lucky today and really want to win something. You will actually be able to join a tournament lobby, which will create a single or double elimination bracket or groups or whatever the format the owner of the tournament will want to make, and you will be able to enter it as you go. You won’t need to go to a website to register to the tournament or something similar. So everything will happen inside the game. That’s something that players, our userbase right now, has been asking for a lot.
GameWatcher: I understand that you’re starting a tournament series for the game. What does that consist of?
Emilien Eloy: The Faeria Monthly Cups is the first part of our recurring series of events that is part of our commitment toward esports. The Faeria Monthly Cup has been built up to allow every player, every month to compete for money. What we mean by “every player” is that each type of player has a chance to play. So if you’re a really good player who plays a lot of Faeria, you’ll be invited by your rank inside the ladder, just like the Legendary of Hearthstone. So that’s the first way to enter. If you are top four of the God rank each month, you will be invited to the tournament.
The second way is that you can get invited. We reserve four slots of invites each month for players that are either very active and have a positive impact in the community, or to invite players which have a huge reach, like we did for the GO Faeria Clash. So that’s one other way to get invited. The third one is to actually get voted on by the community. So we want people to actually raise their profile, with the game, with the community, to actually get voted on by the community. It’s a very social experience that we are trying with that.
And then, the fourth way is to get qualified by open qualifiers. We will be running each month two open qualifiers of 428 slots, and the top eight of each qualifier will be qualified to the finals. So basically with this we wanted to give the opportunity to every player to try their luck each month. The cash prize for that is $3,000 USD a month, which is already setting up a decent baseline for what is to come.
GameWatcher: Obviously, the online community is incredibly important for a game like this. How has the community been responding the game since its launch on Steam Early Access?
Emilien Eloy: The community has been really great towards us. As you’ve probably seen, part of the community was coming from our Kickstarter, which was in 2013. And this community came back to the game very excited, because the changes we made to the game were at first something they didn’t feel would make sense, but when experiencing the new Faeria version they were astonished by the fact that those changes were very positive.
We obviously went the Early Access route, for two simple reasons. The first one is because we wanted to test the infrastructure of the game. We didn’t want to go too big and have the server crash or too many issues, so that’s why we wanted to go with paid Early Access at first while announcing we were going to be free-to-play by September. So we are always up front with the community. The other reason is that we wanted to make a proof of concept that the new Faeria would be working even if people have to pay. That’s increasing the retention of our game and the commitment from our players towards the game.
The community has been very positive. The big Pandora announcement has been received partially well and partially not well, to be honest. The reason for that is when we want to try something as a game studio, we want to go as crazy as we want because we aren’t free-to-play. It’s something we can’t do on release, so we went crazy with the Pandora mode in terms of experience and craziness. And we are now scaling it to make it more the Faeria way. It’s definitely a concept that we want to make it all the way through Early Access, giving us the flexibility to do that. But the community is great.
GameWatcher: You mentioned the Kickstarter back in 2013 and some of the changes to the game since then. How has development progressed over the past few years, and what’s different?
Emilien Eloy: The first big change is that we had the clock at that time. You had the cycle of night and day, which were affecting the cards. One of the other things has been the abilities. All of the abilities, especially abilities from cards, have been changed to make the game a bit easier to play, because it was to be honest very niche at that point.
GameWatcher: The game’s set to come out on a variety of platforms. Will there be cross-platform play?
Emilien Eloy: Yeah, our goal is to be a decent cross-platform game by the means that you’ll be able to start to play on PC and then finish your game on tablet. We already have the reconnection feature right now, which means that if you disconnect because of your connection or if the game crashed, when you log back into the game you can get back to the game you were playing, and that’s something that will be cross-platform.
GameWatcher: Is there an estimate on when the final release will come?
Emilien Eloy: This year. That’s the goal. We want to give ourselves a bit of flexibility and we don’t want to commit to a date that we can’t actually get to, so I’d rather play the safe card here.
GameWatcher: Is the current pricing on card packs and things like that similar to what we can expect in the final release?
Emilien Eloy: No, definitely not. The key thing I will say is that the core set option will be there. That’s something we like. We give the player the option to pay $50 USD and get all the cards in the game. That’s something we want to keep for the future, but due to that, the value of a booster pack is too low, and we have a hard time pricing that. So we’ve been working for a couple of months on a new business model that we have been introducing to our central community, our beta testers. It’s been very positive feedback for the free-to-play with that, so it will change. But we’re positive in terms of user experience, mostly.
GameWatcher: Down the line, is the plan to continue updating the game with new card types and expansions?
Emilien Eloy: Yeah, expansion is definitely one of our big projects that we are running on the side, also. So we are fixing bugs, making new features, but also working the expansion at the same time. Faeria is a game we want to see still thriving in three-to-five years time, and it will be due to expansion obviously.
I had a good time with what I played of Faeria, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it shapes up as it nears its final release. If you’d like to check it out sooner rather than later, you can buy in for immediate access via Steam.
