Titanfall 2 came out in the last few months of last year, and developers Particle City were hard at work on a mobile game based on the series called Titanfall: Frontline. It was a free-to-play strategy card game for mobile devices including Android and iOS, and would pit players against each other in real-time battles as Titanfall brigade commanders.

Unfortunately, Particle City has now announced that due to the feedback they’ve been getting from players in the closed beta they were running, they’re going to cancel the game. They announced the news through a Facebook post in which they informed their community of the plans and the reasons behind it.

We’ve learned an incredible amount in the beta test of Titanfall: Frontline, but in the end felt the experience wasn’t ready to deliver the intense action-packed gameplay synonymous with Titanfall. While it’s never easy to cancel a game, we’re excited to take some of the concepts we saw resonate with players and build off of them in future Titanfall mobile games. Titanfall: Frontline’s closed beta will be winding down in the next few days, and servers will go offline on January 20th, 2017. We want to thank you for your support of Titanfall: Frontline

A sad end for what could have been something good for fans of the series and strategy card games alike.

After a little time off over the holidays, welcome back to your weekly update on what looks interesting in the world of Kickstarter gaming campaigns. This is a quietish period for campaigns but new ones do pop up every week, and the last few weeks have brought at least one change – Kickstarter campaign pages now look a lot cleaner.

First of all, let’s clear up those previously covered that have come to some resolution over the holiday period. Starting with bad news, a number of games have finished short of target; including Project: Liberty (with the last update being about a delayed trailer), Blanco (no updates),  Legend of Decay (again, no updates), Left for Dad (last update from weeks ago), Twin Flames (last update says that they’re going to keep going with the project though), Never Not Shooting (the last update being on an enemy type), Knock-Out (their only update being about using social networks to get word out), Monkeys On Your Back (with the last update thanking people for support), Arcade Tycoon (with an update after close showing a version they got out despite the campaign’s failure), Nin (the last update showing off VR mode gameplay), One Up This (the team are now working to make the game available on a print on demand site), and with no change in the status of Berghein‘s campaign page, it’s probably safe to say that game won’t be coming out too soon either.

As always though, we do have some good news and the previously covered campaigns that met targets or finished with well met targets during the holiday period are DämmerLicht, Undermine, Plague Road, Renegade Line, SECTOR 6, and Bitdude. All are wonderful looking games and we can’t wait to see them out and on sale.

Sundered

First up, we have the next game from the team that brought us Jotun.

Sundered is described as a “horrifying fight for survival and sanity” in its title, and is a replayable metroidvania game that deals with eldritch power. You play as a character named Eshe, in a world of caverns and relics of terrifying and terrible power. Use their power as your own and defeat demonic bosses, but be careful – eldritch power comes with a cost and the more you embrace it, the smaller your own humanity becomes. Will you resist, or embrace its call?

Sundered has a CA$ 25,000 goal, and has reached its 100% mark during my writing of the article. It still has 31 more days to run though, so who knows how far it can go?

UnDungeon

Next up is an action/RPG with roguelike elements to it.

UnDungeon has pixelarty graphics and is set in a world formed from seven former worlds, merged into one by the ‘Shift’. Seven immortal ‘Heralds’ travel this world in ruins together and between them will decide the world’s fate. The game will be released for PC/Mac/Linux, with console releases planned if the game reaches certain stretch goals – which means it’ll need to do well if you want to play this game on the Playstation 4 or Xbox One! (Or the Switch…? Possibly?)

UnDungeon has 27 days to go, and has made €34,748 of its €50,000 goal so far.

Pixel Princess Blitz

Thirdly, another action RPG, but with a beautiful looking art style.

First of all, this campaign is filled with funny, quirky little comics to explain what the game is and what the story is all about. I love that, it’s such a fresh way to get this information across. There are some roguelike elements to this one too, with random encounters, loot to pick up, randomly generated dungeons and enemies and fast-paced combat. And as I said, the art style is lovely. I really hope this one does well.

Pixel Princess Blitz has a €77,700 goal, with 23 days to go. It has made €35,528 so far.

Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game

And we’re finishing with a physical game based off of a digital one.

Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game seeks to bring the world of the video game, wide and sandboxy with an emphasis on forging your own path, into a role playing setting. And it could probably work – there is a lot to do in the video game and this campaign is aiming to get a core manual and four supplement books published for your role playing fun. Who knows, maybe if it gets funded we’ll get a copy for the office here at the station.

Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game has a £45,000 target with 29 days to go. It has made £19,821 so far.

Today saw the first of a new experiment Blizzard are trying with their game Hearthstone, a livestreamed Q and A to keep players up to date on what the developers are thinking about and how certain processes work as far as changes being made.

The stream lasted only an hour at most, but during it we got to hear a number of different thought processes that show how Blizzard watch their game and seek to keep the balance both in the meta as well as making the game interesting for both new and experienced players.

As far as keeping it accessible to new players they talked about how they’ve tweaked the Casual mode in the past to make it more welcoming for those just beginning to learn how to play. They said that in the past Casual had a few bugs, but now that it takes many things into consideration including card collection size, previous win rates and tries to match newer players against other new players so players play people of their own skill level more often.

With experienced players, they talked about how they’ve noticed that ranked ladder is beginning to feel very grindy to most players and measures they were thinking about with how to address that better. These included upping the total of bonus stars awarded upon the start of a new season, the addition of more brake points besides just the one around Level 20, and also possibly extending the win streak beyond Level 5. All these were just thoughts and ideas though, it was never said that all or even any of these would be coming to Hearthstone in the future.

As far as the meta balance, there was talk about how they think that Standard and Wild will become much more distinct once the next rotation of card sets happens. Right now, only two sets are outside of Standard, Naxx and Goblins vs Gnomes; but the next rotation will take many more sets out and limit them to just Wild decks. This means that a certain deck type could be very different in Wild to how it appears in Standard and it was hoped that such a thing would encourage the growth of more Wild-focused tournaments from fans and other groups.

There was also discussion about the rumours of possibly retiring some Classic cards to Wild too, versus what has generally happened before which is a nerf or effect change. Right now, neither option has been decided upon and Blizzard are still weighing up their pros and cons to both before decisions get made either way. Retiring to Wild might be more extreme, but there is also the question of people who come back to the game after months away and get confused with cards changed by nerfing – so it wasn’t stated either way that one or the other would be happening.

With the recent addition of the Streets of Gadgetzan set, the meta has changed already quite recently although it’s now had a few months to settle down into a regular routine. Speaking of what they saw, we were told that a lot of experimentation happened during the first few weeks as you would expect, before patterns began to emerge.

One of the biggest surprises to the team was that Pirate decks have been on the rise in Ranked ladder with the new Gadgetzan cards, with Warrior, Rogue and Shaman all making use of that Minion type heavily for weapon buffs. In fact, so much so that they expressed a little concern saying that the percentage of those decks in use right now was just a little bit higher than they generally like to see, and that if it didn’t change enough they might need to step in to tweak something to redress that balance. We were told it was not so much how many decks of that type exist, as much as which cards were seeing overuse in many decks – for example before its nerf Undertaker was seeing use in as many as 40% of decks at the time. Arena-wise, they have seen more Priest and Mage players beginning to claw back higher win rates.

So right now, that is the state of how Blizzard see the meta of the card game playing out. While nothing said in this Q and A can be seen as confirmation of things coming, we were told that 2017 is planned to be another big year for Hearthstone. Whether or not they’ll continue to do these Q and As is also to be seen as of yet.

If nothing else, we learned that those people with pirate decks should prepare themselves for choppy waters if Blizzard do decide to interfere there.