So, there has been some new screenshots that surfaced in regards to Cardfight!! Online. I happened to visit their website, which you can visit here. And it was vastly different than from what it was before, with the banging header image of Amnesty Messiah, Chronoscommand Dragon and Dragonic Overlord the Ace.
Now I will admit that, in my last post, I was wrong to say that Cardfight!! Online didn’t put out enough to tide fans over the new wait. They still need to put up a gameplay demo to give us a preview of how much they have done as well as show off what it is that people can expect from the game. But with the slew of images that I have found on their website, it seems like I can begin dissecting them and figuring out what we can expect.
This is gonna be a long post, because there is a lot to talk about here. So…
So this image has to be the top menu. The menu you see when you first come online to Cardfight!! Online. Quite a lot to take in but let’s break things down here.
At the top, you have a avatar picture and your user name display next to what looks like Gold Coins and CP. Changing your avatar is common place. Nothing special about that. As for the Gold Coins and CP, we know for sure that Gold Coins are the in-game currency, which I will touch upon later.
Below that, you have 4 buttons. “Information”, “Inbox”, “DailyQuest” and “Achievement”. “Information” and “Inbox” are inconsequential. Nothing noteworthy. But as I had predicted before, there is a “DailyQuest” system. This is a good step in the right direction, I feel, because in this day and age, daily quest systems is a standard inclusion in most games these days. It makes the game worth coming back everyday to play. But the “Achievement” button is a big surprise. I do realize that it is on Steam and there most likely will be an achievement system, but if completing those achievements allow players to earn rewards, that will be phenomenal. Imagine the rewards you can get for achieving some of the more difficult ones. If they do put a reward system for achievements, this game already blows my expectations sky high.
Moving on now, you’ll see Chronojet Dragon on the front screen, with the “Card of the Day” area and the “Generation Stride” booster pack image. I’m not sure if you can customise your front screen to change Chronojet Dragon to another unit, but one can only hope. The “Card of the Day” is a nice touch, as well as the GBT-01 image. I would gander a guess that they are clickable and you can go to the card information and game shop respectively when you click on them.
At the bottom, we see buttons for “Card Fight” and “Deck Build”. And below them, there’s “Top Page”, “Shop”, “Crafting”, “Profile”, “Community” and “Function”. Self explanatory for each one. But what does “Crafting” mean? Are they implementing a crafting system of some kind? Where you can craft specific cards? Did they actually read my blog post and took my advice in modelling after Hearthstone?! QAQ
Okay, I’ll just put that aside and move on. I can only speculate what “Crafting” could mean, as there is not that much that would lead us to a conclusive answer. Taking it into mind, we can only assume that CP would stand for “Crafting Points”, and if it does, it would play a huge part in “Crafting”.
Moving on, we have the shop screen. As I said, it is pretty safe to assume that Gold Coins are the currency. One can speculate that you can buy more Gold Coins with real money. It makes the currency system simple, which is good. On the tabs, you see “All”, “Campaign”, “New”, “Pack”, “Pre Built Deck” and “Other”. Now “Other” could mean that purchase of Gold Coins that I mentioned earlier. “Campaign” is hard to guess. One I can think of right now would be limited release packs and/or decks. That raises one of my fears, in the fact that they will sell packs, cards and decks during a certain period of time and if you miss it, you either won’t be able to get it and have to craft it, or have to wait for its next cycle to purchase it. Now that we know that there is a “DailyQuest” system in place, I’m not so fussy about this, but I still wish the “Campaign” tab means something other than that.
Moving on, we see that one of the tabs says “Pre Built Deck” and not “Trial Deck”. I assume it generally means a tab where players can purchase Trial Decks, but it would be interesting to broaden that idea of “Pre Built Deck”, like say being able to buy deck recipes that the anime characters use, from Aichi to Chrono, Kai to Mamoru, Ren to Kanzaki, and so on. It makes the game tie in with the anime nicely, but my guess is that’s not gonna be the case, due to the following…
Here is the Deck Build screen. Super sleek and neatly designed. It reminds me of the YuGiOh Tag Force games on the Playstation Portable. It does borrow heavily from the 3DS games that are out on Japanese 3DSes, but that’s not a bad thing at all.
We don’t have much of an idea on how many deck recipes we can save, but from what I see here, the UI looks friendly and easy to use to start building your decks from the ground up.
For this one, I am not too certain what this screen is. Perhaps the “Profile” screen? I’m not certain. The information you see here shows your rank and tournament wins from bronze onwards, your chosen playmat and sleeves, and your fight results, which shows you how many wins you have in specific categories. The self introduction box is unique. I believe that they have that in as a default intro that each player will do once they go into a fight. Which might hint at the notion that there won’t be any sort of chat system, like Hearthstone, where you are limited to certain emotes and such. Perhaps it is limited to the “Community” tab, but like some of the stuff we’ve seen, it’s hard to say.
I find it odd that you can change your “player name”. In this instance, you can change your name from Jaime_Alcaraz to something else with that option. I don’t know the reason as to why they would have that option. Perhaps someone might want their player name to be Soryu_Leon, but hey, as long as they have their word filter system, the only thing one can be insulted about player names is how uninspired they can be. No offense.
As you can see, there are 4 types of fights you can take part in. “Tournament” and “Rank” as well as two types of “Free Battle”.
Clan Fight and Extreme Fight. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Extreme Fight, but it does give players the option to play they way they want to. If you aren’t familiar with Extreme Fight at all, Extreme Fight is where players can build a deck with any units from any clan. Currently the default fight rule is Clan Fight, where you are limited to using the clan you are building for, with some exceptions, such as the case of Majesty Lord Blaster decks allowing up to 4 copies of Blaster Dark. Extreme Fight rules lifts that restriction and you can build and play as and how you like.
I like how aesthetically pleasing these versus screen are, and how it looks like the screens you’d see in fighting games like Street Fighter.
Now these are the in-game fight screens. I don’t have that much to say about them, except for a couple of critiques, which is that the numbers for Damage, Hand, Deck and Drop are too small and/or can’t be seen with the background being the Vanguard circle. While all of the information you want to know are all on screen and you don’t necessary need to look at that in text, it should be information that you should be able to see properly at a glance. It would work better with a solid background, even though I know you are going with the cyber theme in your look of the game.
I noticed that in the second picture, there seems to be a countdown timer. I assume that it’s a timer that will immediate end the phase or step if you let it expire. It is a welcome addition in a way that it avoids “AFKers” from holding up the game on purpose. I hope that they are generous with the time.
There’s only one image left to talk about, and that is this screen.
A tutorial screen and list, which all games must have. What’s nice about it is that they reward you for completing the tutorials, so that you can get started immediately after learning the game. This is good for people who are curious on how to play Vanguard. They can easily learn from this for free without any commitments at all. And with the reward being a Trial Deck, they feel at ease investing more time into the game.
Okay well, that’s a doosy of a post I have typed out, but being able to talk about it gets me very pumped up to play it, seeing how well designed it looks and some of the features we can expect from it. Amazingly, it’s shaping up better than I ever expected and the direction it is going ticks every box on my list for this game looking good. If there is ever a chance that Dempster, Leon and/or myself can get access to the beta, we will be sure to talk about how the actual game is, if they let us. And be sure to keep up to date with us on our full review of this game.
Also to note, there will be a Cardfight!! Online Twitter Q&A on November 20th, between 11am to 11:30am Japan Standard Time (GMT+9). During that time, you can tweet them your questions @cfvangaurd_en. We’re not certain if we will take part in that Q& A, but we may be able to pick out certain questions from the Q&A and put them here for you.
Cardfight!! Online has been postponed to Early 2016, but after seeing all of this, I don’t mind the wait at all. Take the time to need to shine it up real nice, developers. We’ll be waiting!
Stand up, my Vanguard and Raizer Power!
– Captain
Crossbone Vanguards 