Anyone who is familiar with app games, or free to play games, knows what I’m talking about here. For those who don’t, I shall explain. App games, give you quest limits based on say, 5 tickets per 1h 15m meaning you regenerate 1 ticket every 15 minutes which lets you go on a quest every 15 minutes. If you’ve depleted your tickets, you have to wait to get more back, or buy more. There isn’t a true stamina system in Shadow Lords, but the Guardian astral energy system is pretty close and I will say it is a rather annoying concept.
Pros:
Gives a purpose to having multiple guardians (duplicates even)
Makes you value using high cost guardians on easy missions
Add’s some thought processing into picking load-outs for each mission
Cons:
Guardian charges are used in multiplayer
You don’t earn astral energy from multiplayer matches aside from daily rewards
Astral energy earned from Shadow Lords itself is less than what is required to reach Gargos playing conservatively
Beating Gargos is the only way to earn a positive astral energy income
It will be hard to manage astral energy consumption for beginner players
While the astral energy aspect has some good values, I think is is more tedious and annoying than the purpose I think it was meant to serve. Definitely with the fact that, if I play more than 5 multiplayer matches I’m wasting guardian charges, not to mention I have to leave multiplayer, go into shadow lords, refill the charges, then go back to multiplayer. I think in multiplayer the guardians shouldn’t require charges at all. While playing Shadow Lords, missions should show how much astral energy you can gain too. There is already 1 currency in the game to manage which lets you pull guardians and pull materials if you so choose, so having a second currency on top of that for guardian management I think just goes a little too far. I’ve played a lot of freemium games so I know workarounds but, for the average player, this is definitely not something that will be easy to manage. If you only play your 5 multiplayer matches, you can keep afloat really easily, if you can defeat Gargos consistently, you can also keep afloat easily, but what if you can’t? Or if you want to keep playing Multiplayer? You will run out of Astral Energy and be in a position where you’d have to restart a shadow lords story a few times just to earn some Astral Shards back to recharge a guardian.
I like the concept but, I don’t feel it fits quite well yet. Either that or there should be in game side quests that pop up that earn Astral Energy. If you’re looking for Shadow Lords to get constant attention, and be played and played, I think Astral Energy needs to be toned back or tweaked a bit otherwise it will get to the point where, people will stop playing that mode because they have no energy to feed their guardians. There were a few times when I was making my first guardian pulls that I was forced to transmute a few just so I could keep my guardians active towards the end of my first playthrough. I don’t feel it necessary that I have to wait until daily rewards come back, or transmute guardians to keep my game going. That is an unnecessary road block to hit. Anyone else with similar concerns, or thoughts on what we can do to improve that? Other than that I am loving Shadow Lords, that’s why this bugs me so much. I have to slow down my game for this system. I want to keep going, finish my quests, whoop Gargos a few more times!
Thanks for reading.
That’s why I’m posting it early. It isn’t a problem all the time but everyone has felt it so far in some regard. Just needs some tweaks because this wasn’t as prevelant in the Beta.