Take on the role as your favorite Resident Evil character and collect powerful Weapons and Actions to battle the evil Infected.
Adding together all of the votes from facebook and the website, it appears the majority has spoken, and they wish to see a character!
I thought I would preview the best survivor of them all. The one who gets every job done, regardless of the cost…
Just like his namesake, Mr. Death makes sure that he stays alive long enough to get the job done, as long as the job involves crushing your opponents and bringing first place to you!
So now you have brand new Ammo and a brand new gun to use it, but what about the knives?
In a design sense, we still have 1 more thing we need to reward: Exploring. While the gun satisfies this necessity to some degree, we don’t have a direct push for players to want to hunt down Infected. This last step was put onto the knife, and “reliably” so!
The damage remained the same due to the original intent to keep the average damage of the starting deck at 15 damage, just enough to beat a small percentage of the Mansion. With the change to the starter pistol, the average has gone up slightly, but not enough to push for consistent damage due to the trashing nature of the pistol and the new knife.
This knife serves two purposes: It shows newer players what you should be doing with the knife (like every other card), and it also progresses the game much faster than the original basic 6 resources.
Why haven’t I shown the new healing item? Because it was the only basic resource that was pulling its weight: Keeping players alive from mistakes or unlucky flips from the Mansion. Now that all the other basic resources are up to date, your Resident Evil games will now be faster, and it will be easier to show new players the subtle nuances of the DBG play style, which means more opponents for you to test your mettle against!
Greetings Everyone!
The time is upon us where once again gamers from all over the world smash through the petty human defenses around Indianapolis, Indiana and swarm the convention center for news, goodies, tournaments, and more. I, however, am in the same shoes as you, not at the convention itself, but there in spirit, reading the many blogs and tweets, viewing the pictures and videos, and living through everyone else present at what promises to be another grand event for board games and card games alike.
I know you have all been supremely patient with the release of RE5, and I’m happy to have some of the most endearing and hardcore fans of the game. I was happy with the original finished product, but I was allowed to redo RE5 as a base set, giving me the opportunity to complete redo the basic 6 resources, as well as keep my original design goals when RE5 was just an expansion. To go through that, I’m going to have to start from the beginning…
Mercenaries 3D was about to be released, and I was really digging the skills system. A primary complaint amongst people was that some characters are completely and utterly useless in certain modes. I didn’t want to sacrifice the specificity I gained by doing this, as that made the character unique in their own way, and thats why you get two characters to choose from, but as these types of characters are released, the player will, inexhorably, be stuck with 2 choices: terrible character not fit for this mode, or the exact same, maybe with more health, and nobody enjoys that.
The skills system in Mercs 3D represented an opportunity to completely eradicate that issue. What if you could build your character, from scratch, complete with their own effects? Sounds neat doesn’t it? Obviously some skills are tailored to match others, but finding those unique combinations is what sowed the seeds for the future of interpreting those skills into the game itself. The only downside to this is the number of effects running around, so we dropped each character to a single effect, but boosted their maximum health to not only compensate for the single effect, but to also give character’s more survivability in Mercenaries Mode itself.
But how do you activate skills? Same way you do in the video game, by playing! Not exactly the same, but we wanted your character to learn from their experiences as they explore the mansion. As such, every time your character explores the Mansion, whether they succeed or fail, they receive 1 XP. You can use this XP to activate your skills, to power up a few guns, or to make a few actions a little better than normal.
So now we have the concept for the skills, but what about the Boss in the Mansion? Another primary complaint amongst newer players is that 90 damage is difficult for hit for on a consistent basis, while the more seasoned players were saying that this was too easy. This tells me that the game has a VERY steep learning curve, which definitely showed when I played a few friends over the weekend. Due to this, I dropped the health on the boss from 90 to 80 on this set, giving the newer players a slightly better chance to defeat the boss. This also means that consistency in your deck is much easier to achieve. Taking into mind the skills, and that consistency drastically increases.
The next point of contention was the mansion itself. The whole draw of Mercenaries in the video game was its replayability. You could play over and over again, seeing if you can match your own score in the various levels presented, with a varying number of opponent’s vying for a taste of blood. We already have a scoring system in our own Mercenaries, and I definitely encourage everyone to share their best scores in the forum, but what we didn’t have is the multiple levels. So, we came up with 3 different concepts for 3 radically different Mansions, all packaged in 1 set. Each Mansion is tailored to attack the players in a different way, so no challenge is the exact same.
The above was only the initial offering, back when RE5 was designed as an expansion. Then I was told to make it into a base set, which offered even more design possibilities, the most important of which being the basic 6 resources. Many players have been saying that the game is too slow, and that the basic 6 only hinder you, not benefit. I agree wholeheartedly, and that’s why the new basic 6 were created. The new pistol and knife create new strategies of their own, and are designed to maximize your damage and buying both in the early game, and for the rush strategy if that’s your cup of tea.
Speaking of the pistol, here it is:
This type of effect is what we have been calling an “Overload” effect. This means that you can activate it to push the gun to its limits, but doing so destroys it in the process, forcing you to rebuy if you want to do it again. Not only does this effect facilitate the necessity for trashing of sub standard cards in the beginning of the game, it also gives players a small damage boost early, which may (or may not) help you to get your initial decorations for your level 1 ability.
Stay tuned as I go through another card as well as the development of RE5 next week!
