How should games that have almost exhausted their cast be treated hereon out?

[Jotari]

So we just got a Binding Blade banner, and, as I noted on that thread, this puts Binding Blade almost into the single digits for its remaining playable characters. Meaning it has almost exhausted its entire cast. And it's not the only game in this situation.

Shadows of Valentia only has 3 playable characters left if you don't count the Cipher ones (which it seems the game doesn't). Sacred Stones has 8 and Awakening has 6.

Fates and Fodlan can sustain themselves for quite a while yet, having 15 and 13 respectively (yes, despite Fates having the most unique characters in the game, at 56, Fodlan is actually slightly closer to completing its roster), but we probably will see a Fates and Fodlan roster within the opening months of next year.

Binding Blade is at the most modest number of remaining characters at 22.

All the others, Archanea, Holy War, Thracia, Tellius and Engage all have over 30 characters not yet in the game.

In other words, we're in a situation where half the games have 1-4 remaining banners while the other half need 8-9 banners left to fill out their casts. What will happen when a game finally runs out of new characters? Well, there seems to be several different ways this could be approached.

*Ignore the issue, keep releasing banners at the standard rate of about 1 banner every year and a half per game, and then

**When the cast is exhausted, retire that game from the banner rotation entirely and leave only seasonals as a method to get any more versions of those characters

**When the cast is exhausted just keep releasing new banners anyway and fill them with alts and no new original characters

*Continue to slow down the rate by including increasingly minor NPCs, this seems to be the only active approach they've taken so far.

*Increase the frequency of banners for the games that aren't as close to being finished. So don't give use an Awakening or Shadows of Valentia banner until late 2025, but give us more Archanea, Tellius and Jugdral banners in that time.

*Just cancel the game before it gets to this point.

And how will future releases of future games impact this? Engage actually had a decently small cast for a Fire Emblem game which leaves it in a similar position to Archanea, Jugdrals two games, Thracia and Tellius. But what happens when, in two or three years, they release another Fire Emblem game with 40 new characters while every other title has only a handful of characters not in the game yet? The new titles released in Heroes life span were expected to get more frequent banners in their opening years, but it would be egregious if every second month was just characters from the new game simply because it's overwhelmingly not represented.

I don't really have a strong preference for any solution, but I do think, at the very least, they should separate Path of Radiance from Radiant Dawn. At 38 characters not in Heroes, Tellius has the biggest unrepresent cast (at least by absolute numbers, Thracia is the least represented as a percentage). And the game already treats Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn as different titles mechanically, which means each Tellius banner we get is categorized as either one or the other, yet we only get a Tellius banner at the same rate we get all the other titles.

I've put the possible solutions I can thing of in a poll. If you have any other suggestions, or a preference one way or the other, do tell.

Edited November 18 by Jotari

[Humanoid]

Every banner will be an FE1 filler character banner!

In all seriousness, while I don't think the game will run long enough for it to be a problem, a fair few game modes rely on there being a constant supply of fresh blood for each title - most notably Limited Hero Battles. So unless the removal of a specific title's New Heroes isn't compensated for by a commensurate increase in other hero types for that title, then it probably shouldn't be done.

[Jotari]

35 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

Every banner will be an FE1 filler character banner!

That is an issue I've touched on in the past too. Despite Archanea being one of the games with several dozen characters not in it, it's still kind of done as far as relevant characters go. I really feel as if a bunch of those Warrens and Dolphs should have been put in the game from the start to fill out the Inital roster as the Inital fodder. But instead they mostly bulked up the game in the beginning with Fates and Awakening characters with any Shadow Dragon characters being more notable ones like Tiki and Ogma. I get why, they wanted the game to succeed so they out their most powerful foot forward with the most relevant characters, but on retrospect it might have been better to have some more filler units in the start so such characters could be more saleable later.

As for how long before we actually exhaust a roster, we just had. Valentia banner, so we probably won't see one in 2024, but we probably will see one before June 2025. So they'll either have to add the Cipher characters, or repeat what they did last time and add a whole one new character. Though they are missing some villains, Mycen might actually have been better served being pushed back onto a Rudolf, Jedah, Halcyon old men of Rigel Banner.

 

 

Edited November 17 by Jotari

[Othin]

21 hours ago, Humanoid said:

Every banner will be an FE1 filler character banner!

In all seriousness, while I don't think the game will run long enough for it to be a problem, a fair few game modes rely on there being a constant supply of fresh blood for each title - most notably Limited Hero Battles. So unless the removal of a specific title's New Heroes isn't compensated for by a commensurate increase in other hero types for that title, then it probably shouldn't be done.

I don't think Limited Hero Battles are enough reason to sabotage the New Hero lineup. Ideally they can use seasonals to make sure each game gets at least a few new units each year, but it's not like they've been especially consistent about that even under the current system.

[Etrurian emperor]

Just don't give them New Hero banners and focus on putting the more important/popular/wacky members of the cast on seasonal banners.