How would you want a Non-Gacha Fire Emblem Heroes Port to be handled?

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Last year Capcom released something I'd never seen before. They had this mobile gacha game called Mega Man X Dive that was ending its support completely. No more updates, no more servers to continue playing and advancing in the game. A tale as old as time for for this genre. But then they released a thirty dollar offline version on the same mobile platforms and PC, complete with (almost) all of its content. Concessions had to be made (they removed all the online versus and cooperative modes), but all the characters, skins, levels, music, and poorly localized plot crammed with Original Characters are now permanently preserved on this offline port. There's no more monetization or gacha elements, no more daily/weekly quests demanding regular play, the acquisition of resources was reworked and rebalanced completely. You can play any of the seasonal events on any day of the year. Unlock the characters in any order you want, and in reportedly a fraction of the time investment. No stamina meter or play limits saying you've got to wait for the next 24 hour refresh.

This isn't to say Mega Man X Dive Offline is a great game in its own right or that it's the best version of this idea, but it did get me wondering if there's a market for that sort of thing for Fire Emblem Heroes. I don't want to upset anybody in saying this but Heroes will not last forever. At some point they're going to determine it's not worth it to continue adding to the game. And some point following that, they'll shut off the servers entirely leaving no game to play. No remaining record of those hours and dollars you spent. I think a complete, server-unreliant version of Heroes has value to fans. And a gacha-less version of this gacha game is it's own tantalizing possibility for players that stay away for their own safety. How do you think they should approach it? I have some thoughts

• It probably wouldn't have to be offline: Mega Man X Dive's multiplayer was simultaneous 1v1 play in a fast paced action platformer. Heroes is definitely not that. I don't recall any simultaneous multiplayer mode, and all of its "multiplayer" constituted checking static player data (updated from the last time they played the game) and lifting that directly into your match. That's as server intensive as having a Score Leaderboard in an Xbox Live Arcade game. Nintendo may still consider nixing multiplayer modes as a cost-cutting measure, but seeing as how Nintendo owns its own worldwide server network for its proprietary hardware and is the most successful Japanese company, a full 87 places ahead of Capcom, they probably don't have an excuse that theoretically saves them money proportional to the perceived value that online modes add to the game. How would they handle events like Grand Conquests, Voting Gauntlets etc? I suppose they could run one of each at all times in a perpetuating loop of every one they've ever done. While the Events that don't hinge on mass player participation (Tempest Trials, Forging Bonds, etc) would just be freely selectable PvE content like Chain Challenges. You'll get to them when you get to them.
• Transfer data would be preferable: A lot of people have sunk outrageous amounts of hours and money into Heroes and would consider buying in just for the opportunity of preserving that progress. I also remember our Heroes play data is linked to a modern Nintendo Network ID so there's our migration client already up and running. They could even have separated save files, allowing veteran players the chance to start from zero and see things from a new player's perspective.
• Reworked resource acquisition: So it's been a few years since I played but I remember the Resources tab being more than a full page of junk that was all useful for one specific task and usually acquired from one specific event or mode. I don't have a design document ready to go on what specifically would need to be changed but this is an opportunity to consolidate resources together into Rewards that have multiple functions and can be earned from multiple sources. From my googling of Mega Man X Dive, this was a common theme with their rebalancing that makes it much easier to grasp as a new player jumping in. And certainly a lot faster to get stuff since there was no need to balance around limited event-play windows or FOMO psychology.

 

[Jotari]

3 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

• It probably wouldn't have to be offline: Mega Man X Dive's multiplayer was simultaneous 1v1 play in a fast paced action platformer. Heroes is definitely not that. I don't recall any simultaneous multiplayer mode, and all of its "multiplayer" constituted checking static player data (updated from the last time they played the game) and lifting that directly into your match.

 

Summoner Duels is direct 1v1 live play against a real opponent. But, if we assume Nintendo is willing to continue support by having their servers up, is having a server that can handle live play that much of a stretch? Eh...maybe so? I mean, I think down that road and then I think "Is selling a jpeg each month as a new character really that cost intensive?" and I'm right back at Gatcha.

As for the question over all, would I want that? My answer is yes, but only so all the stuff I've got in it over the past six or so years doesn't just vanish. It's not like I'd actually play it. I did like the gameplay of Heroes at one point. In fact, I thought it was really, really good. But the steady power creep has just put the gameplay into ridiculous levels. Nothing feels tailored made for a good gameplay experience any more. You either lose because you don't have the good units, or you win because you have the good units. Trying to beat an Abyssal map now feels more like a boolean check than actual strategy. I'm only still playing the game because I love Fire Emblem and it takes up a pretty unhealthy amount of my life and thought process. I just want to see what character they put in the game each month (and then inevitably bitch about who they do actually choose and how they choose them). If the game would shut down tomorrow I'd probably buy the offline version, marvel at my incomplete collection of seasonals, and then never open it again but be satisfied knowing it's there on my phone.

How would summoning work though? Would orbs just be infinite or would you be able to grind them (or some other resource by that name) by just playing the game? Neither seems a fun option to me. If it's infinite then what's really the point? You basically already have every character, you just need to spend enough time pulling to get them. And if they can be grinded out to an infinite degree like in the tower then it's basically the same thing only even less fun, because grinding in Heroes is just a mindless slog as you let the game play itself. The best result I could see would be some kind of cool down timer. Like you're allowed to summon five units once every six hours or something. So pulling for a unit still has excitement and worth.

Edited March 11 by Jotari

[Humanoid]

Dragalia had private servers go up after EoS, those are still available right? Would be cool to have that option open for FEH, with settings ultimately driven by player demand. Some would want a server that remains fairly faithful to the F2P pacing of the live game, others might want a complete monty haul, and it'd be good to have servers catering for each preference.

Paying Nintendo for a dead game though? Nah.

[lenticular]

I'd theoretically be interested in a fully standalone version, but I find it hard to imagine that it could ever happen in a way that I would care about. There are two main problems that I see:

The first is that, in order to actually work as a standalone game, it would take an absolute ton of reworking and rebalancing. Resource acquisition and unit advancement would have to be remade from the ground up, old content would have to be balanced against new, and so on. I don't doubt that this is possible but it sounds like an ungodly amount of work if they want to get it right. And are they really going to want to put that much work into a project for a game that's no longer popular enough to keep the servers up? It doesn't sound like it would be worth it, from a business perspective.

The second problem is that what I would want, as someone who doesn't play Heroes, is probably substantially different from what an avid Heroes player would want. They would want a way to transfer their existing data and have it still be meaningful. I would want a game where it doesn't matter that I'm starting from nothing and I can still beat -- and even 100% -- the game in a reasonable timeframe. I don't see any way of balancing the two competing sets of needs.

So my assumption is that if anything like this ever did happen, it would end up being a fairly minor rework that was designed to appeal to the remaining holdout player base rather than something that would really work well enough as a standalone to interest me.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

12 hours ago, Jotari said:

Summoner Duels is direct 1v1 live play against a real opponent. 

Oops guess I should have done some more googling on modes added after I stopped playing.

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As for the question over all, would I want that? My answer is yes, but only so all the stuff I've got in it over the past six or so years doesn't just vanish. It's not like I'd actually play it. 

This is definitely an angle I was thinking of. Back on the 3DS, I was migrating pokemon into the Pokemon Bank service. Trying to have a complete collection that dates all the way to the GBA/Gamecube era of games. They're still sitting there in Pokemon Bank, a service I haven't paid for in many years. I can't do anything with them without paying, but the option to migrate them into a new playthrough or forward into a new Switch game and continue that collection is kind of neat even if my interest in new pokemon games has totally lapsed. If this Fire Emblem Heroes Remaster had this migration feature, you technically wouldn't need to buy it. They've already preserved your data

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How would summoning work though? Would orbs just be infinite or would you be able to grind them (or some other resource by that name) by just playing the game? Neither seems a fun option to me. If it's infinite then what's really the point? You basically already have every character, you just need to spend enough time pulling to get them. And if they can be grinded out to an infinite degree like in the tower then it's basically the same thing only even less fun, because grinding in Heroes is just a mindless slog as you let the game play itself. The best result I could see would be some kind of cool down timer. Like you're allowed to summon five units once every six hours or something. So pulling for a unit still has excitement and worth.

This is a good question, as I honestly don't know how Nintendo, specifically, would handle it. Mega Man X Dive Offline as my chief example did it this way: There are no more banners. Everything obtainable from banners in the original gacha game is just purchaseable straight from a shop menu using one of a half dozen currencies. And all of those currencies are obtained through standard play. First-time-clear rewards from story progression and infinitely grindable from repeatable maps if you need more immediately for your latest project. There's definitely no longer a "journey" in getting new stuff like that. But for me going in blind, I was able to goof off with a different character on every map, and still had a ton leftover to discover after clearing the 20 hour-ish campaign. FEH has an even longer campaign with certainly more characters to try out along the way.

So the solution of how they'd rework Fire Emblem Heroes would be psychologically and philosophically interesting. Gacha games convince you that new characters have value BECAUSE there's no guarantee you'll get them. Not even if you open up your wallet. And not even if you wait to grind more orbs because those Banners eventually end. They could keep Banners/Gacha Acquisition if they wanted, I just doubt that they would since the model doesn't work without real world money involved. No one actually likes rare drops in RPGs, in other words.

If I was in charge of the project I suppose I'd have each legacy fire emblem unit be handed to you at Level 1, 1 star rank after clearing the story/paralogue chapter set they first appear in. Or Perhaps to avoid overwhelming you with a steady stream of units, they'll be spread more evenly amongst PvE Event modes like Tempest Trials, Forging Bonds, etc. Then it's up to the player to decide how much of their resources they want to spend on raising their star rank, skills, etc. I would probably ditch Merging and Skill Inheritance, so that you'd only ever have one copy of a unit, maximum. And instead have the player get those extra stats and skills from some other means. Dragonflowers are basically merge levels, so It makes sense to consolidate the concept into that one resource.

[Jotari]

3 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

And not even if you wait to grind more orbs because those Banners eventually end. They could keep Banners/Gacha Acquisition if they wanted, I just doubt that they would since the model doesn't work without real world money involved. No one actually likes rare drops in RPGs, in other words.

This is very true. Xenoblade 2 had the excellent idea of having a Gacha model for it's Emblems and it sucked. They even made it so you couldn't save scum. I did not like that at all. Would much rather fixed acquisition at fixed points.

[Jotari]

 

On 3/12/2024 at 7:39 AM, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Oops guess I should have done some more googling on modes added after I stopped playing.

This is definitely an angle I was thinking of. Back on the 3DS, I was migrating pokemon into the Pokemon Bank service. Trying to have a complete collection that dates all the way to the GBA/Gamecube era of games. They're still sitting there in Pokemon Bank, a service I haven't paid for in many years. I can't do anything with them without paying, but the option to migrate them into a new playthrough or forward into a new Switch game and continue that collection is kind of neat even if my interest in new pokemon games has totally lapsed. If this Fire Emblem Heroes Remaster had this migration feature, you technically wouldn't need to buy it. They've already preserved your data

This is a good question, as I honestly don't know how Nintendo, specifically, would handle it. Mega Man X Dive Offline as my chief example did it this way: There are no more banners. Everything obtainable from banners in the original gacha game is just purchaseable straight from a shop menu using one of a half dozen currencies. And all of those currencies are obtained through standard play. First-time-clear rewards from story progression and infinitely grindable from repeatable maps if you need more immediately for your latest project. There's definitely no longer a "journey" in getting new stuff like that. But for me going in blind, I was able to goof off with a different character on every map, and still had a ton leftover to discover after clearing the 20 hour-ish campaign. FEH has an even longer campaign with certainly more characters to try out along the way.

So the solution of how they'd rework Fire Emblem Heroes would be psychologically and philosophically interesting. Gacha games convince you that new characters have value BECAUSE there's no guarantee you'll get them. Not even if you open up your wallet. And not even if you wait to grind more orbs because those Banners eventually end. They could keep Banners/Gacha Acquisition if they wanted, I just doubt that they would since the model doesn't work without real world money involved. No one actually likes rare drops in RPGs, in other words.

If I was in charge of the project I suppose I'd have each legacy fire emblem unit be handed to you at Level 1, 1 star rank after clearing the story/paralogue chapter set they first appear in. Or Perhaps to avoid overwhelming you with a steady stream of units, they'll be spread more evenly amongst PvE Event modes like Tempest Trials, Forging Bonds, etc. Then it's up to the player to decide how much of their resources they want to spend on raising their star rank, skills, etc. I would probably ditch Merging and Skill Inheritance, so that you'd only ever have one copy of a unit, maximum. And instead have the player get those extra stats and skills from some other means. Dragonflowers are basically merge levels, so It makes sense to consolidate the concept into that one resource.

I've got it! What they should do if they're ending the service and making an offline version. With the artificial scarcity and potential for profit gone, they should release all the remaining characters from Choose Your Legends not in the game. Just a mass release of 400 or so characters using existing artwork from Treasure, Cipher, the Old TCG or, if they really have to, just the in game portrait horribly scaled up. Anything to just go Smash Ultimate and make "everyone is here". Then, a bunch of different quests to unlock specific characters, revolving around fan service if possible. Like, to get Chagall you have to kill an Eldigan using a Sigurd. No difficult, but something you have to go out of your way to do and a reference to the game. Some could be difficult though, like getting a 20 battle streak in Arena Assault to unlock...idk Levai or something.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Another neat thing to add would be that Fire Emblem Heroes comic as another in-game unlockable. Because at some point getting more units won't be as interesting at Hour 50 as they would have been at Hour 5 when your roster was still low. These are also really funny and well localized in comparison with the story texts. Some comics could have unique unlock conditions, like simply fielding a team of the four units of said comic after you've unlocked them all. Give the player excuses to try out their back catalogue of junk.

14 hours ago, Jotari said:

 

I've got it! What they should do if they're ending the service and making an offline version. With the artificial scarcity and potential for profit gone, they should release all the remaining characters from Choose Your Legends not in the game. Just a mass release of 400 or so characters using existing artwork from Treasure, Cipher, the Old TCG or, if they really have to, just the in game portrait horribly scaled up. Anything to just go Smash Ultimate and make "everyone is here". Then, a bunch of different quests to unlock specific characters, revolving around fan service if possible. Like, to get Chagall you have to kill an Eldigan using a Sigurd. No difficult, but something you have to go out of your way to do and a reference to the game. Some could be difficult though, like getting a 20 battle streak in Arena Assault to unlock...idk Levai or something.

One last batch of units can be compelling, though I'm not sure Heroes' most pressing addition in a new release is Yet More Units. I could imagine that a game like this will probably end with some commissioned arts remaining unused on a company hard drive, because of shifts in release schedules and priorities. Some character spots may literally been taken up by a more marketable Alt towards the end of development. It would be a little funky to dump in artwork from other projects. Mainly due to the format difference. Cipher art is wonderful, but it's just the one picture, you don't have the three different poses for that character. It's also hard to say whether Nintendo retains the rights to those arts so many years later. And finally a chibi in-game character sprite still needs to be built so it wouldn't be a Zero Labor assignment.

How much of the Fire Emblem Roster is still waiting anyway? I remember you made this chart showing how much of the Playable roster were in, but I know of no other resource. 

Edited April 3 by Zapp Branniglenn

[Jotari]

26 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Another neat thing to add would be that Fire Emblem Heroes comic as another in-game unlockable. Because at some point getting more units won't be as interesting at Hour 50 as they would have been at Hour 5 when your roster was still low. 

It would be if I can play as Chagall!

26 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

How much of the Fire Emblem Roster is still waiting anyway? I remember you made this chart showing how much of the Playable roster were in, but I know of no other resource. 

The linked spreadsheet in that thread is still updated each month (and is also where the sortable Choose Your Legends data is kept). Currently Heroes is at 63.222% of its playable roster and 57.753% of its CYL roster (plus the four Cipher characters in Echoes).

Edited April 3 by Jotari