Throughout a latest Konami shareholder assembly, the sport firm’s president addressed considerations that its newest free-to-play Yu-Gi-Oh! sport, Yu-Gi-Oh! Grasp Duel, has negatively affected the franchise’s development. A shareholder famous that Grasp Duel’s play fashion poorly interprets to the favored buying and selling card sport’s tabletop and official card sport event guidelines, echoing what followers have been saying. However Konami President Hideki Hayakawa solely doubled down.
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Yu-Gi-Oh! Grasp Duel is a cross-platform buying and selling card sport the place gamers can buy booster packs, construct personalised decks, and compete in opposition to each other in on-line matches that was launched in January for PlayStation, Xbox, Swap, and PC.
The problem is that its gacha sport guidelines and streamlined play are vastly completely different from Yu-Gi-Oh! desk card and on-line card video games. Yu-Gi-Oh! is infamous for having a revolving door of rule and regulation modifications associated to banned playing cards and strikes, which might make hopping from Grasp Duel’s streamlined method to a web-based or tabletop model tough to regulate to.
“New customers who began with Yu-Gi-Oh! Grasp Duel might hand over when attempting to begin Yu-Gi-Oh!. This was the case with a participant I truly met at a Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG [official card game] Duel Monsters event. Isn’t it needed to contemplate find out how to eradicate such instances?” the shareholder stated throughout the June 28 assembly.
“I discovered it extraordinarily regrettable that gamers who had began taking part in [the] Yu-Gi-Oh! card sport weren’t ready to take action for lengthy,” Hayakawa responded throughout the assembly, in line with a browser translation posted to Twitter by professional duelist and Yu-Gi-Oh! champion Jeff Jones.
“Grasp Duel actually doesn’t enable anybody to get used to the precise TCG,” Jones wrote in settlement on Twitter. “In addition to being automated and never explaining why issues work the best way they do, the utterly completely different forbidden checklist and card pool makes it even tougher for brand new gamers to transition.”
The identical shareholder famous the poor reception to Grasp Duel’s official live-streamed event matches, which he blamed on the dearth of means to give up a sport the place defeat was a foregone conclusion.
“As somebody who tried to get into Yu-Gi-Oh! lately, the cardboard sport mainly being simply ‘You win in a number of turns’ kinda put me off from eager to play,” ResetEra person Jawmuncher wrote, echoing the shareholder’s critique. “Like I purchased a deck that had all these cool concepts however good luck seeing any of that shit truly play out.”
The unnamed shareholder steered Konami change the Grasp Duel rule stopping gamers from pre-emptively quitting, saying it may enable gamers to “be capable to make a strategic alternative to begin over with the following sport, which might additionally enhance the attraction of dwell streaming.”
Not solely [do] we wish Yu-Gi-Oh! to be extra satisfying to play, however there may be additionally that useful perspective that ‘satisfying to look at’ is an important topic that has been related for a number of years,” Hayakawa answered. “I feel your opinion is completely appropriate and I’ll convey it to our firm to make the right issues for the following livestream.”
Hayakawa concluded his response by plugging the upcoming Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship which might be held in Japan and livestreamed internationally.