Slay the Spire 2 dev says an early idea was to actually reduce the card pool, but players hated it: 'We need new stuff!'
Casey Yano, co-creator of Slay the Spire and co-founder of studio Mega Crit Games, has given a new interview to Edge magazine about designing the sequel to a roguelike deckbuilder that, honestly, pretty much got it right first time. With some games it's obvious what a sequel could build on or improve, but when your starting point is so finely tuned that it's scooping PCG's Best Design award… well, where do you even start?
Dark Souls obviously. Yano says that elements of FromSoftware's series were one of the major starting points for where they wanted to take the sequel. The specific inspiration being how, across the Dark Souls games, players can essentially build the same character. But the difference is in what that specific build will be facing. Then the idea ran smack-bang into playtesters.
"We did mess around with, like, what percentage of the card pool should be different for returning characters," Yano tells Edge. "At first, it was less."
"If you say 'I'm going to make a katana build' you can make essentially the same exact character again in Dark Souls 2 and 3—you're just up against new challenges," Yano says. "I like that, personally."
But when Mega Crit started playtesting the early builds, players recoiled at the idea. "They were not jiving with that at all: 'We need new stuff!'" says Yano.
There's definitely something in Dark Souls whereby finding a particular style of weapon is almost like a comfort blanket: I was always delighted to find my first halberd-style weapon in any entry, because I adore the moveset and know how it works in different scenarios. Experimenting is great and all, but how about this one weapon that you know will always get the job done?
Slay the Spire 2 has ended up hewing closely to the formula of the original, though it does add a lot more new stuff than was maybe the case at an earlier stage. It's had a hugely successful launch, though with its most recent updates, many players are grumbling about the direction it's taking. But given that the original game had seven years of post-launch support, this clearly isn't the end of the road.
One thing that will stay, however, is the game having a definitive endpoint. In a post-launch Q&A, Yano addressed the idea of adding an 'infinite mode' of some kind to Slay the Spire 2, and in his reasoning references another classic deckbuilder of recent times.
"Probably not, the deckbuilding gets less exciting the longer a run goes on," says Yano. "I think games like Balatro do a better job due to infinite strategies being possible less often. The scaling of their game's mechanics feels more natural—whereas it's not really the case for us."
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