Throughout a latest Konami shareholder assembly, the sport firm’s president addressed issues 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 model 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 troublesome to regulate to.
“New customers who began with Yu-Gi-Oh! Grasp Duel could quit when attempting to begin Yu-Gi-Oh!. This was the case with a participant I really met at a Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG [official card game] Duel Monsters event. Isn’t it needed to contemplate the way to remove 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 in a position to take action for lengthy,” Hayakawa responded throughout the assembly, in accordance 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. “Moreover being computerized and never explaining why issues work the way in which they do, the utterly completely different forbidden record and card pool makes it even tougher for brand spanking 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 capability to give up a sport the place defeat was a foregone conclusion.
“As somebody who tried to get into Yu-Gi-Oh! not too long ago, the cardboard sport principally being simply ‘You win in just a few turns’ kinda put me off from desirous to play,” ResetEra consumer 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 really 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 of make a strategic selection to begin over with the following sport, which might additionally enhance the enchantment of stay streaming.”
Not solely [do] we would like Yu-Gi-Oh! to be extra pleasing to play, however there’s additionally that useful perspective that ‘pleasing to observe’ is an important topic that has been related for a number of years,” Hayakawa answered. “I feel your opinion is completely right and I’ll convey it to our firm to make the right concerns for the following livestream.”
Hayakawa concluded his response by plugging the upcoming Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship which will probably be held in Japan and livestreamed internationally.