Steem Monsters revamped gameplay is live!

As announced by the Steem Monsters developers, a complete revamp of the Steem Monster battle system just went live. This update fundamentally changed the entire way the game is played, and it has now moved away from being an "idle game" to being a game where you must actively play.

Instead of knowing the Rules and the mana cap before the match, you now go blind into the arena. You will get matched against an opponent, and at this point the rules and mana cap of the game is revealed to both of you. At this point you both have 3 minutes to create a deck to battle with. The battle itself is the same as before, but this change really shakes up the strategy you need for playing.

The new "Enemy found" screen where you can see the rules for the battle.

Some of my first impressions

I played a few matches of the revamped Steem Monsters, and here are some of my first impression:

• The game is a whole lot slower to play. You can't really spam matches anymore, which I believe was the intention of this change. You now need to actively think and interact with the game. Gone are the days where you could spend a certain amount of time and craft a few good decks, and now you will need to think and craft decks for every single battle. You will not be able to play anywhere near the same amount of battles per hour, so the daily quest requirement has been cut in half, and you now only need to win 5 matches to get your daily quest complete.

• The game is now (probably) a lot more expensive to play at a higher level. You used to be able to get to a good Rating by focusing on upgrading your cards for a certain splinter. While this might get you into a place where you had to wait 48 hours for a bad Rule set to go away, you still had the chance to climb relatively high without a huge investment. With today's changes you will need at least a few different decks to be able to get to the same semi-high Rating (or at least that's my prediction).

• The Rating reset makes for lots of unfair matches. Right now everyone starts at 0 Rating, and while this makes sense, it will be a good mix of newbies with only a handful of cards that might get matched against people with Hydras and other expensive cards that can craft good decks for all type of matches. But this is only a temporarily problem, and it won't be something to worry about anymore after the good players with a big card collection have climbed up the ladder.

Some concerns I have with the revamped gameplay

I used to enjoy playing Steem Monsters on one of my monitors while reading or working on my main monitor, but the new and more complex gameplay will likely make that impossible. For me Steem Monsters just went from being a chill game I can play without thinking too much to becoming a much deeper strategy game. This was obviously their intention as well, but it will likely reduce my playing time by a huge amount since I'm one of the people who like to play video games to relax, not to be intellectually challenged, since I have other arenas for that.

I am also a bit concerned about the entry barrier being very high now that you essentially need a lot more cards to be able to get a decent Rating. But we will need some more time to see how big of an issue this really is.

With that being said, the developers behind Steem Monsters seem to be very bright people with a clear idea of what they want with their game, and I'm sure these changes will be well-received within the community.

I definitely think Steem Monsters will be a very different game from this point out, going from a game you play on your second monitor, to a game where you actively have to play. I think this is great for the long-term health of the game, but at the same time I'm a bit sad, since it won't be my preferred game to pick up when I need to chill out with a podcast and a mindless game after a long day anymore. I guess it's back to doing World Quests on WoW, or running maps in Path of Exile again!