Hello fellow duders/dudettes,

Just wondering if anyone has stayed with Gwent up until the big redesign, or has jumped back into the game due to the release of Thronebreaker or Homecoming. And if so, what your impressions are. Personally, I am really enjoying both Thronebreaker and the new multiplayer. I love the new visuals and although I'm not totally comfortable with the new mechanics yet, I'm learning quickly and think they've made huge improvements, particularly when it comes to mulligans and the coin flip. So in general how do we all feel about the new direction the game has taken?

This came out of nowhere, really excited for the Gwent story mode. Played some of the Gwent beta it's okay but i preferred Witcher III Gwent.

@soulcake any plans to try multiplayer?

@gorillabandito: If it sticks sure, i would like to try some multiplayer. But i think i would mainline the single-player campaign first.

I've only touched Thronebreaker since the release, but I played a fair bit of the multiplayer PTR when it was up a week or two ago. Overall the game is pretty much where it's always been, CDPR trying to figure out what they're doing. The visual update is nice and all, and the provisions system is an actual substantial improvement to the game, but the lack of direction and understanding of multiplayer concepts has always permeated the project. They went away for six months to redesign the game based on all the mistakes they had learned from and it took about an hour to discover that they hadn't really learned much. It was just yet another iteration of "this might work".

That's not to say the game is bad. It is what it is, and has always been. If you tried Gwent and didn't like it a year ago this new version isn't suddenly gonna change your mind. If you never tried the beta and is jumping in the for the first time now you'll probably have a good time for a while, but for most people it's not gonna be something you stick with.

Playing through Thronebreaker it's just blatantly obvious that they have a severe lack of understanding of their own game. Ofc they get the story-telling etc, but comparing the gameplay elements to something like the classic Hearthstone adventures it feels like playing Tic-tac-toe. And it's almost incomparable to the recent Dr. Boom Puzzle Lab.

Homecoming honestly made me sad. I got into the Gwent beta very early and was super flashed: "Wow, look how clean this board looks! Look at all these unique cards! Look at how little RNG this game has! So much synergy! And flavor!" And after a long break I came back for the big ol 1.0 HC release. What do I see? Horribly cluttered board, and hella ugly 3d leaders to boot. Then the cards: I haven't exactly checked every single card yet, but doing a few Arena runs it sure feels like 90% of the cards now are "direct/slightly conditional boost X" or "deal direct damage X" on a stick and horribly bland. I like how they culled the power bloat down, coin flip changes and made ST traps actually useable, but in pretty much all other regards it feels like a step back or treading water. Certainly not the grand homecoming I was promised months ago. I'm back to MTGArena for a while till people figure out what's worth my scraps I guess then give it another shot.

I knew that there was a major update to the game. I didn't expect to find it changed so drastically. Now there's only 2 rows on the board, and you can place your cards on either of them. I didn't play a lot but I feel that there's less strategy involved in cards' placement. Also, there is a hard limit of 10 cards in hand now, and you draw 3 cards at the beginning of each round. This makes the first round not as impactful anymore as card advantage is pretty much nonexistent, any card you draw will just be discarded if you already have a full hand. I don't know what Gwent is supposed to be but what we have right now is nothing like the beta version that we had for years, which makes all the changes very jarring.