AFK Arena Game Deconstruction | Game Design Analysis with Jeff Witt & Adam Telfer

every one today we're going to be talking about FK arena and trying our first video game deconstruction so hopefully this turns out well we're going to be experimenting here with kind of a format and how we're doing this but you know please bear with us hopefully this works out and we'll see steadily increasing in time but if FK arena pretty much hit the scene pretty hard from December of last year and it's been steadily increasing in popularity and performance the game is what I would call a systems-based RPG in that you know it really kind of fundamentally lacks a lot of real RPG base gameplay but instead focus more on progression collections and RPG systems advancement now I wanted to first kind of start with looking at the performance of the game and so for that we use a tool called sensor tower and what we can do is we can do app analysis and just looking at the app I can pull up I can pull up the data with respect to the downloads and

revenue and so here we can see that we'll just choose all time that the game from a downloads perspective has been has been pretty good since December and it's kind of spike although it's starting to come down a bit and revenue wise you know the game continues to do pretty pretty well the full month here is not completed but you know the there's been a pretty significant revenue ramp from from December kind of spiking in March but current amount of downloads looks like it's sitting in about 2.1 million in downloads with actually that's just the app store let's look at unified which means both App Store and Google Play so here we can see that overall downloads is about eight point seven million and total revenue is 40 million remember this is 40 million nett meaning that this is 40 million after the platform fees from Google and

Apple and if you were to look at some of the top countries we can see that a bulk of the revenue for afk arena is being generated u.s. Germany and France with other countries making of a smaller percentage of the revenue for this game and the one other thing I wanted to pull and to show was in my opinion I believe that afk arena if Kate arena C was really modeled after Idol of Heroes and you can see that when we look at RP which is average revenue per install that on iOS and in Google Play that it's been showing you know significant increases over time and so this is actually you know quite this means that there live operating this game really well when you when you see continues improvements in terms of the

RPM and their KPIs but afk arena also without as much history does seem to be improving fairly steadily as well with the limited amount of data that we're looking at and we can also just comparing the two head-to-head iOS versus iOS we can see that here afk arena does seem to at least from a time ease perspective it seems to have you know overtaken by a little bit the performance of Idol heroes from from a time perspective and it seems to be in line with Google Play performance so at least right now we're seeing that the performance should be mirroring that of Idol heroes and I don't know if Adam or Jeff you guys have any comments on that but if not you know I also want to talk about the developer Lilith you know Lilith this a fantastic developer I first found out about Lilith when they made their game dota legends and it was

actually I started working at this company called thumb Plus and I was in Beijing and a friend of mine at that time the very first day I joined phone class kind of showed me all the the top games like literally 30 games in China and then when I saw him go to legends I was just blown away I went and spoke to the CEO of fun plus at the time and we wound up doing a publisher deal for legends for Southeast Asia I couldn't convince him to take it to the US but I you know I was definitely lobbying very strongly to take to the legends to the US before he was charged and will also even tried to do a deal with Warner Brothers to like do like a hobbit version of that game before he was charged at the market but anyway um I just wanted to highlight a few things that I thought were kind of unusual or interesting to know about Louis as a studio and you know first was that the CEO you know when I spoke to him it was through a translation that the CEO of Campos was translating for us but I could tell that he was extremely smart

and that he had really fun Mele sound sort of principles for how he was running his company and the first point was like when they were working on dota legends which is you know the sense of this the foundation for games like Star Wars Galaxies appears and Marvel strike force in terms of the gameplay in systems and things of that nature but you know I like that they really like to focus on key risks and so for them they were most concerned about the specific gameplay for dota legends and so they just spent the first four months just a hundred percent focused on the gameplay and nothing else they just really wanted to make sure that that gameplay felt really fun and was very natural the second thing is that you know there were all gamers after lunch they would all play dota together and this reminded me a lot of the stories about early blizzard and Condor were blizzard north and how they spent a lot of time playing games together at that studio and finally although they didn't force crunch or overtime you saw a lot of people working a lot of overtime hours

and over the weekends and the the one thing about how they did that though was was I was I thought was unusual which was that if you work Saturday or if you work Sunday you actually got paid for those days and so there's like this incentive to actually put in the extra hours or commitment to make sure that projects get gets done and so with that you know I think we could start digging into the game design starting with Adam sure yeah so hi my name is Adam yeah I work at one of others doing product management actually moved to the console side just recently but that doesn't stop my continued interest in the CC RPG market on mobile but yeah with with afk Arena the way that I see it in terms of its positioning is that it's a CC RPG at its absolute core that takes elements of Idol to actually drive its engagement

its actual systems really reflect 99% of what a CC RPG is but there are actually some nice elements from the idol genre that make it feel slightly what I would call more mobile II which personally I really like just for myself anyways after playing a ton of really too many games that are absolutely demanding hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay and/or it actually makes some meaningful progress I'm definitely looking at you warframe is this this is very refreshing so it is a very kind of like light CC RPG that doesn't amount to much of your actual time and can actually play very very effectively well in a meeting that you're very much bored but yeah I've done a lot of deconstructions on CC RPGs just too many really account with many of them feeling actually very very similar they all follow very much the same formula in terms of their modes in terms of how

they kind of drive collection and this formula I would say is very very well worn path for loop of the genre of course is very very simple but the progression of characters of modes of the economy is incredibly complex where it's only be getting more and more complicated the more games that come out within this genre but I think the one we should take a step back and kind of evaluate any CC RPG game we have to kind of evaluate it against its collection that upgrades system really everything around this game needs to be built around how to make sure that the players have a strong deep path or collecting and for upgrading every single character into the game as well as all the systems in the game are actually putting pressure on the most upgraded as well as the widest collection and I think personally whenever I've been analyzing CC refugees the part that I'm most interested in is

how they are kind of incentivizing having the widest collection as in having the most number of things making sure that each time that I actually use the gutter whatever drops mum is actually seen as beneficial that can be in the form of duplicates but also in the form of making sure that every character every drop is something useful to my progression as well as the actual design of those characters making sure that every character has a limited utility that is to say every single character is actually useful in specific modes to make sure that not one character is a generalist that's amazing entity and that's always a very difficult problem and if we see CRPG faces but anyways that's that's my obsession in the context of actually comparing afk to other CCO routines I've kind of picked up three key points that I paid attention to when climbing the game because I feel like if key has actually

done some very very clever things on it hood to make it feel very different from other CPCC RPGs Wow still reinforcing what I believe is actually driving like a successful CC RPG that's system pressure on those collections so the first key point that I want to talk about and JCAP chickie is pull up the image there in terms of mode if you go in the game actually just go to the dark forest it's the second tab yeah this basically highlights all the different modes in the game and I think this is kind of one of my first stops when I'm starting to evaluate the system pressure in the game all the different modes that the game offer what how did they each function how are they paced and what are they kind of driving ethic player like how which characters are most usable what types of team setups are most useful in each mode so there's seven core modes as you can see here there's actually a couple more as well if you include the campaign so first one is on the campaign to go back to that

tab yeah the first half top half of the screen here where you see 6:32 at the top and where JK's notifications are coming down this is the campaign the main progression of the game so similar to like a saga progression you'd actually be moving up the map being levels which is amazing but the difference between say galaxy of Heroes is you can't go back and replace on those old levels there's no purpose to doing that instead what what most DC RPGs would do is say you know put some gear sets there and incentivising going back to specific levels and bribing them afk a completely ignores that just as look just focus on progressing as quickly as you can through these levels which is a very very compelling mechanic as well as it just kind of drives that sense of progression but then pushes you to other modes that when you can't beat that tough level you're gonna have to play those other modes the second key mode here is the auto battle which is at the bottom of the screen here so where

all of these little dudes are running around and doing lots of damage and having nice little things to say and I would just call this the appointment mechanic it's a nice sprinkle from idle where there's the auto battle if there's something happening at all times so even when you're playing or even when you're not playing you're still kind of fine but this is really kind of a nice retention driver because every time you collect from my chest you're getting all those rewards that they've collected but of course there's a maximum that chest can ever hold on to kind of driving that retention as well as giving some clear reason for a push notification that's compelling so that's good but then if we go back to the dark forest to the actual mode screen this is then where the game gets significantly more deep those first two modes are unlocked pretty quickly and then these next modes are a little bit more so as the player progresses so the first one is peeks of time which is at the top right there this actually unlocks a little bit later in progression but think of this like a

secondary progression of modes with secondary campaign so each one of these players can basically play through a little map where they're exploring I'm trying to defeat as many of the enemies that collect as many of the rewards within it as the player completes these they can unlock further ones and then continue along in the story the is essentially a secondary progressive track on the fourth mode is the labyrinth which i think is probably the most compelling mode in this entire game number one because it scratches my itch of roguelikes where this is very much like my my favorite game currently slay the spire where you get this idea of each time you're moving forward you're making a choice between what reward you want to take after you finish this battle after you've completed the RPG battle component you then get to choose or eventually unlock things like artifacts which give you - sorry relevant relics which actually give you boosts to your event so while you're within it so you

want to try to push yourself as far as you can within this two day event but every time that one of your characters dies they're out of that of it so while you can still use them in other modes throughout of this event so this ends up being say similar to like arena and contest to champions or galactic collective quest that they go and galaxy of Heroes where it's kind of like a survival like just try to go as far as you can and what's nice is that this is actually unlocked very very early in the progression and it's very very compelling it's just automated constantly running every single two days so a lot more aggressive than what I've seen before so I think this probably probably one of the best modes and one of the best ones we're driving that collection gives you a good use of having as many characters level up as possible fifth mode King's tower which again is another kind of progression mode where you're trying to work your way up these towers by defeating more and more

difficult opponents as you progress sixth mode would be the arena PvP mode so very similar again to things like galaxy if heroes as well as things like heroes charge where you're basically trying to work your way up a ladder well it's interesting is that this mode is the only one that's actually paced energy so similar to fire at them similar to all these other CC RPGs this one's actually taste with energy and lastly the mode is bounty board which is the one of the bottom here and this is what I would call it back then which is essentially you can dispatch your worst heroes on these little missions in this moment doesn't really incentivize having a high-level I don't think but it actually had said the buddies you have to have a collection so typically you're trying to send out your worst here is here they're typically not gonna be using you know and those other quests actually gain words so that's kind of the main mold breakdown if you think about those seven modes and what I find interesting as I kind of talk

through is just how different it is versus say some cc RPGs biggest thing for me say three straight progression modes with no pacing involved so that's the campaign mode it takes a tower and the King starts or piece of time and the King's tower each mode doesn't have energy each of them only pays based on the difficulty of the level of you're currently on so eventually you're going to get pushed away from them as soon as you start pressing fast enough your characters aren't strong enough so what they do is they actually unlock them slowly after each other so as you slow down in campaign you unlock King's tower as you slow down at King's tower you unlocking pizzatime which gives that really really nice intro progression which is a nice big booster while at the same time giving you feeling like you're constantly unlocking new modes constantly exploring new things and the second thing I want to talk about is just how the economy's setup across these modes there really isn't say a unique incentive to actually play each

mode so if you think about the actual economy for this game and and where the actual sources and sinks come from each kind of key currency what's interesting is that the modes actual outputs sometimes they'll give things like store currency sometimes they'll give things like dodgy currency but typically modes are split into two different things either they're rewarding key elements which are driving your gear chase which is the small gear items that are on each character or they're giving you basically character chase item items that are improving your character but overall there isn't really unique incentive to play each mode versus if I get something like galaxy of Heroes I'm going to constantly use that as an example they actually have like multiple progression tracks within a character so they have abilities they have gear they have level and each one of these progression tracks

is kind of assigned to remote so in the case of events the image that JK has here on the left right like the actual purpose of this mode is you have to do it because in order to upgrade all of your abilities on your character that this is where you get that currency so the only place you can get it so all of a sudden in this game you get a lot less of a unique incentive on each mode versus most CC RPGs so that was my first ramble my first point on afk and what I found interesting um the second point was really along about driving collection as I mentioned before kind of my obsession when I look at CC RPGs so looking at kind of the ways that afk incentivizes like a wide character roster and I talked about a little bit about key events that are the key modes in the game so you have the arcane labyrinth and a bounty board being really the only two modes it's explicitly kind of push a heavy collection but one interesting thing is

that at launch anyways that's that they didn't really have a limited time event mode so similar to what you see here on the left from galaxy of Heroes it would be a mode where essentially right like that you have constantly cycling events on different sized timers that are giving unique rewards that are needed to basically progress specific characters and what this does is incentivizes specific safe actions of characters so in the case there would be an event for Jedi's and then you want to bring out all your top level Jedi's compete there so it gives a nice collection so in the case of afk there is no mode for this you can't see that on the map but actually since launch they launched a new mode called dewers trial I actually didn't get the Pilatus unfortunately because it's a little bit ton event but this is where they started to experiment with it so it is good to see them like since launch kind of continued

adding new mode and finding new ways to incentivize that wider collection but I've always been kind of curious about like how they got away with essentially not having that limit a ton of that mode kind of driving that collection and I think that actually has to do a lot with the team composition system that they have so if you pull that up where it kind of shows the bonuses that you get for having a different team composition so the case of here one of the interesting thing is that they did with their design is that there's factions in the game I think there's six different factions and they all have say like a rock-paper-scissors ish type of element cool but the way that they incentivize team makeup is instead of saying you know try to have one of each one in your team makeup stay similar to it like Pokemon where you're trying to you know don't have like a whole team of water Pokemon because then you'll get destroyed by electric in this case they actually do the obviously they say look you need to have all of the same faction within your team you get the best

bonuses towards your attack and defense so this kind of like promotes a very flat team structure which is very different than what I've felt in CC RPGs so what ends up happening is is that in the endgame when you're trying to design your team you end up needing to build essentially a team of five top level heroes for every single faction so there's six factions so you really need roughly thirty heroes one for each faction so you can drive it so you can basically play at the top level and what ends up happening is in things like PvP is instead of it being a very very tactical how what your team setups actually are it's much more about countering the enemies that you're facing so you're trying to it's much more of a bit more PvE that aspect where you're trying to just counter what's given to you rather than said build with defensive strategy around the team so yeah that that was interesting to me

because I felt like that was very different versus most CC RPGs and the last point that I'll talk about is their merchandising so I've talked a lot about passes etc past I think it's very very interesting especially for me now in console and one of the morning just seeing aspects for me afk was actually their implementation of battle past like so this would be the system called advancement move wards so they actually have a couple different systems here the one interesting one is advancement forwards which basically says look if you pay us in the very beginning of the game with time limit then you're going to beginning crazy high rewards each time you make major story progression marks so in the case of of the advancement rewards what you're seeing sitting sorry with JK your account you look at you missed your opportunity you didn't get it up yeah you got to buy

that in the early that be smart but at the beginning you can actually take that take that retention trade-off you say well do I think I'm going to stick with this game and I got to play through chapter one am I going to play through chapter three all the way in and it was a very very nice kind of trade-off for retention on top of that they have a system called regal rewards which is very much a battle pass where essentially there's the free track where as you play the game your earnings a battle passes norm of XP and you can see here on the Left you've got your free track which is blue crystals that gives you rare rare heroes which are actually not that useful to you by the mid game versus the right track which is purple crystals and diamonds which of course is premium currency and purple crystals which is for epic heroes which are far more useful in the engine so very very similar to a battle pass component and what's interesting of course is that if

I versus most battle paths and implementations when you think about fortnight you think nope up t-mobile these games are much more cosmetics driven these games this game in particular of course is very economy driven so they don't really have to give a ton of unique rewards and a crazy unique cosmetic at the end of it each one of these rewards is very very useful in their economy so this is a strong driver regardless so those are kind of the three big notable points that I make I would just say my takeaway from afk its design and kind of its resulting success it's essentially that like product focused innovation is actually quite a lot to be competitive in this market in this very very mature market like when I play this game the art style is met the poor fighting is pretty forgettable but the progression systems are incredibly the social components are tied progression

early team composition actually retains enough strategy their marketing tactics are actually pretty cunning actually advertised this game not even as CRPG they advertise it as an idol man and the merchandising as they talked here with the battle past is actually some of the best in class so they've actually focused their innovations I would say more on the product side and they actually won based on those differential differentiating factors not on factors that say an altruistic game designers just for myself would love to win on things like art style or core gameplay depth or team composition like super strategy they're like that's not that's not another one so yeah you're an altruistic game design I am dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde I constantly switch between those two things so yeah as that game designer inside me weeps my able product managers side says no I told you so yeah focus matters in this market mature marketplace and this game actually shows

in drive success by focuses focusing on merchandising writing instead of say smart innovations in as well as you know keeping smart innovations in design so that was my take away I'll hand it off to you Jeff yeah I mean just as as a game designer this may make you weep and as a product guy it makes you happy as a economy and systems guide this makes me really happy you know just as I first I mean I played pro just as many other cc RPGs as and one of the ones that struck me two years ago was idol heroes and looking at that looking what they were doing is so different from the other RPGs out here and and for me like what I've really appreciated from Afghan Rena is that it's taking a little heroes but really

like streamlining a lot of it making things clear for players and just the pacing of the game is perfect like my number one complaint for a lot of RPGs is that in the elder game the time it takes to do everything the game is asking you to do it explodes you can easily like Star Wars Galaxies it heroes you may easily spend our hour and a half each day and still not necessarily do everything the game is telling you to do afk arena it's really really easy to kind of be an elder player and get everything you need to die but some things that I'm gonna tackle today is mainly a greater look at the depth of the economy particularly when it comes to heroes as well as how they smartly are using stat checks in multiple parts of the game to really drive investment in you know in hero upgrades so you go

to first if you want to go to the temple of Ascension Joseph in ran horn so you know the the rarity system which is pretty similar to idol heroes that is it it's similar in function they though simplify it a lot I feel like for players basically you have a specific pathway to upgrade any hero to ascended it's a mixture requiring the same hero at a certain rarity level as well as other faction heroes um and this is what afk arena and idle heroes the so well because anything you get from gotcha that is rare or deletes will eventually

be used in to upgrade heroes to that you want to service entrance here you're never really getting a bad draw you may not be able to use that fodder for a while until you get the hair you want to upgrade until you have everything you need to upgrade to the next rarity but you will net you'll never want to just like you know get rid of it it'll eventually become abuse versus you know game like galaxy of Heroes where if you want to upgrade a specific hero you are really at the mercy of their gotcha system you know both based on what hero you're gonna get as well as how many hero shards are gonna get afk does not have this problem they they I don't want to say clearly because you do have to dig trying to deep into it but they really like give you a straight pathway

to upgrade the hero you want to the ascended rarity and so by that means you know unlike Star Wars Galaxies if you're probably the better comparison is legendary where you know heroes get updated very quickly and in order to maintain your monetization legendary has to create new events that both introduce new heroes and repurpose or revitalize old heroes through event bonuses and stuff like that if K doesn't need to do that because all the heroes that you get are gonna ultimately be used to get other heroes to the rarity that you want and they even have taken that and made us that better if the the total max level you

can get to is based on the number of heroes you get to ascended I think it's five per every ascended hero you had outside of your first slide um as you can see like ascended brings the NOx little to 240 but then every hero besides your initial five that are on the crystal or the resonating crystal every hero above five that you bring to ascended level rarity level it will increase that cap by five levels so at the time that you know this was taken right I don't know when it was taken there were 34 heroes that could be brought to the ascendant ear so that would increase the max level from 240 to 410 but in this case if they added a

35th one then potentially a player get their heroes to level 415 it's really just a super smart system but uh so so yeah so they're LiveOps I would imagine all their live ops they're really just going to be putting pressure for players to just engage more with the existing systems right now in the game at least in my game they're having a event about PvP using they're not the not the basic arena but the the grand tournament where you have to make three teams of five and there's extra incentives to do that at this skin the stage of the game that you know they're doing pretty well monetization wise it's all about you know keeping players engaged and keeping them retained and they're they're doing just fine from what I've seen but I want to go and go

to back to this notion of the different gameplays and how they all essentially are just various forms of stat checks like Adam mentioned there's no stage grinding like you see in galaxy of Heroes there's no redoing of something that you've done once you beat a campaign level or get a reward from peaks of time like you are essentially done with that and you don't need to do it again so the game is essentially a series of statics and the different gameplay modes really you steps checks differently campaign and the campaign in the King's tower basically is just a 5v5 like here's the five opponents use the mixture of your team bonuses and RPS to get around this

5:5 enemy challenge arcane labyrinth has Adam talked about is a really just well thought out version of doing the survival events that you see in Star Wars Galaxies heroes and other RPGs and what's smart about this is they add in strategic decisions both in the relics that you choose after battle and whether to do more battles and a four go you know the healing the new heroes and the gear purchases there's a lot more strategic choice but it never cannibalizes the need for higher stats and a wider array of Heroes that are upgraded so it's both more fulfilling for players but not at the cost of monetization which is fantastic and the pacing is just perfect like having to do in our team Lantern labyrinth every two days which at most maybe takes 20

minutes on 20 30 minutes versus like galaxy of Heroes and other RPGs their survival events they will expect you to go through it not just once each day but I forget the max if you do today whether it's 2 or 3 or not that's just a lot of time to be spent on just one system in a game and the pacing if caring is just perfect but what I find really interesting is the peaks of time event because it's kind of take a sort of combination of the arcane labyrinth and the campaign arcane labyrinth is a just a core core core content you know it's not limited time and doesn't change but you still have the same sort of survival rules that you have in arcane labyrinth where kudos all

your heroes once but once they get damaged or once you know they die you know they they stay that way until you reset the content but what they do is whereas the pathways of arcane labyrinth is pretty little linear yeah you get to choosing different tiles but you know you're heading essentially straight towards the boss the the peaks of time Matt Matt's are a lot more open-ended players do get to choose which direction they go but the design of the Maps really sort of like kind of pushed in to go a specific routes and where is an arcing labyrinth you are fighting enemies that are easier to harder always peace of times uses both map design and artificial story rules to forth players to fight enemies harder enemies before

some easier enemies in the case of the third peaks of time map I think it's called secrets of the forest or whatever there's to get the final rewards in that map you need to both fight a pretty strong boss early on but also defeat the boss with the team of five wild are heroes so where is like where is Joseph I have the screenshots of that if you want to take a look at the encounter and the secrets of the forest yes so here like to get to the final rewards you need to beat this boss with five Wilder here now in our King labyrinth when you see a single a team of five of one faction

they're definitely incentivized to use the opposing faction but you're not required if you have a strong group of five heroes of various factions you could go ahead and use that in arcing labyrinth and not be penalized but in this case in the peeks of time you have to use five Wilder heroes in order to get that final thing that will let you get the reward so it is an artificial means of requiring the player to use a specific calm army composition and you know I've only so far I'm only on the fifth peaks of time scenario I can see there's at least I think close to two dozen it's not more and it's something that's easy to add over time you you can this is a pretty easy way to add content that will continue to add new stat checks but also use map design and story to get players to go faced enemies in a

certain order and if you notice I mean Adam was right in that almost all the different gameplay systems in the game reward more or less the same thing just a little different peaks of time are one of the only systems that I've seen so far that will reward artifacts so they're using their the system that they probably have the most the strongest ability to stat check players in specific ways to reward some of the most compelling things it's a really smart system that I haven't seen in any other RPG even idol heroes and I'm personally excited to see how us they utilize peak sometime to to engage and and and challenge players but that's that's pretty much my biggest takeaways right

now again I really do want to stress the quality of life improvements of a FJ arena versus not only idol heroes but other RPGs yes there's a lot of stuff to do but the time required really isn't that much between what the daily challenges and weekly challenges require it's super easy to get everything done without having to spend a ton of time and you still get the same you know fulfilment that you would with any other RPG I'm just a huge fan and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next great and so I mean I can wrap up by just kind of talking about a couple of points that I thought were interesting and first is around the core design philosophy and they're basically their product strategy approach and so what it seems like you know from my eye it sounded like and Jeff you had reference

idol heroes as well but it my take on this is they looked at the success of idol heroes and kind of used what I call the peak strategy and so what does that mean so soup eat games it's kind of known for like taking an existing category of games they'll go in they'll read all the comments about you know into in terms of reviews and feedback and then they'll try and make the game a little bit better you can also call it the blizzard approach right taking an existing genre and then trying to improve that game and that's essentially what it seems like you can see the influences from Idol heroes you can also see the influences from some of the other games that they've developed like rise of kingdoms for example and taking like the best of those other games in integrating it here and so it seems like what they've what they've done is they they've seen that there's a market need or there's a number of players that are looking for this kind of casual RPG progression experience so that's why they have this kind of focus in terms of

the messaging around Oh afk or idle or you know you can progress without spending too much time or involvement and and so to me this is really like trying to cater towards like an RPG slots audience right it's like kind of mindlessly going through the systems like that and so I feel like that's the opportunity that they pursued and I feel that you need a pretty good job there and you know really cater to that audience if I'm being honest I kind of don't like this kind of game personally but because it is all systems based but I can't see how it was very successful and then speaking to like the the second thing for me that that I I like was in terms of their UI UX and so you know just looking at the game you can see that one thing that they did differently from Idol heroes and you can see that if I can just pop up the idol heroes so this is a this is a screen for idol heroes and you can see this is landscape mode they got a pretty big minion you

have to you have to have to scroll left and right to see everything on the screen and this seems very cluttered there's just all this stuff on the screen and so I think one of the big advantages of if Kay arena is that one they shifted the orientation to portrait mode it is a little bit more simple you can see a lot of UI elements you know just basically creating like a visual menu based system but they've simplified it to some degree from from idol heroes and they're certainly like a lot of UI UX influences from the original dota Legends game the other thing I like is that what they've done is they have actually integrated a lot of badging and notifications to incentivize you to go in and look at all of these different all these different menus and so you know I I don't have the bad sure but in terms of gift sets they try to incentivize you to to go to these by providing like being bed like you know

free gifts that refresh every once in a while so that you're you kind of come here and they're kind of incentivize to go into the store and look at these different different screens very similar to what clash Royale has done in terms of their store and a lot of a lot of these things that that where you're incentivized to go in and just click through and tap into a lot of these different areas and besides that I also think that compared to heroes they added a lot more visual progression in terms of the main home screen so here you can see that there's I can see there's a lot of treasure that I need to collect so I'll collect that treasure and that shows in you know in Idol heroes like this Idol component was kind of put off into the PvE section of Idol hears and for them to bring that into the homescreen I think was a very good improvement as well as Adam had mentioned bringing this kind of mini saga Maps event you can see oh I'm

making this this is the progress that I'm making it so when you come in you're able to have that visual progression to see the progress you're making in addition to like you know being able to see your power and your love of things like that but yeah for me that's basically the key takeaways that that that I had you know in addition to law the the systems and event design and you know merchandising and collection aspects that Adam and Jeff spoke about but I know guys so I don't hear as vs. afk I think it's a pretty pretty big improvement but what do you guys think how do you guys think if Key Arena stacks up against Idol heroes in the feature I have KZ far better position I think Jeff really hit on it in terms of their live ops and just like how much effort it needs to actually maintain and might drive deeper and deeper economies and their game is set up the scale

barbra right yeah they've definitely taken a lot of care make sure that the time required doesn't spiral out of control even like things like the bounty like when you first start out you have to manually assign the heroes but at some point either when you get to a high enough bounty level or maybe it's a VIP thing I don't know when it happened but like for me I'm now able to just push up on that auto dispatches so it's a bun that will autofill the bounty just much more easy to clear the board the bounty board then it would be just if they always had you manually assign each one just yeah just a very the guild boss the first time you defeat him but all the other subsequent guild bosses you fight that day you could just do an autocomplete PvP you could push a button and autocomplete they really have taken care to make sure that players who

generally you know enjoy doing all this stuff and all the different senses of progression that you're not forced to sit through a lot of assignment and exactly um so I think really well done definitely a step up from Isle heroes and I think it will it I would imagine it would retain a lot better than Idol heroes given how much care has been taken to make sure that the player experience is a lot better but I guess time will tell great alright well I think that is basically it for us so the first sort of video deconstruction that we're trying and so for those in the audience if you've got any comments please put them please comment and let us know what you think and with that I think we're we're basically done thanks Adam and Jeff

awesome thanks guys [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]