Monetizer: Heroes of Dragon Age

hello and welcome to pocket gaming opportunities monetizer feature this is where we play the first 10 minutes or so of new free to play games and have a look at the user experience user kind of interface the flow and the um kind of in-game currency kind of what kind of currencies there are what they've been used for that's that sort of thing give us an idea about what these games are about so i'm going to look at today is um heroes of dragon age from ea so let's fire it up see what we get so it's um obviously the the original game is bioware so um it's kind of based loosely i guess in not the same gameplay at all but based in the in the universe of dragon age so the first thing we see wants to send us push notifications i think this is kind of a really wrong place to be putting this kind of thing i think push notification is very useful communication with your users when someone's first downloads a game though they don't really know but it's particularly free

to play game you might delete you straight away you know people are basically going to go no i don't really want to push notifications don't know if i'm going to like the game if i want if i like them switching back on again i think it's much better to ask this after you've gone through after you've taken the player through a tutorial process um i'll say yes because i want to see what they're going to tell me but there we go i think that's not a good place to do it in terms of user experience that's a very fantasy world i don't have a bit of a story backlog orcs and elves and dragons okay here is the dragon age the tavinta circles are being built that's exciting again i don't think this is a particularly great user experience thing to be sitting here going oh look 10 of the whatever update

is being downloaded being downloaded um you know this kind of stuff is now very involved having funny little kind of telling us what's going on we know he's just downloading something but i kind of think there must be a way and a lot of games do it it just takes a bit more time but you can have things for the player to do it doesn't need to be the game it can be just even simple things at the start maybe even something i don't wouldn't necessarily recommend an unskippable video but at least that means you're not waiting around and you can do stuff in the background i mean i think this is as we know there's so many free to play games this is giving me seconds of time to think oh we're going to do something else let me go and download another game or not having another game i'm playing i should really have a stopwatch to be uh timing this so nothing to do at least if you're doing this lie so at least um tell me very quickly do the 50 and then maybe the other 50 takes mysteriously longer but

this is a bit painful really only good jokes and that's always really good when it completely stops the reason we do play mobile games is they're much more accessible and easy to get into and you just like fire them up and off we go the only thing that gets in the way of that is um pretty big no-no come on you can do it

now we finished 100 now you can start the game yeah alice there i'm not else there anyway i guess this is us and they're the baddies it's a bit of a turn-based battle situation i'm sure we're going to win

mysteriously so was he dead fishbest bush that was exhilarating no it wasn't it was tedious okay basic squad let's toughen up we're going on some quests well i think nothing is it often happens in these games you kind of you're thrown into battle immediately and it just happens automatically that you win i mean i think you do need to put some interactivity into these in these opening sessions even if you you don't want the player to lose necessarily but give them some options i'm beginning to hate these loading screens already okay health power and the ability to uh

okay so we're learning a bit about how the group works eventually we set up our squad and it all happens automatically no i mean i'd even speed it up but i think it is much more interesting so we've gotta unlock yes again about front row and back row heroes back row ones get two times damage from our runs have more health

pretty kind of standard gameplay mechanics doesn't speed up come on oh leveling up three more ago got energy so probably we're in a tutorial we can't look at anything else can we oh no it's gonna take us through

we did defeated terrible i figured our luck would run out okay so this is quite a good technique so you lose automatically lose and then they use that technique to show you a new kind of part of the game ah so this is kind of taking us to it into the install the in-game store so heroes obviously we know this from league of legends here is a pretty uh good monetization and gameplay mechanic so there's different packs and we can hit different um abilities of heroes obviously we want the more we spend the more likely we are to get okay more likely to get a good hero obviously you can see this is a another good technique reciprocity reciprocity so we've been given amazingly 38 of this hard currency looks

like some gems champion pack guarantees are rare era that's 38 and also we can buy warrior pack guarantees and uncommon here are not quite as good as ram and me it's 1500 gold and we've got 1700 gold but obviously they want us to buy this one got a silver base okay whatever that means he's very powerful okay so my squad set up the squad select your hero so yes now we're gonna dump him here splendid presumably about we didn't do we didn't complete last time

uh you can hit the macro with pay attention to speed there we go that was easy on it there's usually one more solution to being a strong enemy team we'll go check out the black seals and all four are going to get a bonus because they're all the same factions okay yeah that's what i'm gonna win

okay so my energy and stamina have increased and i've got 500 gold okay the last one is the boss it's a dragon it's a general brutal rear here i can still i'm gonna lose well she's gonna somehow help me out oh okay gonna buy the other worry pack

runes it boosts my squad's abilities so that was my new one okay nope so looking like that's gonna probably give me like a consumable boost

there we go okay so that's tutorial done anyone so we're gonna go to the store so take this store we've seen this already okay so because this is like a car based type experience we're going to get these weaker characters to consume to um upgrade our big ones there's uh so he's our main character i'm going to pull the wolf onto the side

another way to upgrade heroes we have two okay another card based type thing and maybe okay leaderboards stamina regenerates like energy okay this is quite a long tutorial really back out this right

giant corrupted spider you have a large creature slot it's lucky nice um so

okay are you done what's my name gonna be um is privacy okay so i guess this is a reasonably in-depth game it's kind of basically based on kind of card card battling tactics um that we've kind of seen in lots of games before um but uh

i mean it's better to have tutorials not tutorials i would suppose um so we've kind of seen how the game works out we're kind of gonna by end up buying kind of packs of we're gonna grind out someone and then we currently end up buying um other packs and then using those characters to increase our the squad that we have so we've got the currencies up here so we've got the hard so i've got these that's my level and this stamina and energy so they can be used up and then i have to wait for them over time to be refilled or spend currency doing them and then we have um these currencies so let's have a quick look let's see what's going on in the store okay so we've got heroes so these are the packs that we saw before so these goes from the actual currency it guarantees an epic character for two bucks it's quite good um uh dark relevant early access that's some sort of

messing around with the pricing on that i guess um maybe not haven't got enough currency to buy any of these because i'm not playing the game past the tutorial but in terms of gems kind of typical what we expect so it's got six options going from 1.99 to 99.99 again this is also in the total we've seen this is kind of a typical ratio of what we've seen so you spend a hundred dollars so perfectly one dollar or yeah so if you spend more you get more so one dollar here will get you effectively 16 whereas one here will get you 11 gems so the more you spend the better the ratio of what you get and this is kind of what we've kind of seen um actually is no it's not going to say this was the ratio of clash of clans is actually a tenth of the ratio of clash of clans so um normally what you kind of see is you get a ratio of about

kind of 80 to 100 to one on this one obviously getting 10 just 11 to 16. um but uh oh and this is saying if i tap the gem pen i'll get my local currency price so if i tap on that pretty much in pounds because i got this from the uk store hasn't even done that okay so it's pretty straightforward kind of kind of currency system i guess the the thing with these kind of card games is kind of um how how difficult the um the people you fight against in terms of kind of how you um level up your cards i guess the other thing is we haven't seen anything sit here is

his items so these runes so this room here it lasts for six days but how do we get it no i do have it it's not very clear so we'll find out as we play the game what does that do select my country so there we go get these we get an idea took a long time to download i guess this is you know this compared to a lot of card games which are obviously all in um 2d this is a 3d game with a nice animation pretty

good detailed models that's what's taking the time to download but with all the basis of the card game is always is the the underlying kind of um excel document that drives it all um and there's quite a few i've played that um very quickly become quite boring and i'm kind of fortunate to spend money i mean these games the card based games between japan have monetized incredibly well so much so there's been a complete kind of glut of games being released there and people are now having to um expand out the genre at least in terms of not just having car based games but having games that are kind of based on car based mechanics but kind of putting a bit more of a accessible kind of graphical interface around it and certainly for for western markets um whilst a few games based just around card 2d card representations that have done pretty well that was been about a year ago so the next

generation are all trying to do something a little bit different so we'll give this one a go over the next couple of months see we'll get on with it you