2nd February 2022
NOMAD MONTHLY MAILBAG - FEBRUARY 2022 EDITION
Hello everyone!
Another month goes by, and somehow it’s February already! This month at Nomad we announced some new Legendary Decks, and continued working away like eager little beavers on Catan. For this mailbag we’ve got a few spicy business questions - so lets get to it!
From Chris
“What would you do if you didn’t get any monthly mailbag questions?”
First of all, we’d be mighty sad.
Second of all, we’d most likely spend the time doing something different - we’d probably sit down as a team and come up with some questions we wanted to ask the community! We’d need to do something fun, that’s for sure.
If it turns out that we can better engage with our community some other way, that’s what we’d do!
From Sebastian
“When is Fury of Dracula coming to Nintendo Switch?”
So our usual response to this is “We don’t have any firm plans at the moment, but who knows what the future holds!” As this is a monthly mailbag question, we think it deserves a bit more detail than that.
When we first launched Fury of Dracula on Steam, we did so knowing that we’d be developing a mobile version shortly after. We’ve had much success on mobile in the past, and our team are highly experienced with bringing PC games to mobile. We could therefore turn it around fairly quickly with a guaranteed number of sales based on what we’d done in the past.
Consoles are an entirely different beast however - we’ve got less experience with them and we have less of a proven track record there. So until Dovetail came along and offered to publish the game for us on Xbox and PlayStation, we didn’t have any console plans for Fury of Dracula. With their experience on console, assistance with the development and publishing, it became a prospect that we could go for.
With regards to the Switch version, it’s still not proven to be a platform we can make our investment back on right now, and Dovetail also don’t have as much experience there as on PlayStation and Xbox.
From Jorge
“Have you ever thought about making Talisman free to play?”
It’s something we’ve definitely talked about internally, and as we’ve seen more and more games adopt a free to play model we’ve had a lot of examples to take from if we did go down that route.
We’ve also seen games go from premium to free to play with a range of success, so we also have a wealth of knowledge on what to avoid doing! We also have things to consider such as the size of our team here and our support team. From talking to other studios in the industry, going free to play comes with a massive increase in demand on player support. Right now we’ve got enough time to answer all the bug reports, support requests and other issues that players have - but if you have a much larger player base then the amount of support requests jumps up massively!
Right now we don’t have any plans to make Talisman free to play, and we also don’t really see the need to - we’re happy with how successful Talisman is and the revenue it’s generating.
From Jarryd
“I was wondering if it’d be possible to add an option in for the cataclysm board to have the vendors/NPCs that are there on the original board? It’d make it a much less RNG experience with the gameplay as sometimes it can be a struggle to gain lives when you have to draw a denizen and hope they offer some form of healing.”
We talked about this a bit as a team, and the denizens feature of the expansion is too integral to a large number of objects, spells and other features of the expansion to just allow players to turn off the cataclysm board. Part of the fun of the Cataclysm board is that randomness - something that a lot of players enjoy Talisman for!
We can still add it to our list of player requested features, but the amount of work it would take would be considerable sadly!
From Richard
“I was wondering if you are looking from time to time at the older parts of the game and fixing any bugs you might identify their (eg like the Barbarian & Black knight ) not having the listed items listed in their disruption when they start the game ?
I know you have t keep the game fresh for us and knew players to keep them and to draw them in and you might not even know that you have a bug or glitch in some parts of the game ( it is so big now ). Please keep up the good work
PS: are you planing more charity cards in the future like the Shaman?“
So, one of the biggest things to unpack here is the issue with the Barbarian and Black Knight characters. As this isn’t a bug, but caused by not using The Cataclysm expansion.
To explain - when you’re choosing what content to play with before a game of Talisman: Digital Edition starts, you can choose what expansions you want to play with. If you want, you can choose to instead play with just the characters from that expansion instead of the entire expansion. For example, below we’ve selected to just play with the characters from The Cataclysm:
For both the Barbarian and the Black Knight, they specifically say “You begin the game with a Spiked Shield/Greatsword from the Purchase deck.” But what adds those items to the purchase deck? The Cataclysm expansion does.
So when you start the game, the Barbarian or the Black Knight look for the item in the purchase deck, but because The Cataclysm expansion hasn’t been enabled, there’s no item in the purchase deck for them to grab! This is something that players have pointed out multiple times over the years, and we’ve often talked about changing the way these characters work - but that depends on what the community would like to see!
With regards to other bugs in the game, we’re always working to get those fixed - when we release these new Legendary Decks, it’ll be part of an update that includes a whole host of different bug fixes. We’re fixing and making new stuff at the same time, don’t worry!
When it comes to charity characters, we’re always open to the idea - the Shaman has been quite popular and helped raise money for SpecialEffect consistently since we launched it. So maybe!
From Snorku
“Hello, are you planning to implement multiple online saves in Talisman Digital Edition?”
The short answer? No.
The long answer? Maybe!
The problem is one of being able to advertise the presence of each player/game combination in the 'environment' we use to manage how online works in Talisman: Digital Edition. Having multiple online saves becomes even more complex when you also factor in the fact that online games can continue without you as well. While we have looked into adding it, because it would be so long to develop, add and test, it's always been pushed down the list for other tasks/issues/different projects that required our priority attention.
We probably could do it - it's just never been that much of a priority. The amount it time it would take compared to other things we could work on has never quite lined up. This is a feature request that does crop up a fair amount though, so if it’s something people would like then let us know!
And that’s the end of this edition of the Nomad monthly mailbag! Thanks to everyone who sent in questions, and don’t forget to send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk if you want us to answer your burning questions next month!