Not really failures, but complete failure to live up to hype:
Spore. So much potential wasted. The game that was described early sounded so good, but it seems all they could get working was the alien race generator, so they slapped it into some dumb minigames and called it a day.
I could not make Tyranids after the first time through it was basically the only way to play the game it seems
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miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
Castlevania 64 was a huge letdown. Not having a Playstation, I followed every scrap of info when Konami announced a Metal Gear clone involving hi-tech spies and a 3D Castlevania for the Nintendo 64. At the time, Castlevania could do no wrong; each title in the series was a quality experience.
Wow! That's just like Link fighting in the Zelda 64 demo!
It's going to look like Resident Evil's mansion! Squee!!
Instead of the fast action and spooky locations the series is known for, we got switch-pulling puzzles, slow platforming sections, and skeletons on motorcycles.
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
That post was made all the more perfect by your sig animation.
To rub salt in the wound, Castlevania 64 required a memory card to save progress instead of saving to the N64 cartridge itself. I think I blew $90 from my own piggy bank when the game came out.
Like to the point where it's probably my favorite Castlevania game
I think being able to play as Carrie had a lot to do with it. That and the periodic survival horror injections into the gameplay. It was just so wonderfully varied.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
Bulletstorm had pretty impressive characters,writing, and story, its advertisements as 'bro-shooter xtreme' worked too well to scare people off, and it ended up not attracting the people who liked the concept it sort of mocked. Granted it went with the sin of 3 "not endings", not knowing if they would get a sequel.
So it sold nothing, and got ignored by crowds of people who would have loved it.
If you had no idea, heres a quick run down, you should probably play it:
1. It has a great story
2. features a very pretty, not brown world
3. really nice setpieces
4. nice gimmicks for setpieces
5. fast twitch FPS shooting which uses a score system to upgrade your guns
6. Characters who grow and have arcs. characters plural
7. Great moments between characters
8. Self realization at how dumb their smack talking evolves into, very quickly. It mainly becomes an outside source/guy you should hate who says such awful stuff.
All of the trailers are pretty awful. They show set pieces nicely, but the voice overs on them are terrible. They play up the "extremez" aspect way to hard, but its hard to sell this game as anything else when you look at it.
The game was great, but failed on terms of selling, and failed to tell a full story. ending
at the last seconds in the game, it pulls a "THE END!---?--!----???". It also negates some of the purpose and point of the whole game. Because they had to set up a franchise, which it never became.
DiannaoChong on
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Kinda surprised it hasn't already come up, but I'm gonna go ahead and say Starbound. Their initial release got rushed out to keep from missing yet another self-imposed deadline, and they've since spend nearly an entire year reworking the game from the ground up to try and fix it. Hopefully they get a new stable release out before too long, would be nice to see if it lives up to the dream once it's actually had time to get done right.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
the only thing that saves deus ex: invisible war is that it's kind of unintentionally amusing. Plus I legitimately do enjoy the ending(s)
Brink. My god the promo stuff for that game looked so good
planetside 2 seems to be going this direction too. I guess it's unfair to call it a 'failure' at this point but man it could've been something amazing and instead it's just sort of mediocre
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I'm going with an oldie. Terminus was my most anticipated game ever. I thought of it as a 3D Online Escape Velocity. It, sadly, lacked the proper infrastructure from a server side and was DOA. The game was probably 5-10 years ahead of its time with a good economy and persistent world. Also, I think X-Wing physics are just more fun than Newtonian space physics which hurt the combat.
Kinda surprised it hasn't already come up, but I'm gonna go ahead and say Starbound. Their initial release got rushed out to keep from missing yet another self-imposed deadline, and they've since spend nearly an entire year reworking the game from the ground up to try and fix it. Hopefully they get a new stable release out before too long, would be nice to see if it lives up to the dream once it's actually had time to get done right.
Well, not really. They just stopped with the constant updates and instead are going to do much fewer, much bigger ones. The game is still in beta after all.
There was Other M for a fair amount of people I know, and myself. It was finally another Metroid game, supposedly helmed by one of the dudes from Super Metroid, which was aiming to "inject a touch of action into the Metroid formula and delve deeper into the backstory of the Metroid universe and Samus in particular" - it sounded pretty good and we were all very interested to try it.
And then stuff started coming out. Team Ninja was making it. Sakamoto's interviews started raising major flags. People started to worry. But, when it came out, since we're suckers for Metroid, we still played it.
I want those hours of my life back. And the worst thing is it keeps looking like it might get better soon but it never does. It just keeps piling on the pain until the end.
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Too Human. Here's a game by the studio that made Eternal Darkness on Gamecube and the very first Legacy of Kain game, Blood Omen. I was really looking forward to it, and I knew it'd been in development for a long time. Then came the lawsuit(s) with Epic about the Unreal engine, as well as Denis Dyack attempting to argue with people on NeoGAF or something. I remember him appearing on one of 1up.com's podcasts and it was just some sort of treatise about behavior on the internet.
Anyway, I bought the game, but it was not received very well. The combat system was a bit clunky and it didn't look that great. What was supposed to be an epic trilogy ended up dying with that game. Silicon Knights would put out one more game, X-Men: Destiny, before closing shop.
Oh yeah, and those lawsuits with Epic? I'll just post this quote from Wikipedia:
As a result, on November 7, 2012, Silicon Knights was directed by the court to destroy all game code derived from Unreal Engine 3, all information from licensee-restricted areas of Epic's Unreal Engine documentation website, and to permit Epic Games access to the company's servers and other devices to ensure these items have been removed. In addition, they were instructed to recall and destroy all unsold retail copies of games built with Unreal Engine 3 code, including Too Human, X-Men Destiny, The Sandman, The Box/Ritualyst, and Siren in the Maelstrom (the latter three titles were projects never released, or even officially announced).
For what it's worth, I stopped playing the game not long after it came out, but jumped back in a few years later. To me, the game was just OK. Not as bad as some would have you believe, but certainly not the game Silicon Knights should have released.
There was Other M for a fair amount of people I know, and myself. It was finally another Metroid game, supposedly helmed by one of the dudes from Super Metroid, which was aiming to "inject a touch of action into the Metroid formula and delve deeper into the backstory of the Metroid universe and Samus in particular" - it sounded pretty good and we were all very interested to try it.
And then stuff started coming out. Team Ninja was making it. Sakamoto's interviews started raising major flags. People started to worry. But, when it came out, since we're suckers for Metroid, we still played it.
I want those hours of my life back. And the worst thing is it keeps looking like it might get better soon but it never does. It just keeps piling on the pain until the end.
In fairness, Team Ninja was announced on it before they even said what its name was, or that Sakamoto had a part in it.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
That was a hell of a surprise, especially given Gabe's stance on the PS3 prior to this, and I was taken in by the promise of cross platform play, which I thought was awesome. So you can bet I bought a PS3 copy in the hope of encouraging such behaviour in other developers.
What happened? Well...
Literally days after Portal 2 came out, the great PSN Blackout occured, which really hobbled the PS3 community from my perspective. And indeed the promise of cross platform play seems to have remained a pipe dream for most folk.
So less the game itself and more its potential to shake up the gaming scene by building bridges.
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Literally days after Portal 2 came out, the great PSN Blackout occured, which really hobbled the PS3 community from my perspective. And indeed the promise of cross platform play seems to have remained a pipe dream for most folk.
So less the game itself and more its potential to shake up the gaming scene by building bridges.
Yeah, that was awful. I'm pretty sure there was a multiplayer-only shooter that came out around the time of that blackout too. Poor bastards.
Literally days after Portal 2 came out, the great PSN Blackout occured, which really hobbled the PS3 community from my perspective. And indeed the promise of cross platform play seems to have remained a pipe dream for most folk.
So less the game itself and more its potential to shake up the gaming scene by building bridges.
Yeah, that was awful. I'm pretty sure there was a multiplayer-only shooter that came out around the time of that blackout too. Poor bastards.
MAG and Mortal Kombat got hit badly. This was also in the heyday of online passes.
Kinda surprised it hasn't already come up, but I'm gonna go ahead and say Starbound. Their initial release got rushed out to keep from missing yet another self-imposed deadline, and they've since spend nearly an entire year reworking the game from the ground up to try and fix it. Hopefully they get a new stable release out before too long, would be nice to see if it lives up to the dream once it's actually had time to get done right.
I just started checking out the nightlies, and having gone through a portal generated by a stone arch covered in cthuloid imagery on an asteroid, and been... hang on, it's something you have to see for yourself.
The portal in question. Went through, came out of a similar portal on the other side. Was very worried about what I might run into.
Alright, artificial lighting, and in a form fairly familiar. I might be okay. But, then again, it's not like in the stable versions NPCs have been happy to see you very often. Gotta keep my guard up, look out for any...
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
oh my godAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAH
Anyway, so yeah. The core of the game is solid, and I've been having fun going back to the stable builds of Starbound every once in a while, but when they built up all that suspense for me and then turned it on its head like that, I my excitement for what the final release was gonna be like was pretty much rekindled. I'm far from saying that Starbound has failed.
Kinda surprised it hasn't already come up, but I'm gonna go ahead and say Starbound. Their initial release got rushed out to keep from missing yet another self-imposed deadline, and they've since spend nearly an entire year reworking the game from the ground up to try and fix it. Hopefully they get a new stable release out before too long, would be nice to see if it lives up to the dream once it's actually had time to get done right.
I just started checking out the nightlies, and having gone through a portal generated by a stone arch covered in cthuloid imagery on an asteroid, and been... hang on, it's something you have to see for yourself.
The portal in question. Went through, came out of a similar portal on the other side. Was very worried about what I might run into.
Alright, artificial lighting, and in a form fairly familiar. I might be okay. But, then again, it's not like in the stable versions NPCs have been happy to see you very often. Gotta keep my guard up, look out for any...
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
oh my godAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAH
Anyway, so yeah. The core of the game is solid, and I've been having fun going back to the stable builds of Starbound every once in a while, but when they built up all that suspense for me and then turned it on its head like that, I my excitement for what the final release was gonna be like was pretty much rekindled. I'm far from saying that Starbound has failed.
Oh, I'm not saying it's ruined forever, but man that launch was horrid after the novelty of OMG STARBOUND wore off. And then unless you're aware of the nightly build stuff it's been sitting in that state for close to a year now.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Quirky, fun, cartoony marketing campaign. Don Bluth meets Firefly meets classic WoW. So excite.
But then... well, first the publisher, NCSoft, killed my main MMO of the time, City of Heroes. The "why" depends on who you ask, but tends to come down to "wasn't making as much as they wanted." This does not bode well for a quirky, niche-appeal, very "Western" game under their corporate overlordship, and killed a lot of my own personal enthusiasm, hope, and willingness to give them more money.
Then the beta. And the first hints that the endgame will be unrepentant hardcore grind - everything that people have been fondly remembering and asking for since vanilla WoW. Except... it's been ten years. The genre, the industry has moved on. Most of the people who used to like that sort of thing have moved on; they're adults with jobs and families now, and 40-man raids are just too much of a commitment. And many who look back with nostalgia are finding that actually doing it again isn't as much fun as they remember, for some reason...
Also, a box that you buy and then pay a subscription! Who does that anymore? (I stayed subbed to CoH its whole life, but I am apparently a vanishing breed... )
Now most of the developers have jumped ship, the situation for those who remain at the studio is reportedly dire, the vultures are circling and waiting for it to go F2P (if the Korean masters don't just shut it down), they've just now released the first promised content update to make single-player leveling more fun... and they're throwing out "come back for seven days! Please? pleeeeeease" emails.
A big, well known mythology to mine for stories and ideas. Great concept art with a look very different from the WOW aesthetic (which I had become very tired of). Guilds could build castles and the like and fight each other. Third person action controls that was supposed to be more than just clicking on icons from time to time. PVP anywhere.
It sounded great but pretty much disappointed in every way. The controls weren't "action oriented" they were just needlessly complicated. You could just make a macro for them and it became every other MMO out there. The guild stuff took forever and wasn't in working condition even 6 months in. Large areas were broken and for every fix two other things broke. While there was PVP anywhere it was frustrating and not particularly fun so it just became annoying.
There was Other M for a fair amount of people I know, and myself. It was finally another Metroid game, supposedly helmed by one of the dudes from Super Metroid, which was aiming to "inject a touch of action into the Metroid formula and delve deeper into the backstory of the Metroid universe and Samus in particular" - it sounded pretty good and we were all very interested to try it.
And then stuff started coming out. Team Ninja was making it. Sakamoto's interviews started raising major flags. People started to worry. But, when it came out, since we're suckers for Metroid, we still played it.
I want those hours of my life back. And the worst thing is it keeps looking like it might get better soon but it never does. It just keeps piling on the pain until the end.
In fairness, Team Ninja was announced on it before they even said what its name was, or that Sakamoto had a part in it.
I wanted so hard to like Other M. It wasnt the combat, I loved the crazy combat and wanted to see more of it. It wasnt the awful writing. It was the maps. I was more lost in Other M than in any other Metroid, 2d or 3d. I gave up around the time I got the Varia Suit. I hated the level design.
Cantido on
3DS Friendcode 5413-1311-3767
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chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
There was Other M for a fair amount of people I know, and myself. It was finally another Metroid game, supposedly helmed by one of the dudes from Super Metroid, which was aiming to "inject a touch of action into the Metroid formula and delve deeper into the backstory of the Metroid universe and Samus in particular" - it sounded pretty good and we were all very interested to try it.
And then stuff started coming out. Team Ninja was making it. Sakamoto's interviews started raising major flags. People started to worry. But, when it came out, since we're suckers for Metroid, we still played it.
I want those hours of my life back. And the worst thing is it keeps looking like it might get better soon but it never does. It just keeps piling on the pain until the end.
In fairness, Team Ninja was announced on it before they even said what its name was, or that Sakamoto had a part in it.
I wanted so hard to like Other M. It wasnt the combat, I loved the crazy combat and wanted to see more of it. It wasnt the awful writing. It was the maps. I was more lost in Other M than in any other Metroid, 2d or 3d. I gave up around the time I got the Varia Suit. I hated the level design.
The sad thing is the maps are pretty much linear corridors once you know how they go. It's all the irritation of getting lost combined with more linearity than Fusion.
Oh, and the combat was trivialized if you just mashed directions to autododge and held a charge for melee finishers.
I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned KOTOR 2. I mean, it was still pretty fun, despite the incredibly obvious fact that it was an unfinished game being sold for full retail price, but it was still an obviously unfinished game being sold for full retail price.
I never played it but didn't people have high hopes for Tabula Rasa? The WoW-killer MMORPG with Richard Garriott's name attached that promised no more 'collect 10 boar tusks' grindy quests. There must have been something wrong with the game because it sputtered out in a year.
A big, well known mythology to mine for stories and ideas. Great concept art with a look very different from the WOW aesthetic (which I had become very tired of). Guilds could build castles and the like and fight each other. Third person action controls that was supposed to be more than just clicking on icons from time to time. PVP anywhere.
It sounded great but pretty much disappointed in every way. The controls weren't "action oriented" they were just needlessly complicated. You could just make a macro for them and it became every other MMO out there. The guild stuff took forever and wasn't in working condition even 6 months in. Large areas were broken and for every fix two other things broke. While there was PVP anywhere it was frustrating and not particularly fun so it just became annoying.
Unlike other MMOs mentioned here, it's still going, though.
Every Sonic the Hedgehog game since Generations. It took them a while to find their stride with 3D Sonic, but they finally found something that definitely worked. Then they threw it out. No excuse. None!
Tomb Raider: Underworld. It followed Anniversary, which was one of the best TR games I've ever played. But they decided to totally redo the engine and it took a really, really long time. Level designers built things that they were unable to play until really late in the development cycle. Then crunch happened. So instead of the fluid animation and great level design of it's predecessors, we got really stiff mo-cap animation and levels that clearly hadn't been playtested enough.
Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 20XX. Take a reasonably fast-paced card game. Slow it to a colossal crawl. Give the player almost no cards to start with and make them grind to unlock options. Also, make every card unreadable unless you've zoomed in. Block the entire screen when zoomed in, just in case the player wanted to reference the state of the game while reading. Duels was good for about an hour when I was learning the basic rules, and then I hated it.
Posts
It was still terrible.
Hearthstone - Webber #1330
3DS: 0920-3235-4071
I could not make Tyranids after the first time through it was basically the only way to play the game it seems
you could of just asked casually hardcore politely
Really?
NOBODY?
Or the previous AvP game.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Games that should of been amazing but HAVE failed instead.
Wow! That's just like Link fighting in the Zelda 64 demo!
It's going to look like Resident Evil's mansion! Squee!!
Instead of the fast action and spooky locations the series is known for, we got switch-pulling puzzles, slow platforming sections, and skeletons on motorcycles.
Like to the point where it's probably my favorite Castlevania game
I think being able to play as Carrie had a lot to do with it. That and the periodic survival horror injections into the gameplay. It was just so wonderfully varied.
Super Mario Maker ID: DBB-1RH-JJG
yeah i would have bought the hell out of a disney game that looked like that
So it sold nothing, and got ignored by crowds of people who would have loved it.
If you had no idea, heres a quick run down, you should probably play it:
2. features a very pretty, not brown world
3. really nice setpieces
4. nice gimmicks for setpieces
5. fast twitch FPS shooting which uses a score system to upgrade your guns
6. Characters who grow and have arcs. characters plural
7. Great moments between characters
8. Self realization at how dumb their smack talking evolves into, very quickly. It mainly becomes an outside source/guy you should hate who says such awful stuff.
All of the trailers are pretty awful. They show set pieces nicely, but the voice overs on them are terrible. They play up the "extremez" aspect way to hard, but its hard to sell this game as anything else when you look at it.
The game was great, but failed on terms of selling, and failed to tell a full story. ending
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Brink. My god the promo stuff for that game looked so good
planetside 2 seems to be going this direction too. I guess it's unfair to call it a 'failure' at this point but man it could've been something amazing and instead it's just sort of mediocre
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_(video_game)
Well, not really. They just stopped with the constant updates and instead are going to do much fewer, much bigger ones. The game is still in beta after all.
And then stuff started coming out. Team Ninja was making it. Sakamoto's interviews started raising major flags. People started to worry. But, when it came out, since we're suckers for Metroid, we still played it.
I want those hours of my life back. And the worst thing is it keeps looking like it might get better soon but it never does. It just keeps piling on the pain until the end.
Anyway, I bought the game, but it was not received very well. The combat system was a bit clunky and it didn't look that great. What was supposed to be an epic trilogy ended up dying with that game. Silicon Knights would put out one more game, X-Men: Destiny, before closing shop.
Oh yeah, and those lawsuits with Epic? I'll just post this quote from Wikipedia:
For what it's worth, I stopped playing the game not long after it came out, but jumped back in a few years later. To me, the game was just OK. Not as bad as some would have you believe, but certainly not the game Silicon Knights should have released.
My Backloggery
In fairness, Team Ninja was announced on it before they even said what its name was, or that Sakamoto had a part in it.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
Now that there is not a monocle left in place, allow me to explain by reminding you of E3 2010.
That was a hell of a surprise, especially given Gabe's stance on the PS3 prior to this, and I was taken in by the promise of cross platform play, which I thought was awesome. So you can bet I bought a PS3 copy in the hope of encouraging such behaviour in other developers.
What happened? Well...
Literally days after Portal 2 came out, the great PSN Blackout occured, which really hobbled the PS3 community from my perspective. And indeed the promise of cross platform play seems to have remained a pipe dream for most folk.
So less the game itself and more its potential to shake up the gaming scene by building bridges.
Yeah, that was awful. I'm pretty sure there was a multiplayer-only shooter that came out around the time of that blackout too. Poor bastards.
My Backloggery
MAG and Mortal Kombat got hit badly. This was also in the heyday of online passes.
The portal in question. Went through, came out of a similar portal on the other side. Was very worried about what I might run into.
Alright, artificial lighting, and in a form fairly familiar. I might be okay. But, then again, it's not like in the stable versions NPCs have been happy to see you very often. Gotta keep my guard up, look out for any...
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
oh my godAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAH
Oh, I'm not saying it's ruined forever, but man that launch was horrid after the novelty of OMG STARBOUND wore off. And then unless you're aware of the nightly build stuff it's been sitting in that state for close to a year now.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Do it and weep for the unplayable monstrosity we received in its stead.
Quirky, fun, cartoony marketing campaign. Don Bluth meets Firefly meets classic WoW. So excite.
But then... well, first the publisher, NCSoft, killed my main MMO of the time, City of Heroes. The "why" depends on who you ask, but tends to come down to "wasn't making as much as they wanted." This does not bode well for a quirky, niche-appeal, very "Western" game under their corporate overlordship, and killed a lot of my own personal enthusiasm, hope, and willingness to give them more money.
Then the beta. And the first hints that the endgame will be unrepentant hardcore grind - everything that people have been fondly remembering and asking for since vanilla WoW. Except... it's been ten years. The genre, the industry has moved on. Most of the people who used to like that sort of thing have moved on; they're adults with jobs and families now, and 40-man raids are just too much of a commitment. And many who look back with nostalgia are finding that actually doing it again isn't as much fun as they remember, for some reason...
Also, a box that you buy and then pay a subscription! Who does that anymore? (I stayed subbed to CoH its whole life, but I am apparently a vanishing breed...
Now most of the developers have jumped ship, the situation for those who remain at the studio is reportedly dire, the vultures are circling and waiting for it to go F2P (if the Korean masters don't just shut it down), they've just now released the first promised content update to make single-player leveling more fun... and they're throwing out "come back for seven days! Please? pleeeeeease" emails.
A big, well known mythology to mine for stories and ideas. Great concept art with a look very different from the WOW aesthetic (which I had become very tired of). Guilds could build castles and the like and fight each other. Third person action controls that was supposed to be more than just clicking on icons from time to time. PVP anywhere.
It sounded great but pretty much disappointed in every way. The controls weren't "action oriented" they were just needlessly complicated. You could just make a macro for them and it became every other MMO out there. The guild stuff took forever and wasn't in working condition even 6 months in. Large areas were broken and for every fix two other things broke. While there was PVP anywhere it was frustrating and not particularly fun so it just became annoying.
I wanted so hard to like Other M. It wasnt the combat, I loved the crazy combat and wanted to see more of it. It wasnt the awful writing. It was the maps. I was more lost in Other M than in any other Metroid, 2d or 3d. I gave up around the time I got the Varia Suit. I hated the level design.
The sad thing is the maps are pretty much linear corridors once you know how they go. It's all the irritation of getting lost combined with more linearity than Fusion.
Oh, and the combat was trivialized if you just mashed directions to autododge and held a charge for melee finishers.
Just a disaster of a game from every angle.
Why I fear the ocean.
Unlike other MMOs mentioned here, it's still going, though.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
And then, we waited.
Tomb Raider: Underworld. It followed Anniversary, which was one of the best TR games I've ever played. But they decided to totally redo the engine and it took a really, really long time. Level designers built things that they were unable to play until really late in the development cycle. Then crunch happened. So instead of the fluid animation and great level design of it's predecessors, we got really stiff mo-cap animation and levels that clearly hadn't been playtested enough.
Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 20XX. Take a reasonably fast-paced card game. Slow it to a colossal crawl. Give the player almost no cards to start with and make them grind to unlock options. Also, make every card unreadable unless you've zoomed in. Block the entire screen when zoomed in, just in case the player wanted to reference the state of the game while reading. Duels was good for about an hour when I was learning the basic rules, and then I hated it.