I’ve not heard that, but if so that’s super cool. I’d love to see something like 7th Sea myself.
Aeg still owns warlord Todd said that on one of the fb threads
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Went and read the whole spiel they posted on the L5R main page. Something really doesn’t grock right to me about all of this, it sounds a lot more like the company is just downsizing and they happened to be able to get some cash for the IP instead of letting it die a slow death. Also means everything they were promising for Onyx is probably gone and left to whatever FFG feels like doing. And yeah, Gencon 2017. Wow. That is way way too long for a transition to take. L5R has always been a fringe game hiding and surviving in the shadow of Magic the Gathering, that long a wait for new cards is really going to kill off the player base in waves, I can’t really imagine anyone thought this was a good business plan.
It just reads so weird. They’re already producing an LCG right now with DTR. Not sure why they’re kicking their biggest product out the door without there being an ulterior reason. Really sounds like they just fired a ton of people.
And the forums are all suspiciously gone. Not just pulled down but flat out -gone-.
The forums are gone because the L5R community is very passionate, and I’m sure there’d be quiet a lot of back lash. As well as having to restructure them - due to L5R needing to be archived.
The jobs are an unfortunate side effect of the sale. It took a lot of people to run L5R. As for making it an ECG - I honestly don’t think the L5R community would have allowed them to do that. It had to go to someone else for it to happen.
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Yeah I’m sure there are a lot of people going batshit insane about this.
Well, I mean, for a majority of players, this is basically AEG saying “The game is dead guys”.
Yeah. It’s definitely an interesting transition. And it’s so sudden it makes sense for some people to be concerned and upset. We’ll see what happens though. It could ultimately breath a new life into it.
I for one use to strongly support FFG (I still do to an extent) what they do for it who knows (refer to pics above). I mean 20 years for a game is amazing and Aeg is proud of that and they should be. Maybe AEG wants out and they saw how long it took FFG to get Thrones back on track from ccg to lcg and decided they didn’t want to do that since it’s not their big money it use to be (i.e. todds FB post). For 2 years it wont be back in reality isn’t that much time. Look at Swccg and Stccg who have been gone for close to ten years and they have a community for it still. For that matter look at classic doomtown it still has followers @davido4015. And now off to watch @swider doomtown games folks check his stream out if you watch you might learn something.
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2 Years is enough to catch the less hardcore players in a net of doomtowny goodness.
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L5R was dead since 2000. There was this ironic reboot in 05. Since the LCG model didn’t exist, the game was praised as being the most original CCG out at the time and not as the watered-down and corporate counterpart Magic was turning out to be. The early teens, 11-14, was a fringe backwoods fanclub made up of old people. Makes me think of whats happening with Vampire: The Eternal Struggle or Shadowfist. AEG had an embarrassing development team, a few guys that mimic CCG lingo and publish it as a game. Take a look at their Gen Con 2015 L5R animated video or tutorial. So low budget and awkward.
I have no remorse for the old players. It’s cute, but no one really cares if you play a game that was once influential. Longevity doesn’t favor the old. It favors the new.
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I was around from Gold on through Samurai edition and for a while I quite enjoyed the game. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed watching the story unfold and the camaraderie with fellow Ratling players. I won’t deny that mechanically the game has always had issues and every environment had massive issues and there was some really really obvious design bias and a lot of ‘good ol boy’ problems with fans joining the design and brand teams.
But a lot of that didn’t matter. You had your friends, you played your faction, you cheered when you won, you fought for your place in the game and the story.As bad as the environments were, everyone ended up with some time in the limelight.
For me, axing the Ratlings killed my interest. I really liked them, they were an outsider group, they were indicative of the larger world and not the microcosm of samurai culture that was just Rokugan. They were the oddballs, misfits, they were the only non-clan faction to survive past Gold and it was purely coincidence that they had stayed in the game, if the Warrens of the Nezumi had never gotten that gold bug in that final WotC set, there never would have been a Ratling faction, it would’ve remained the odd one off joke. But we lobbied, we fought, we pushed to be included and eventually we got recognized as a full faction, we were allowed to sit at the big kid’s table and play for real instead of being a complete and total joke.
Then they rebranded the game. People got on staff that didn’t see a place in the setting for Nezumi, for anything that wasn’t a samurai. They didn’t see the wealth the setting had to offer, the rich asian influenced fantasy, and instead just saw ‘samurai drama’, the human struggle to maintain honor, loyalty to one’s lord, oh yeah and overcoming corruption because that only happened every gods damned arc. To me it was horribly uninteresting, and the Spider was just a terrible idea. Much more the story gymnastics the team had to pull out of their ass to justify it.
AEG just made tons of mistakes. Like they do with pretty much all their games. I don’t want to browbeat them, but they have this amazing knack for developing these really awesome, geeky properties that encourage a lot of loyalty to the brand and particular groups in the setting. And then crashing them hard into the ground and having them either die slowly or quick and suddenly like this. They’re absolutely notorious for mismanagement. I mean, L5R, Deadlands, 7th Sea, Warlord, Spycraft, and those are just the well known original ones, there was plenty of flops like that racing anime CCG, that weird pokemon wanna be one? And plenty of others I can’t name because they were so immemorable and short lived. But I get why their games are succesful and I get why they aren’t.
It’s really frustrating, frankly. I’m thankful they’ve been able to bring back Doomtown and I’m glad it’s lasted this long and I’m hopeful it lasts longer under the LCG model. I’m excited for the Eagle Wardens and I’m looking forward to the new round of outfits and I’m really digging the flavor.
So I guess, here’s one for friends past and passed. It’s sad to see even L5R go. It was never perfect, but it was fun and it was a kind of home for a while.
I’ve heard FFG has done good things with old brands, maybe they can bring the magic back to L5R. It’s a ways off to GenCon 2017 and expectations are going to be high, I can tell you now, whatever form the game takes, people will be both excited and disappointed. Maybe I’ll fall into the former category. I don’t really expect it. But I’ve been wrong before and DTR was a complete surprise.
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This is unexpected, but I am pretty happy… I think…
As said above, L5R was dead a long time ago, as sadly as it is. And FFG knows a thing or two about LCGs by now. But I really really hope they realize how big of a factor the story is for most players and continue with that aspect of the game the way AEG has done it until now.
As Alex said a few times, never has there been a better time to reach out to your L5R friends and say, "Sorry 'bout your game, dude. Why don’t you let me pour us some drinks and you can tell me all about how you feel bummed and betrayed over a game of Doomtown. WHAT?! You’ve never played Doomtown before?! Well, you’re in for a treat then … "
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100% this. We’ve got some tricks under our sleeves to appeal to the tournament player as well as the casual player. We’re hard at work here at the Gazette.
C’mon 7th Sea!
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I wonder when the AEG forums are going to go back up.
I played L5R until the end of diamond arc, I was hooked by the story, tried to get back into it with Ivory but it was just rubbish and the story was getting uninteresting, but interested to see what FFG will do with it. In the mean time I can concentrate on doomtown reloaded! On a side note, the RPG is good.
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Thanks .
well without putting the link back on their site, they’ve returned some of the forums, mostly the Doomtown ones.
O_O
Feels strange that they’re selling it instead of making more LCGs, when they got Doomtown running already… but guess i need to play it now (when it arrives). Hope AEG is well with that, but you all said it already…
7th Sea, too, please.