I've also spent a lot of time trying to make the Paladin questline work. I think the main problem is simply the amount of 1-mana cards you need to play to complete it. If you put your deck full of 1-mana cards, you can complete it on turn 4 relatively often, but still not super reliably. And then you're stuck with top-decking 1-mana cards for the remainder of the game, so you better hope that your hero power is enough to close out the game.
As you mentioned, Light's Justice wasn't terribly useful as a reward: often I would just go face with it, to use up all the charges in case I would be offered a better weapon from Blessed Goods later. I don't think Light's Justice is bad in general, but it is the wrong tool for this deck: it helps you trade up, but if you're playing all 1-drops, you can't afford to make a lot of trades, as you have to be pushing face damage to close out the game before your deck's power falls off.
Another approach was to put more dude (Silver Hand Recruit) synergy cards in the deck, but even a few would dramatically reduce the chance of completing the quest on turn 5 and on later turns the impact of both the 7/7 body and the quest reward is no longer enough to carry the game.
I've seen some people play the questline in Wild in a Dude Paladin deck that finishes the quest later in the game. I guess that with enough synergy cards, the upgraded hero power becomes powerful enough to justify weakening your opening hand. In Standard, that critical mass of synergy cards was never there.
One thing that could have helped is more cards that generate cards like Blessed Goods, which always offers a 1-mana option because Paladin secrets cost 1 mana, but can also produce more expensive cards in a top-deck situation. Another option would be to simply reduce the number of cards needed to advance one or more of the steps. As the quest reward can't be played before turn 5 anyway (*), I think easier completion wouldn't have made it overly powerful.
(*) Turn 1 is the questline itself, so you have 5 mana to spend on turn 2 and 3. Even if every one of the three steps would take 2 instead of 3 cards to be played, you couldn't coin out the reward on turn 4.
By the way, while the deck is widely considered to be unplayable, the win rate I got was actually not that far below 50%: I didn't measure it exactly, but I got decent progress on the "win 5 matches" weekly quest. However, when it won, it was usually very close, while when it lost, it was by a mile. So the deck felt worse to play than what the winrate would suggest.
A deck variation that might be worth mentioning is the inclusion of Lady Prestor, which takes advantage of the fact that many dragons have good battlecries. Still, I think overall she didn't make the deck better, but it did add some more variety.
Mostly playing Talos Principle 2 at the moment. I'm about halfway the regular content now. It is more story-heavy compared to the first game, but the puzzles are still good (including new mechanics) and I like that there is more stuff to do outside the puzzle arenas (staying vague here to avoid spoilers). There is a sizable demo that gives a good impression of what the game is like: the start of the story, some old mechanics (for new players or those that need a reminder) and some new mechanics.
Baldur's Gate 3 with friends, but only once a week, so that will take a long time.
I still need to finish Afterimage. It's a good metroidvania, but larger than I expected and now I only have difficult areas left that I'm just going to fail at if I'm too tired, so progress is slow.
And Hearthstone of course; got to keep up with those quests to get gold for the new expansion.
By the way, now that this is Out of Games rather than Out of Cards, this subforum has become on-topic, so maybe a bit of reorganization would be good.
Even though Twist wasn't a big hit, I've never had to wait in queue for too long, so there must still be a decent amount of people playing it.
Creating a Twist season shouldn't be that much more work than creating a Tavern Brawl. But we rarely see new Tavern Brawls anymore either. Are they so severely understaffed that they just can't find the time?
Hmm, I checked my collection and for this year's sets I have slightly under 75% completion, but last year's sets are all over 75%. So these packs are a good way for people to catch up who have really large gaps in their collection, but don't help much if all you're missing is epics and legendaries.
These are strange packs in the sense that the more you open, the worse they get. I wonder if mass-opening these packs is better than opening them one-by-one: do they recalculate the completion percentage after each pack or after each opening?
I played the demo of The Talos Principle 2 yesterday. The first puzzles were basically a tutorial for people who hadn't played the first game, but after that they showed some new mechanics (RGB shifter, driller, teleporter) which look interesting. So I bought the full game and will be playing it tonight.
I also managed to get into one puzzle that wasn't supposed to be accessible in the demo by jumping across a fence, but as soon as I picked up an object there, it respawned me at the latest continue point; it looks like they guarded the demo against that.
I liked the meta when Prince Renathal gave you 40 health, so experimentally I'd say that for me the game is better with more health.
Maybe you only included it for humorous purposes, but going from Magma Rager to Ice Rager is not power creep, as neither card ever played a role in any past meta. A real example of power creep is Azure Drake, which used to be considered a good card included in many decks and now barely sees play despite being buffed. Or going from Sen'jin Shieldmasta to Saronite Tol'vir.
What happened in Wild is a particular kind of power creep: the main factor driving up the power level is not that people select the best cards from all past sets, but that synergies work much better if you have a larger pool of synergistic cards to pick from.
Quote From Noxious
Old Hearthstone had a few OTKs and that sort of thing, but also three things you seldom find in modern Hearthstone:
Less swings. No healing to full health 5 times a game. No 20 face damage a turn as a baseline for most decks.
Stickier minions. When you placed a strong, expensive minion on the board, you didn't expect your opponent to have an answer for it 80% of the time.
Games that would consistently last past round 10. This has become shorter over time.
I agree with your first two observations, but old Hearthstone games did not consistently last past round 10. Maybe if you go back to before Naxxramas or played a very control-heavy deck, but most games I played with mid-range decks took between 8 and 12 turns (I remember because I logged my attempts to play decks like Beast Druid). Going past turn 10 wasn't rare, but it wasn't a majority of games either. Dr. Boom was such a good card because he came down on turn 7, which was often just before games were decided.
Less swings has both upsides and downsides. It feels more fair when your efforts aren't easily erased, but it also means that if a deck snowballs, there is no hope of recovering. While I think Modern Hearthstone has a bit too much swing potential, I wouldn't want to go back to the old days either.
I fully agree with stickier minions. Minions are now so easily removed that you summon them to force your opponent spend resources on removing them, not because you expect them to still be there the next round. Again, I wouldn't want to go all the way back to the old days (games being decided by a turn 1 Mana Wyrm was no fun), but having stickier minions would be nice.
Giving a hero more health has two main effects:
it gives you more time to stabilize versus aggro
it raises the bar for OTKs
I think having more time to stabilize versus aggro is a good thing, because it makes games more interactive. It will force aggro decks to have a game plan that goes beyond just dumping the initial hand on the board and going face.
Raising the bar for OTKs is good up to a certain point: metas in which OTK decks are dominant aren't fun, as the first player to draw their combo wins. But metas in which control decks without win conditions are dominant become a slog. I think it's good that in modern Hearthstone control decks do have win conditions, although when a single card is a win condition, like Odyn, Prime Designate, it becomes too repetitive.
Tying health, archetypes and classes together sounds like a risky proposition:
even though cards were designed with a particular archetype in mind, that is no guarantee they'll be played only in that archetype; cheap taunts have been used successfully in aggro decks as well, for example
what about decks from previous expansions? do you tie a class and archetype together for an entire year? do you power creep so much from expansion to expansion that old decks become unplayable? if not, then some classes will have multiple archetypes
for aggro decks, how much health the most common opposing decks have is more important than the amount of health the own hero has
In particular, if there is a viable aggro deck in a class that was predicted to not play aggro, that deck could beat all the aggro decks in the lower-health classes, because it wins damage races.
In Hearthstone a card has a significant intrinsic mana value. For example, we have 0-mana cards that do useful things. The Warlock hero power costs 2 mana and 2 health for a single card and still it's considered one of the better hero powers. Arcane Intellect gives you net +1 card for 3 mana, yet lots of decks include it. Faeria had a neutral card with the same cost and effect, but it saw almost no play, because in Faeria drawing cards just gives you more options, but the mana cost determines the power level of the card.
It is because of the intrinsic mana value of cards that we have aggro decks that dump their initial hand on the board and win or lose based on that momentum. It is the reason card draw and card generation are so good and that in turn is one of the main contributing factors to today's power creep: it is easier than ever to draw and generate cards and every card represents a mana discount.
I think questlines were an improvement compared to the original Un'Goro quests: by getting intermediate rewards, the end reward didn't have to be ridiculously strong to make the quest(line) worth playing. The DH questline was an extreme example of this, where the end reward didn't even get played in most games: it was the intermediate discounts that mattered.
In some cases though, like the Warlock and Warrior questlines, the end reward did have game-ending power and I think those would have been better if toned down a little. Ironically, while Priest's end reward was literally game-ending, it didn't feel as much of a problem, since surviving until the point you could use the reward was hard enough.
Like quests, questlines lead to decks that tend to play very similarly from game to game, so while initially they're fun, they can out-live their welcome. This could maybe have been mitigated if there had been balance changes sooner: by the time the Hunter and Warrior questlines got nerfed, I was already really sick of queuing into them.
A lot of the questlines don't have much of a board presence, which makes the game play quite uninteractive: while I enjoyed playing the DH questline myself, it's not very fun to sit there and watch an opponent draw and play a huge number of cards per turn. This is a problem with the specific questlines introduced in Stormwind rather than questlines as a mechanic, so I hope that if questlines come back, they will be more minion-centric.
Capture Coldtooth Mine is very nice in a Jungle Giants deck, because it allows you to reliably pick Wildheart Guff from the deck after quest completion. And in the event you already drew Guff, it either directly draws you a 0-cost minion or Aquatic Form which is very likely to offer you a 0-cost minion.
There’s no balancing and no expectation of balancing.
I don’t like having cards changed for a format that changes regularly.
If the season is broken, let be broken, some people like broken decks. Some people like hard countering broken deck. Let them have their fun
With Hearthstone in decline, there will be less and less resources to run a format. Just let it run itself and focus on Wild and Standard balance.
The cards are changed for all formats: Twist, Wild and Tavern Brawl. While Twist was the thing that triggered it, better balance across sets is an improvement in my opinion.
Much of Hearthstone's fun originates from slightly broken stuff. However, if something is extremely broken, the meta becomes stale within two days and then there are four boring weeks left in a season. Just look at how some Tavern Brawls devolve into games being decided by what deck you queue into or whether you go first or not; that happens within hours.
Blizzard seems to be determined to compensate for dwindling player numbers by trying to sell more to the remaining players. I don't think that is sustainable in the long run: neither for the players (there is a limit to how much people are willing or able to spend on a game) nor for themselves (creating all the new content and cosmetics).
I think you're onto something with the Historic Twist vs Random Twist approaches. Currently, the people who want to relive old metas are not getting what they want because of the buffs and new cards. Meanwhile, the people looking for new experiences are also not getting what they want because the format does not change quickly enough from month to month.
As someone who is much more interested in Random Twist, I don't mind the buffs. A lot of cards and archetypes in the old sets were unplayable even back in the day and it's nice that they get a second life. Also it will allow mixing old sets with new sets without the new sets always dominating the meta. However, I expect fans of Historic Twist to have a different opinion here.
I agree that monetization is holding Twist back: players without a Wild collection may skip the mode entirely because it's too expensive. And for those that do buy into it, Blizzard has to slow down rotation to not upset them.
They can't make the packs and pre-made decks super cheap, since then they'll be selling discount dust for Standard players to use (although the pre-made decks could be cheaper than they were without breaking the HS economy). Maybe a new type of set is needed, that is sold as a full set for a reasonable price, but is not disenchantable.
For me, the main issue with the new cards is the large percentage of legendaries. I don't mind buying a few packs to get all the new commons and rares, but the amount of money/gold/dust it would cost to acquire even just a few of the new legendaries is just too much, especially since it's unclear how long those cards will remain usable. I agree that a mini set approach where you can just buy all the new cards for a reasonable price would be much better.
Standard is only new once every 4 months. The mini-set and balance changes generally shake up the meta a bit, but they don't introduce fundamentally new decks. It's nice to have another mode to play when Standard gets stale or the meta is not to your liking.
Wild is not a place where you can play your old cards. The Wild decks are composed of the strongest and most synergistic cards plucked from all over Hearthstone's history (although more from recent sets, because of power creep). It's nice to have a place where you can play old archetypes, without getting slaughtered before you can summon C'thun or a Jade larger than 3/3.
In my opinion, the idea of Twist is good, but the execution has some issues.
As much as I enjoyed Hollow Knight and Elden Ring, the bosses were actually the part I enjoyed least. To me, they feel more like an obstacle that gets in the way of exploring more of the world, which is the part I really enjoy. Fortunately, in Elden Ring most bosses you can take on at any time you like, but the few that do gate progression were pain (Beast Clergyman, Elden Beast).
Personally, I prefer the more classic metroidvania bosses where you have to study the boss to figure out a good strategy, but once you have it figured out, executing that strategy is not that hard. This is not the case in for example Hollow Knight, where attacks are telegraphed so short before they strike that you not only have to know how to react, but have to do it as a reflex, because if you think about it consciously, you are too late.
Elise switched class from Druid to Priest this expansion, so there is no guarantee that Reno will be a Mage card again. But I do expect Reno to take the side of the miners: "We're gonna be rich!"
They state that the other Explorers won't be joining Elise, but if Reno is on the opposite side, he wouldn't be joining her.
Note that progression and galaxy events are scripted, but AI empires react based on things that happened inside the game. For example, I put a lot of resources in making friends with the Klingons and now we're in a defensive pact. That is not hard-coded to happen, but a result of getting every single opinion bonus that I could. My plan is that this deters the Cardassians from attacking me until I can out-class them on the tech and economics front.
Lords of the Fallen looks interesting, but the Steam reviews say the PC port is in a very bad shape, so better wait for a while before considering buying it.
Sad to hear it's mostly scripted. Might be a deal breaker for me.
I don't mind so much, because it feels like a necessary trade-off to make the lore work. For example, if you couldn't get the Enterprise in every game as the Federation, that would add more variation between games, but it would also make the games where you cannot get it just less fun. If I want to play a game where I'm going in completely dark about what might exist in the galaxy, I can just play Stellaris instead.
There are enough choices to be made that I think you can have at least two very different play-throughs per faction and that is likely going to add up to about 200 hours, so by then there will probably be mods and DLC to add some more variation.
The locations of the four major factions are fixed and revealed at game start, but the rest of the map is randomized, so exploring the galaxy will be different each game.
I've also spent a lot of time trying to make the Paladin questline work. I think the main problem is simply the amount of 1-mana cards you need to play to complete it. If you put your deck full of 1-mana cards, you can complete it on turn 4 relatively often, but still not super reliably. And then you're stuck with top-decking 1-mana cards for the remainder of the game, so you better hope that your hero power is enough to close out the game.
As you mentioned, Light's Justice wasn't terribly useful as a reward: often I would just go face with it, to use up all the charges in case I would be offered a better weapon from Blessed Goods later. I don't think Light's Justice is bad in general, but it is the wrong tool for this deck: it helps you trade up, but if you're playing all 1-drops, you can't afford to make a lot of trades, as you have to be pushing face damage to close out the game before your deck's power falls off.
Another approach was to put more dude (Silver Hand Recruit) synergy cards in the deck, but even a few would dramatically reduce the chance of completing the quest on turn 5 and on later turns the impact of both the 7/7 body and the quest reward is no longer enough to carry the game.
I've seen some people play the questline in Wild in a Dude Paladin deck that finishes the quest later in the game. I guess that with enough synergy cards, the upgraded hero power becomes powerful enough to justify weakening your opening hand. In Standard, that critical mass of synergy cards was never there.
One thing that could have helped is more cards that generate cards like Blessed Goods, which always offers a 1-mana option because Paladin secrets cost 1 mana, but can also produce more expensive cards in a top-deck situation. Another option would be to simply reduce the number of cards needed to advance one or more of the steps. As the quest reward can't be played before turn 5 anyway (*), I think easier completion wouldn't have made it overly powerful.
(*) Turn 1 is the questline itself, so you have 5 mana to spend on turn 2 and 3. Even if every one of the three steps would take 2 instead of 3 cards to be played, you couldn't coin out the reward on turn 4.
By the way, while the deck is widely considered to be unplayable, the win rate I got was actually not that far below 50%: I didn't measure it exactly, but I got decent progress on the "win 5 matches" weekly quest. However, when it won, it was usually very close, while when it lost, it was by a mile. So the deck felt worse to play than what the winrate would suggest.
A deck variation that might be worth mentioning is the inclusion of Lady Prestor, which takes advantage of the fact that many dragons have good battlecries. Still, I think overall she didn't make the deck better, but it did add some more variety.
Mostly playing Talos Principle 2 at the moment. I'm about halfway the regular content now. It is more story-heavy compared to the first game, but the puzzles are still good (including new mechanics) and I like that there is more stuff to do outside the puzzle arenas (staying vague here to avoid spoilers). There is a sizable demo that gives a good impression of what the game is like: the start of the story, some old mechanics (for new players or those that need a reminder) and some new mechanics.
Baldur's Gate 3 with friends, but only once a week, so that will take a long time.
I still need to finish Afterimage. It's a good metroidvania, but larger than I expected and now I only have difficult areas left that I'm just going to fail at if I'm too tired, so progress is slow.
And Hearthstone of course; got to keep up with those quests to get gold for the new expansion.
By the way, now that this is Out of Games rather than Out of Cards, this subforum has become on-topic, so maybe a bit of reorganization would be good.
Even though Twist wasn't a big hit, I've never had to wait in queue for too long, so there must still be a decent amount of people playing it.
Creating a Twist season shouldn't be that much more work than creating a Tavern Brawl. But we rarely see new Tavern Brawls anymore either. Are they so severely understaffed that they just can't find the time?
Hmm, I checked my collection and for this year's sets I have slightly under 75% completion, but last year's sets are all over 75%. So these packs are a good way for people to catch up who have really large gaps in their collection, but don't help much if all you're missing is epics and legendaries.
These are strange packs in the sense that the more you open, the worse they get. I wonder if mass-opening these packs is better than opening them one-by-one: do they recalculate the completion percentage after each pack or after each opening?
I played the demo of The Talos Principle 2 yesterday. The first puzzles were basically a tutorial for people who hadn't played the first game, but after that they showed some new mechanics (RGB shifter, driller, teleporter) which look interesting. So I bought the full game and will be playing it tonight.
I also managed to get into one puzzle that wasn't supposed to be accessible in the demo by jumping across a fence, but as soon as I picked up an object there, it respawned me at the latest continue point; it looks like they guarded the demo against that.
Playing 3 modes with less than 18 deck slots would not be fun either. I think the solution would be to filter decks by mode, not less deck slots.
I liked the meta when Prince Renathal gave you 40 health, so experimentally I'd say that for me the game is better with more health.
Maybe you only included it for humorous purposes, but going from Magma Rager to Ice Rager is not power creep, as neither card ever played a role in any past meta. A real example of power creep is Azure Drake, which used to be considered a good card included in many decks and now barely sees play despite being buffed. Or going from Sen'jin Shieldmasta to Saronite Tol'vir.
What happened in Wild is a particular kind of power creep: the main factor driving up the power level is not that people select the best cards from all past sets, but that synergies work much better if you have a larger pool of synergistic cards to pick from.
I agree with your first two observations, but old Hearthstone games did not consistently last past round 10. Maybe if you go back to before Naxxramas or played a very control-heavy deck, but most games I played with mid-range decks took between 8 and 12 turns (I remember because I logged my attempts to play decks like Beast Druid). Going past turn 10 wasn't rare, but it wasn't a majority of games either. Dr. Boom was such a good card because he came down on turn 7, which was often just before games were decided.
Less swings has both upsides and downsides. It feels more fair when your efforts aren't easily erased, but it also means that if a deck snowballs, there is no hope of recovering. While I think Modern Hearthstone has a bit too much swing potential, I wouldn't want to go back to the old days either.
I fully agree with stickier minions. Minions are now so easily removed that you summon them to force your opponent spend resources on removing them, not because you expect them to still be there the next round. Again, I wouldn't want to go all the way back to the old days (games being decided by a turn 1 Mana Wyrm was no fun), but having stickier minions would be nice.
Giving a hero more health has two main effects:
I think having more time to stabilize versus aggro is a good thing, because it makes games more interactive. It will force aggro decks to have a game plan that goes beyond just dumping the initial hand on the board and going face.
Raising the bar for OTKs is good up to a certain point: metas in which OTK decks are dominant aren't fun, as the first player to draw their combo wins. But metas in which control decks without win conditions are dominant become a slog. I think it's good that in modern Hearthstone control decks do have win conditions, although when a single card is a win condition, like Odyn, Prime Designate, it becomes too repetitive.
Tying health, archetypes and classes together sounds like a risky proposition:
In particular, if there is a viable aggro deck in a class that was predicted to not play aggro, that deck could beat all the aggro decks in the lower-health classes, because it wins damage races.
In Hearthstone a card has a significant intrinsic mana value. For example, we have 0-mana cards that do useful things. The Warlock hero power costs 2 mana and 2 health for a single card and still it's considered one of the better hero powers. Arcane Intellect gives you net +1 card for 3 mana, yet lots of decks include it. Faeria had a neutral card with the same cost and effect, but it saw almost no play, because in Faeria drawing cards just gives you more options, but the mana cost determines the power level of the card.
It is because of the intrinsic mana value of cards that we have aggro decks that dump their initial hand on the board and win or lose based on that momentum. It is the reason card draw and card generation are so good and that in turn is one of the main contributing factors to today's power creep: it is easier than ever to draw and generate cards and every card represents a mana discount.
I think questlines were an improvement compared to the original Un'Goro quests: by getting intermediate rewards, the end reward didn't have to be ridiculously strong to make the quest(line) worth playing. The DH questline was an extreme example of this, where the end reward didn't even get played in most games: it was the intermediate discounts that mattered.
In some cases though, like the Warlock and Warrior questlines, the end reward did have game-ending power and I think those would have been better if toned down a little. Ironically, while Priest's end reward was literally game-ending, it didn't feel as much of a problem, since surviving until the point you could use the reward was hard enough.
Like quests, questlines lead to decks that tend to play very similarly from game to game, so while initially they're fun, they can out-live their welcome. This could maybe have been mitigated if there had been balance changes sooner: by the time the Hunter and Warrior questlines got nerfed, I was already really sick of queuing into them.
A lot of the questlines don't have much of a board presence, which makes the game play quite uninteractive: while I enjoyed playing the DH questline myself, it's not very fun to sit there and watch an opponent draw and play a huge number of cards per turn. This is a problem with the specific questlines introduced in Stormwind rather than questlines as a mechanic, so I hope that if questlines come back, they will be more minion-centric.
Capture Coldtooth Mine is very nice in a Jungle Giants deck, because it allows you to reliably pick Wildheart Guff from the deck after quest completion. And in the event you already drew Guff, it either directly draws you a 0-cost minion or Aquatic Form which is very likely to offer you a 0-cost minion.
Regarding your points 1-3, I either agree or don't have a strong opinion. About point 4:
I think you're onto something with the Historic Twist vs Random Twist approaches. Currently, the people who want to relive old metas are not getting what they want because of the buffs and new cards. Meanwhile, the people looking for new experiences are also not getting what they want because the format does not change quickly enough from month to month.
As someone who is much more interested in Random Twist, I don't mind the buffs. A lot of cards and archetypes in the old sets were unplayable even back in the day and it's nice that they get a second life. Also it will allow mixing old sets with new sets without the new sets always dominating the meta. However, I expect fans of Historic Twist to have a different opinion here.
I agree that monetization is holding Twist back: players without a Wild collection may skip the mode entirely because it's too expensive. And for those that do buy into it, Blizzard has to slow down rotation to not upset them.
They can't make the packs and pre-made decks super cheap, since then they'll be selling discount dust for Standard players to use (although the pre-made decks could be cheaper than they were without breaking the HS economy). Maybe a new type of set is needed, that is sold as a full set for a reasonable price, but is not disenchantable.
For me, the main issue with the new cards is the large percentage of legendaries. I don't mind buying a few packs to get all the new commons and rares, but the amount of money/gold/dust it would cost to acquire even just a few of the new legendaries is just too much, especially since it's unclear how long those cards will remain usable. I agree that a mini set approach where you can just buy all the new cards for a reasonable price would be much better.
Standard is only new once every 4 months. The mini-set and balance changes generally shake up the meta a bit, but they don't introduce fundamentally new decks. It's nice to have another mode to play when Standard gets stale or the meta is not to your liking.
Wild is not a place where you can play your old cards. The Wild decks are composed of the strongest and most synergistic cards plucked from all over Hearthstone's history (although more from recent sets, because of power creep). It's nice to have a place where you can play old archetypes, without getting slaughtered before you can summon C'thun or a Jade larger than 3/3.
In my opinion, the idea of Twist is good, but the execution has some issues.
As much as I enjoyed Hollow Knight and Elden Ring, the bosses were actually the part I enjoyed least. To me, they feel more like an obstacle that gets in the way of exploring more of the world, which is the part I really enjoy. Fortunately, in Elden Ring most bosses you can take on at any time you like, but the few that do gate progression were pain (Beast Clergyman, Elden Beast).
Personally, I prefer the more classic metroidvania bosses where you have to study the boss to figure out a good strategy, but once you have it figured out, executing that strategy is not that hard. This is not the case in for example Hollow Knight, where attacks are telegraphed so short before they strike that you not only have to know how to react, but have to do it as a reflex, because if you think about it consciously, you are too late.
Elise switched class from Druid to Priest this expansion, so there is no guarantee that Reno will be a Mage card again. But I do expect Reno to take the side of the miners: "We're gonna be rich!"
They state that the other Explorers won't be joining Elise, but if Reno is on the opposite side, he wouldn't be joining her.
Yeah, it seems the devs are on top of it, so hopefully it will be sorted out soon.
Note that progression and galaxy events are scripted, but AI empires react based on things that happened inside the game. For example, I put a lot of resources in making friends with the Klingons and now we're in a defensive pact. That is not hard-coded to happen, but a result of getting every single opinion bonus that I could. My plan is that this deters the Cardassians from attacking me until I can out-class them on the tech and economics front.
Lords of the Fallen looks interesting, but the Steam reviews say the PC port is in a very bad shape, so better wait for a while before considering buying it.
I don't mind so much, because it feels like a necessary trade-off to make the lore work. For example, if you couldn't get the Enterprise in every game as the Federation, that would add more variation between games, but it would also make the games where you cannot get it just less fun. If I want to play a game where I'm going in completely dark about what might exist in the galaxy, I can just play Stellaris instead.
There are enough choices to be made that I think you can have at least two very different play-throughs per faction and that is likely going to add up to about 200 hours, so by then there will probably be mods and DLC to add some more variation.
The locations of the four major factions are fixed and revealed at game start, but the rest of the map is randomized, so exploring the galaxy will be different each game.