It looks like something is brewing in the realm of digital card games. Shadowverse, a digital card game that initially debuted back in 2016, has been rebooted into a new game, Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, just a few days ago.
Following this release, Shadowverse: World’s Beyond is currently sitting at an "Overwhelmingly Negative" rating on Steam. From over 8,0000 current reviews, more than 80% of them are negative.
What is Shadowverse?
For a quick history lesson, Shadowverse started as a digital card game before spawning a physical counterpart in 2022 for the Japanese market and in 2023 for Western markets.
Recently, the digital iteration has been rebooted into Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond.
Shadowverse can draw a lot of parallels from other card game frontrunners like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and even Hearthstone.
Shadowverse puts its own unique spin on the player-versus-player (PvP) format as players can ‘evolve’ their followers for enhanced stats or abilities. Followers are Shadowverse’s interpretation of creature or monster cards from Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh!
Anyone with a passing knowledge of popular trading card games can easily pick up and play Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond.
The Current Controversy
Card Packs and In-game Currency
Unfortunately for Worlds Beyond, it is currently sitting in the middle of a storm of negativity.
Trawling through some of the Steam reviews and even on social media platforms like YouTube, the negative reviews appear to stem from how the developers have implemented their in-game monetization.
Like other digital trading card games, one way players can expand their collection of cards is by spending in-game currency (aka Rupees) to buy card packs.
Regardless of the source of in-game currency, one source of irritation is the stark difference in cost for buying card packs compared to the original Shadowverse.
Back in classic Shadowverse, the cost of buying a card pack was 100 Rupees. In Worlds Beyond, the cost of a card pack is now 500 Rupees. Without context from the developers, this looks like a heavy-handed approach to force players to spend money on the game.
To play Devil’s advocate, the game does give a free daily card pack. It also has daily tasks/missions for some recurrent earnings alongside a free battle pass for some extra in-game currency.
There’s also some Rupees to be had by doing certain one-time acts like pushing the in-game story mode or by beating the practice A.I. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be enough.
Members of online communities, like Reddit, have reported that the game is very unfriendly towards Free-to-play (F2P) or low-spending players. There doesn’t seem to be enough Rupees to earn to even create a competitively viable deck unless you’re willing to invest money into the game.
In a PvP-focused card game, a power disparity between budget/F2P players and people willing to invest money into the game is a very delicate topic.
Liquifying Cards
Another tool players can use for building their decks is through liquifying (deconstructing) unwanted cards to create Vials, a material used to create other cards. This is similar to the crafting system found in Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel.
Unfortunately for new players, this system can only be used when you have more than three copies of a specific card. Supposedly, this is to help safeguard players from potentially liquefying any useful cards unknowingly.
This by itself is fine. That said, there’s a debate that can be had about this topic, but it’s a very fair system overall.
What players, especially veterans from classic Shadowverse, are taking umbrage with are the conversion rates of cards to vials.
Thanks to YouTube content creator Ignideus, a conversion table was drawn up to show the differences between the original Shadowverse and World’s Beyond conversion rates.
While the conversion rate of exchanging cards of the same rarity level is pretty good, a disparity starts to rise if a player is aiming for a higher rarity card.
Seeing as Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond is still technically a TCG in nature, there is little doubt that the higher rarity cards hold some significant gameplay effects/abilities.
With how high-rarity cards have a low rate of appearing in a card pack in general, the benefit of liquifying an unwanted rare card will rarely ever be reaped. This is assuming you even have excess cards to liquify in the first place.
Is the game actually bad?
A lot of players seem to be generally satisfied with the gameplay of Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond.
The follower evolution system that the original Shadowverse pioneered has been re-implemented. More catch-up mechanics were introduced to facilitate a more balanced board game state between players going first versus players going second.
It looks like a lot of the feedback from classic Shadowverse has been taken into consideration and wrapped into something new and improved with Worlds Beyond, making it a good successor.
It appears that, for now, all the bad press that is plaguing Worlds Beyond is just stemming from how players are reacting to the game’s monetization system and how unfriendly the game has become to anyone not actively investing a good sum of money into the game.