Shortly before the time of wrting this article, Shadowverse was shut down. If you log in all you will get is this
Shadowverse was a game that I enjoyed, even though if to some extent it was a "Stockholm Syndrome" game where half the fun is complaining about how BS it is. The only time that I talked about it previously on this site was in this early essay, and even that was complaining about the state of design. (Specifically how throwing random life gain on various cards that didn't need it had the effect of shutting down aggro and limiting the meta.) At this point that was 4 years ago, and things got more ridiculous past that point. For example, Runecraft got a card (Rosy Court Magician) which not only had random lifegain attached to it, but also exiled an enemy for free, could evolve for essentially free, and had ward to force it to be killed before you could attack the enemy. There was a neutral card that could be used by all decks that was a 3/3 with ward for 3 (already very aggressively curved) that would draw you two cards and essentially only cost 1 if you used an evolve on it. And those weren't even the core cards for the Departed Soultaker deck, which essentially discarded cards into the graveyard and abused evolve mechanics to reanimate a 1 or 2 turn kill far earlier than was ever intended (where even if you managed to kill the reanimated creatures it didn't matter, since they would just repeat the process next turn to reanimate them again.) In short, it was totally busted.
That being said, I did have fun playing it. In a totally busted environment it is fun trying to see if you can get any non-meta deck working, especially when you come to terms that not grinding out the top deck means that you are going to lose at least 2 out of every 3 games, if not worse. There were a lot of crazy and clever combos that could be used, and finidng the key tech card was always fun. And of course I remember the earlier days of Shadowverse before power creep and gacha mechanics devoured the game. At that point it was a very solid game. It had three advantagers over competitors like Hearthstone. First, you could put in three copies of each card, making decks more reliable and allowing you to base combos around 1 or 2 cards. Second, it had the "rush" keyword, which allowed a creature to attack other creatures the turn it comes into play but not the opponent. This solved a problem that Hearthstone type games had where if you give everything "summoning sickness" then it is hard for the second player to regain momentum, but if you allow flat out haste that can attack anything it gives too much strength to aggro decks. Third, it allowed you to evolve creatures. Initially this was done by spending evolution points that you could use starting on turn 4 or 5 (the second player could use them on turn 4 as a balancing mechanic.) These would pump up the creature in some way (the "standard" was to give it +2/+2) and essentially give it rush. This further encouraged a fun back and forth midgame rather than having one player run over the other, and had a lot of design potential. For example, you could have a creature not get as strong when evolving, but do something like add a spell to your hand. Or it might only get a strong evolve if you have the right conditions, which usually fed into the mechanics of each individual class. Or you could have a follower that could not evolve normally, but had a ridiculously strong evolve you had to earn by other mechanics. Some cards even functioned as essentially two different cards completely depending on whether they evolved. It led to an interesting game, though of course later on they just gave rare and legendary cards the normal evolve plus a bunch more without any drawbacks.
But the reason I am writing this essay is not to convince you to play Shadowverse. Afterr all, absent a private server you now can't play Shadowverse. It should be noted that the game did have an extensive single player component. I only got about halfway through it because the plot was rather lackluster and it was more fun playing against opponents than AI, but it was there. They also had a puzzle mode, with things like "determine how to kill the opponent on this turn" that involved various combos. That stuff could still work even without the multiplayer servers, but that is gone too now.
Shadowverse is actually the first game I really played that got disabled in this way. I have to have the caveat "really played" because I did do things like make guest characters in games like City of Heroes, but I didn't have investment in those games. I guess I also played Hearthstone, Magic: Arena, and Gwent (remember that?) but for each of those I didn't stick around for more than a coupjle of expansions. With Shadowverse I have over 1000 hours on Steam (split over the course of 10 years that's really not too much, but not nothing either.) I started playing it on the recommendation a friend who actually lost interest within half a year. This was the same time that I was being pressured to get into Hearthstone, but Shadowverse really felt so much more satisfying gameplay wise so I stuck with it. And now it is gone. Of course, I knew that this was going to happen eventually going into it. I never spent a cent on the game, especially since the only real way to buy things was to just get more packs with low chances for the stuff that you wanted. (The coolest cosmetics, custom leaders, still largely had to be found by getting the right legendary in a pack which could take literally hundreds of pulls to get the one that you wanted.) Honestly I had a gap between 2021 and 2024 or so where I stopped playing entirely, and only got back into it when I learned to my surprise that the game still existed. I had assumed that the game had shut down, especially since the "sequel" game (Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond) was out by that point. Indeed there had been no new proper expansions for sometime, but they did keep updating it. The main thing they did was go through a "historic rotation" where they would have a standard taken from five sets, representing some period in the past. They would also revert all buffs and nerfs to how the cards worked at that time, making unlimited work a bit differently. There was also a "custom rotation" option where you could choose five contiguous sets to work from, with you getting buffs if you chose older sets (acknowledging the power creep.) There were also some cards made that reused old assets, and could only be used in custom rotation for balance. I never really messed with that much, since it was a pain to figure out which cards came from which sets (especially when I had been gone for the release of several sets) but some people certainly loved that format. It was supported more than most developers would have, so I guess I'm grateful to Cygames for that.
Of course, on the other hand, it would take very little for them to maintain a similar level of support in the future. It would take even less for them to allow custom servers. It would be even less still to allow single player. And they went beyond that: the files on my hard drive went from something like 16 GB to 200MB, meaning that the most recent update deleted all the assets for cards, voice lines, game logic, etc. Thus even if you wanted to reverse engineer a solution you would either need to block the update or to have backed up your files before the game got shut down. (I considered backing up the files in the expectation that this exact thing would happen, but ultimately decided that I have too many other pieces of software to get working to worry about the possibility of maybe being able to play Shadowverse again.) Thus outside of people who kept old versions of the files (kind of like what I did with the GOG version of Armello) the game now needs to be pirated to be able to played. And I am sure that in the eyes of Cygames even the people who did keep the files they got legitimately will be viewed as "pirates" for not deleting them.
It's been said by people like Ross Scott several times before, but it's worth saying again: This isn't ending support to a game. This is actively destroying a game. In this case the desire to destroy it is probably due to the misguided thought that all the old players will jump to Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond (which is far worse in terms of balance and gacha mechanics) but really anyone who was going to do that would do that already. This is spite. If they really just wanted to "end support" they could have left the files alone and had the program output a message that it could not connect to the official servers, with an explanation of why this happened (i.e. because they really did "end support.")
Now I'm not really outraged by this since I went in knowing full well it would happen some day, and honestly I'm surprised that it took this long to happen. But I am still dissappointed. Just last week I had made an actually competitive blood aggro deck based around Yurius, and a fun troll forest deck that punished people who used storm combos (which practically every top combo did.) I'd be lying if I said that I didn't want to play those decks just a few more times, or to mess around and see if I could get something working in other classes. But I do accept that it's over.
Instead this is making me about the state of the games industry in general. It reminds me of a Ross's Game Dungeon video where some game closed down and the gmaing press said something like "well, it was around for a few years, that's enough for anyone to have enjoyed it." It makes me wonder how much many younger gamers just accept games vanishing as a matter of course. Now Shadowverse was to some extent gacha slop, so of course it was going to die, but there have been plenty of games that weren't essentially onlines (even ones that were entirely single player) that were killed in similar ways. (And I suppose I stress that it was not necessary for Shadowverse to have been killed, even if we all knew it was going to happen.) Hell, it seems like some gamers have this attitude to games that actually were not killed. Witness the many people who see one of the innumerable "remasters" of a game and say "now I can finally play it," even for games that have been easily playable on modern systems for years, like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 or Doom 2 (which both had better fan "remasters" than the official HD versions.) There is some of this attitude even in the general culture, or at least corporations are trying to foster this attitude, as we can see by the unnecessary remakes of movies (with Disney being the most obnoxious about this.)
Of course this gets into the discussion of media preservation, which is a whole nother essay. Literally, in two ways. First, I've already touched on that topic in previous essays (twice in fact.) Second, I want to update my opinions from those essays, partially to touch on some things that I've seen people talk about elsewhere and partially to revaluate some of my own thoughts. Since this essay is already long enough, and I don't want that to be buried under commentary about Shadowverse in particular, that's probably going to be the next essay. So for now, RIP Shadowverse (though we should remember that you were murdered.)
July 1, 2006