Marvel Snap may only be two months old, but it has started with a bang. The card-based battler from the mind behind Hearthstone has very quickly become part of the zeitgeist, gathered an enormous army of players, and with it, all the feedback in the universe. In response to all this, developer Second Dinner has laid out its plans for the game in the very short-term, the medium-term, and its lofty long-term ambitions.
Be warned from the very start: No, none of these plans include radically changing the game’s abysmal pricing structure and mortifyingly over-priced battle pass. But I live in hope. They do, however, mostly sound like pretty awesome updates.
Short-Term
In the short-term, we’ve got the previously-mentioned “Battle Mode vs Friends,” where a unique game mode will set each player with 10 health, which is either gained or lost via a series of battles against a buddy. This was set to launch “within the next two months” at the start of November, although now looks to release “in the next month or two.” So don’t put it in your diary just yet.
Name Change is the option to...wait for it...change your name. There are no details about how often you’ll be able to, but given there’s no stat-tracking or rivalry (even though there clearly should be), it makes no odds to anyone if you change it up every match.
Artist Credits and Infinite Split Mod Details mean the game will finally give credit to the creators of the art for each card variant, as well as explain what the hexagonal dots on each post-Infinity upgraded card actually mean.
Second Dinner is also adding Russian and Vietnamese language support in the near future.
Medium-Term
Second Dinner describes the following features as being “in development,” as opposed to those above being in the final stages of bug-testing and tidying up. This means they all come with the caveat that such plans may significantly change as they fiddle.
The first seems like it oughtn’t be the most complex of issues, being an option for a PC Widescreen UI. Um, just do a wider piece of background art and spread the icons out a bit. I should be in charge. But yeah, this is pretty crucial, given the PC version is currently launching in a portrait window down the middle third of your monitor.
Smart Decks is a feature intended to help you build a deck around a smaller selection of cards. The idea being, if you’ve a few cards that you think support each other well, but are stuck for how to flesh that out to a full 12-card deck, the game will suggest them for you. Which sounds like a great feature for me to have, but it seems very problematic to roll it out to everyone else.
Unranked Mode is something I was pretty surprised the game didn’t launch with. It is, as you may have guessed, a sort of “friendly” mode, letting you try out new decks in battle without having to risk your Ranks and Cubes. However, rather surprisingly, they intend to let this contribute toward completing Missions, which...doesn’t sound quite right to me. I want a friendly mode, but I find it weird that removing all the risks of competition would allow everyone to unlock the higher-ranking cards.
At the same time, Second Dinner teases something called Competitive Mode, which would “use Battle Mode in fun new ways,” although that doesn’t mean anything at all. There’s no more information on this yet.
Long-Term
Here are the plans Second Dinner calls “In Concept,” which is to say, “In Our Imaginations.” They’re ideas on paper, but not in development, and they invite feedback on them, seemingly preferring that be via their Discord. There are no details on any of them, so here’s the list:
- Guilds (Social Systems)
- Infinity Rank Leaderboard
- Collectible Emotes & Card Emojis
- Mythic Variants
- Booster Magnets
- Avatars & Titles by Deck
- PC Controller Support
- Season Cache Improvements
- In-Game Events
Let me provide some useful insight into these. Screw Guilds—we don’t need a way for players to talk to each other in everything. Screw Infinity Rank Leaderboards—that’s just a list of the game’s biggest whales. Screw collectible emotes and emojis—just add more of them to the base game. But Second Dinner has my blessing on the rest, although I reserve judgment on whatever a Booster Magnet might be.
More sensibly, I’d say in-game events should be the priority above just about everything else in this whole article, given they’ll be the element that’ll remind people to come back to the game once the initial buzz wears off (which is, let’s be honest, any moment now). Especially if the developers prove stubborn on the overpriced season passes, which few are going to bother with if they keep proving so anticlimactic.
For all I grumble, I’m still playing it every single day, without fail, because it’s absolutely bloody marvellous.