Caller's Bane

This game had a huge amount of potential but was sadly one of the most bungled game developments I've been exposed to.

Being released by Mojang you'd expect this to have been a high profile game however as far as I can tell it was largely unheard of other than some early publicity during development when Mojang were threatened by Bethesda for the use of the title "Scrolls" and Markus Persson in response challenged them to a game of Quake over the rights to use it.

The game is essentially a CCG with some interesting turn based strategy elements thrown in (creatures are played onto a grid and can be positioned and moved around). At it's core this was a solid and fun game with very strong art direction and an interesting new IP. There were four factions, all with excellent and original aesthetics and the game was virtually free from the typical fantasy tropes. Unlike what is the standard now for this genre the game was not free to play but required an upfront purchase, however from there cards could then be obtained with relatively little grind.

The game was released into public beta in mid 2013 before the likes of Hearthstone had become huge in this area and at the time, I personally at least, was very invested in the game and felt it had huge promise. Over time however it became increasingly clear that the game was not being competently designed or marketed. Relatively small but fundamental game design issues were simply ignored entirely (e.g. deck reshuffling may have been an interesting idea but very clearly did not work in practice and promoted extremely slow and uninteresting deck types) and minor balance issues were frequently dealt with in a disastrously erratic fashion frequently changing a huge number of cards in small periods of time without addressing the real issues. It felt at times as though the design team was simply too stubborn to address design flaws and instead spent years bending over backwards to try and work around them.

Feature prioritisation was also difficult to understand where largely irrelevant features (card trading, card auction house, custom game mode) were constantly released when issues that prevented the game from being a mainstream success (UI polish, adequate single player features) were ignored.

Ultimately however it was a small player base that was the main thing holding the game back during the beta period and many were holding out for beta to end and public release marketing (and the iOS version) to kick in and increase player population. In late 2014 the game was publicly released to essentially zero fanfare. No marketing appeared to happen and Mojang themselves barely acknowledged it. Very few game review publications seemed to even pick up the story that the game had come out. I remember being online on release day and seeing maybe a couple of hundred additional players come online. Months later I remember reading people on forums being surprised that the game they had heard about with regards to the Bethesda legal issues years ago had even been released.

The iOS release never came despite this being the platform where the game was most likely to receive a mainstream audience. The development team submitted the iOS version to Apple and after what seemed like a minor disagreement over how e-commerce was handled in the game they gave up and cancelled the iOS version.

In mid 2015 (6 months after release!) Mojang announced they were ceasing development of the game and that servers would be shut down as early as 2016. The real loss here more than anything is all the excellent character design and art assets that went into the game ending up forever forgotten. There have since been some murmurs around the development team doing everything they can to release the game into the public domain so perhaps there is a small glimmer of hope still there.