The people over at Riot Games recently released their all new game mode Teamfight Tactics, essentially a strategy board game that hinges on your ability to put together a good team equipped with useful items that allow you to stomp the competition. It’s a beta, meaning that the gamemode will likely change a lot up to the final release but so far I’m not impressed, and I don’t see them changing the core gameplay loop anywhere near enough that it can be called engaging.
TFT represents League of Legends’ entry into the auto-chess genre, a game where, once your team has been put together, you sit back and watch your pieces take pot-shots at each other. There is merit to the idea, certainly, because if I don’t want to play something that is mechanically or cognitively taxing, I can take half an hour out and just play this vaguely amusing spin-off. There’s no teamplay element, which means all that horrible toxicity associated with the main game is absent, as is the crushing feeling of defeat when you realise you wasted an hour of your time fighting a losing battle with a team that would rather strangle you with your own guts than pay you a single supportive word. That said, TFT, is frustrating in its own way that often feels completely undeserving due to the totally random element of character selection. Throughout the game a shop consisting of five characters rotates every turn, from which you must buy pieces to add to your team. Possessing three of the same character levels them up, and possessing three leveled-up characters levels them all up once again to make them even stronger. The random element of what the game chooses to give you can (and will) mean that buying a character and investing your resources on them is an absolute gamble because there is no guarantee you will ever be given the final piece needed to level them up fully. I found out in one of the tooltips at the start of the game that the shop is taken from a collective pool, meaning that you will see characters that your opponents aren’t buying: that’s great, you could have let me know prior to my last ten games, but doesn’t this mean that my enemies could also just screw me over by buying up the characters I’ve already invested in?
That’s my second problem with the game, it just isn’t transparent to its new players. It’s an offshoot from League of Legends so the people playing will know what the characters do, but there is so much more that is different here from the base game that a little instruction would have been nice. The ‘communal shop’ is just the first of facts the game should let players know, because items, gold generation and character synergies are all important mechanics that players need to learn through trial and error, or sometimes even just memorise. Kassadin is one character that I found particularly egregious; in League players grab a lot of items that increase the power of his abilities and his mana pool, but in TFT Kassadin doesn’t use any mana, nor does he use any attacks that benefit from ability power. Without any prior explanation or experience, it’s impossible to know that he behaves completely differently in one game mode compared to the other, and that’s either a result of poor design or poor attention to user experience. Said items are dropped during certain stages (again on a random basis, so don’t go planning out a build beforehand) and are combined with other items to create finished artifacts with special effects. That’s great, that’s how it works in the base game, except that there’s no guidance as to what items build together to make the final product. This would be fine, but actually combining items requires that they first be (permanently) equipped to a character, so if you’ve mis-remembered a recipe and just built a tank item on your mage, there’s not much you can do to fix the problem.
I honestly do wish I had something more positive to say about Teamfight Tactics. Yes, if you know what you’re doing you will definitely win more games than if you don’t, but the game is so reliant on chance that both victories and losses can feel unavoidable and outside of your control. I like the synergy aspect and seeing characters of the same faction work together in a coherent way, but if I didn’t already have so much appreciation for the IP I wouldn’t feel the same way. I think the biggest problem I have with TFT does revolve around the game’s narrative world because it feels like such a waste. Smaller event-driven game modes like Star Guardian, Odyssey or even Bilgewater ARAM are clunky and unpolished, but at the very least they feel like an extended view into the world that the people at Riot Games have spent the last few years developing and embellishing. Why on earth would I want to play a board game in knock-off Skylanders world when I can be reading through comics and stories, listening to adeptly crafted audio dramas, or even just playing as the characters I love on Summoner’s Rift? TFT represents a reluctance to take a chance on new ideas and instead follow the trend of modern gaming, and although it might come back with great success on a commercial level, it does nothing to capitalise on what makes League of Legends special.
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