The Journey Guide: Why We Decided To Make It

CSvenGG

Hi! I’m CG_SvenGG, you might remember me from the last few Q&As or my posts on the forums. I’m a Senior Game Designer for Galaxy of Heroes and I helped create the Journey Guide.

Hi Holotable Heroes,

As we announced in the Road Ahead, the next Title Update will bring The Journey Guide to Galaxy of Heroes. With 177 characters and 44 ships in the game, understanding how to unlock your favorite Star Wars characters or how to build the mightiest fleet in the galaxy can be awfully daunting whether you’re new to the cantina or a veteran of the holotables. With that in mind, we explored what opportunities we had to improve each of these experiences:

1. Welcoming new players to Galaxy of Heroes
2. Welcoming back players who have been away from the cantina for a while
3. Accessing limited-timed events
4. Understanding unit and event requirements
5. Setting long-term goal formation

We decided that unit acquisition and events would be a highly impactful area of the game for improvements, which we’ve named The Journey Guide.

What is the Journey Guide?
The Journey Guide is a new feature designed to help players build long-term goals and give you clear choices in achieving those goals. To do this, the Journey Guide will present players with a line-up of units which can only be unlocked through specific activities like legendary events, raids, and special missions. Every unit in the Journey Guide will include a summary of their strengths and synergies to better highlight why players might want any given unit. The guide will also surface required units - plus the required and recommended investment levels for those units.

Why did we make the Journey Guide?
We see a lot of threads pop up on reddit and the forums looking for advice on what order to unlock characters. The community has always done an awesome job creating infographics, charts, and providing helpful advice to new, returning, and overwhelmed players. As the game continues to grow in breadth and depth, we want to do more to support not only players’ understanding of what your options are but also to give you the means to pursue them.

With 10 legendary events, 4 journeys, 2 epic confrontations, 3 raids, and 3 territory battles granting exclusive access to some of the most exciting units on the holotables, deciding where to spend your time and resources is no small feat. The Journey Guide aims to present those units’ strengths, synergies, and unlock requirements in an intuitive and informative way that reduces uncertainty, mistakes, or other undesirable behavior players would want to avoid as they grow their collection of heroes.

Normally, with earnable units, players can browse the holotables or use the find flow to locate where to earn or buy shards and blueprints. However, units with specific event requirements aren’t available when the event isn’t scheduled, and it can be difficult to prioritize investment in one squad over another. Our hope is that by gathering units with specific unlock requirements into one place, that players will be empowered to decide what to chase and how to do so. With the Journey Guide, players should be fully equipped to judge the potential benefits of a new unit and the difficulty of the chase to unlock that unit all the way to 7 stars.

Switching gears: Everyone in the studio gets hyped whenever our Senior Motion Designer releases a new video. We wanted to harness that enthusiasm to capture the same feelings and quality those videos invoke in-game. Holding up our highest quality work as a standard and pushing ourselves to do better is foundational to our ongoing commitment to Galaxy of Heroes and its players. Raising our standards and looking at our source material - Star Wars - drives us to do more to fulfill the fantasy of being a holotable game player in a cantina in a galaxy far, far away.

Ultimately, we’re trying to put the tools into players’ hands to decide what you want, how to get it, and to do so on your schedule. With the Journey Guide, we hope to deliver that experience with compelling visuals that celebrate your progress and your personal journey in the Cantina.