Clash Royale (2020-present)

All of this just works. ― Todd Howard

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Clash Royale (2020-present)
Behold: the forefather of the ubiquitous card-based tower defense genre. It's seen better days, though.
Genre(s): Vertical Tower Defense Platform(s): iOS Android Release Date: March 2, 2016 Developer(s): Supercell Publisher(s): Supercell Country: Finland Series: Clash of Clans Predecessor: Clash of Clans

"[Supercell has] done nothing for the community. They've only taken, and taken, and taken, and eventually, they're going to have to give. And when they realize that, I hope it's going to be soon. I don't know if they're ever going to, they might just not. They might just be in their board room meeting, watching this video, calling me a dumb-ass, raking in the money. They're like, "What a dumbass! He wants to play a game. Look at this money, look at this dollar, $100 dollar bill, hundred dolla-imagine." They don't care about us."

— B-rad on the current state of the game

"Clash Royale" is a strategical vertical tower-defense game developed by the Finnish gaming house Supercell, released in 2016 and it's a spin-off of the well known Clash of Clans, being the second game of the Clash game universe. The game became so popular due not only to the popularity of the just-mentioned Clash of Clans, yet its vertical mechanics and the elixir gimmick made it one of the most popular games in the App Store. Once, the game was well received by Clash fans, critics and audience, until the company went greed in the new decade (keeps milking more the game even today) and the clan wars got a controversial reworking that still piss off thousands upon thousands of users everyday.

Why It Can't Clash Anymore

NOTE: Some of its flaws that already existed even before this era will also be pointed out.

1. The first thing we can notice here is how the game is bad-treated by Supercell, since they turned it and its original source in one of the biggest cash cows ever seen in a mobile game, and due to this, they do put effort only at pleasing high-pocket players and continuing to give dishonor among new players. Keep do this by making incredibly horrible offers on premium stuff that cannot be afforded through money or gems and the infamous Pass Royale (which we'll talk about it soon) they have ripped off from Fortnite. Everyways, they'll do everything to let customers spend more real money in game.
   • The fact they're only focused on the Clash franchise and do ignore other games like Boom Beach or Hay Day make their thoughts unoriginal, as their situation is a rehash of the same situation Rovio has with Angry Birds, which is a rehash of what PopCap Games does to Plants vs. Zombies, which rehashes what Nintendo, Sega, Activision do to the respectly Mario, Sonic and Call of Duty's franchises. So why they cannot go new leaf and become original?
   • Speaking of microtransations, most of them are based on a purpose "buy-to-level up", which despite being at least better than the "pay-to-win" one, becomes just unfair when you suddendly meet players who got lvl 15 king, despite being in Arena 8-10 and have all the cards who can easily kill your deck in less than 25 seconds. The other part of them are just cheap cosmetics that don't deserve to be paid with real money (whoever wants to spend 5 bucks for an emote?).
     • They even use this latest technique to milk even in game problems. Once they sold for $3 an emote based on disconnection.
2. Another major problem here is that Clash Royale's updates went severely downhill since the Clan Wars 2 updates in summer 2020 and has never recovered since. This update shocked almost the entire community as it seemed perfectly fine beforehand and the update only made things overly complicated. Back then, users had to collect cards by doing battles against other opposing clans' members to fill a unique card selection with which players then chose among the limited cards to compete in a big final battle, which was an original concept that was never done before and it encouraged fair-playing. Meanwhile, the new one focuses around you trying to set up alone a defense to your ship and your main objective is to let clan ship to cross a goal as you have to destroy other people's defences, so you and your squad will be able to tear down temporarily the enemy ship. Despite it cannot sound bad on paper, having it as a server's main profit feels kinda wasted, since people cannot relate at all to other members to help each other, cause is based more on how you manage your situation over other's.
   • You have almost two days to prepare your defence deck before war starts, during this, you're allowed to fight a random someone in other battles not related to your clan's power. Apart defending the ship, you're literally doing nothing helpful for the progression.
   • The defence system is awful, both in how you set it up both in how you fight it. You have three elixir gatling gun towers with tons of HP (in a way others can damage them too), and each have four card slots, and their purpose is to spawn randomly on the map when the tower gets damage or after being destroyed during a current battle. During a battle against it, you got limited time and your king health will be something less than 200 HP. The towers act like the giant X-bows which don't wait to exterminate your team while enemy's units come to defend them. It's so bad made that's provoking.
   • Even after the fall 2020 improvements, the game netted massive backlash for the numerous problems that can cause this to become accused of being pay-to-win:
     1. It favored larger clans over smaller clans, meaning said smaller clans or large clans with many inactive members will struggle due to low numbers.
     2. Clans are not matched with clans of the same or similar time zones. This means that one clan can have an unfair time advantage since they are active in one time zone when their competitors are not active for not being in the same time zone.
     3. All cards have an uncapped level, which when combined with poor matchmaking, means that there's a possibility of being matched with a clan far stronger that one's own clan.
     4. Rewards for not winning is far too punishing, as one losing gets a 1/10 of the winners reward.
     5. The update to coincide rework needlessly changed UI and removed features like daily quest against player bases' demand.
3. The updates following Clan Wars 2 only seemed to get even worse:
   • The Level 14/Champions update was terribly received due to adding yet another rarity of cards that is difficult to obtain. More importantly, adding Level 14 caused a major balance shake-up and further forces players to grind to level up and keep up.
   • The Battle Banners update provided meaningless and pointless cosmetics that were a chore to collect, merely serving as a show-off rather than anything else.
   • The October 26, 2022, update, is infamous for adding the pointless Path of Legends update, which, as mentioned in WICCA#5, is just another branch of the base game with no incentive to complete whatsoever. Not helping is that six new arenas were added to Trophy Road, still yet forcing players to grind.
   • Clashmas, while not awful, was heavily underwhelming as almost nothing was added into the game besides a Card Boost.
   • The Update for Losers, released in March 27, 2023, was not only a terrible way to celebrate the game's seventh anniversary, but also one of the worst updates to ever be released. Season Tokens, a new currency which you can use in the Season Shop, were underwhelming at best, and the Events were updated to be even less rewarding. The worst part about this, is that the Pass Royale was updated by not only splitting its rewards into three tiers, but extensively nerfing its rewards. No more would you be able to obtain a Book of Books, Magic Coin, etc. by spending only $5, nor could you gain a Royal Wild Chest by completing it for free. Instead, you would need to spend $12 to get significantly less valued items.
   • The Card Evolution Update, released on June 19, 2023, may be considered the absolute worst of the bunch. They added Level 15 along with the update to further add another layer of progression required to even stay competitive, and had a terrible system. You upgrade your cards with Elite Wild Cards, which were hard to gain. The worst part, though, is the incredibly flawed Evolution cards. They are stupidly imbalanced and terribly executed, as some of these evolutions seem to be lazily made and/or just original. Because of this game-changing update that would pave way for more evolutions to come, this update managed to be even worse than the notorious Clan Wars 2 update 3 years ago, meaning that Clash Royale would be broken beyond repair and will never reclaim its former glory.
   • Lucky Drops Update, while not as bad as the previous major updates, was criticized for its balancing issues.
   • The Goblin Mode Update, while not bad on paper, gets incredibly stale as time goes on and feels more grind-demanding than ever. Worse is that the mode would be removed and never seen again.
   • The Lucky Drops 2.0 update, although decent, removed the long-running Crown Chests that were around since the game's launch.
4. They cannot ever decide if maintain a brand new feature or just delete it out to make space to a worse one. After the Play Store achievements went deleted in 2017, Supercell replaced them with the Quest Book, which had hideous unlock goals.
5. Repetitive, boring, and frustrating gameplay. Because of this, the game feels more of a game to grind rather than to play for fun.
   • The core 1v1 trophies system ("ladder") is heavily time-consuming and too level-dependent. With the addition of more levels, the game feels like one that focuses more on grinding rather than actual skill.
   • The addition of more arenas past the 5,000-trophy mark is, simply put, a way to lock off items that could easily be obtained much earlier on in earlier versions and simply serve as a motivation for painful grinding.
   • The Path of Legends is nothing more than irrelevant. It's just the core 1v1 mode without any major twist, except for the rewards that are offered along the way. Worse yet is that there is a missed opportunity to add unique game modes each month or week to this mode to differentiate it from the core trophy ladder.
6. The development team can make extreme balance change, making certain cards extremely powerful (i.e. the Royal Giant damage buff or freeze spell rework), or make the card extremely weak (i.e. the Royal recruit elixir cost increase or magic archer slower first attack nerf), which becomes extremely controversial in the community due to Supercell's weak communication to players.
   • Speaking of which, some of the worst examples happened in late-2018, when Supercell held community polls to vote for buffs and reworks of certain cards. Only two were ever held due to backlash of the ice wizard buff (October 2018) was insubstantial and stole the space for cards that needed buffs more than the Ice Wizard at the time and the Dart Goblin damage buff (November 2018) sparked controversy since it was voted over the health buff of archers, which the latter was underused at the time.
   • A second example is in late-2019, Supercell started to rework cards in the game.
     • One was the Executioner in September 2019, which had it's damage significantly increased by 82%, slightly decreased axe return time, but reduced range. Many feared that this rework would make the executioner too powerful due to the massive damage increase alone. This fear even reached Supercell due to the finalized damage buff was a tapered down from the original 98% damage buff. The fact that Supercell reduced the damage buff due to fear of backlash should show that even they knew this rework would make the card too powerful before release of the update.
     • The Witch rework in October 2019 was a problematic one as well, due to losing the splash damage that made it potent in some deck layouts and changed skeleton spawning layout turned the card to becoming similar to the musketeer that can spawn skeleton. This received backlash due to the fact that they changed the mechanics of the witch when it's far too late to make such change.
   • Overall, both cards were changed in function when people didn't asked for, so much that later on in late-November 2019, Supercell reverted the most problematic reworks of said cards, issuing an apology note for the change. With that in mind, it took Supercell the period of almost three months to know the saying of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
7. The Royal Giant and Elite Barbarians. The two troops are known for infamy for being strong cards that's easy to over-level due to being a Common rarity. These cards when over-leveled, is extremely strong to where the cards are hard to counter. There are also supporter asking to buff both said cards, due to their underwhelming performance when equal level to all other cards.
8. Rampant toxicity in the player base, of which Supercell themselves helped fostered through the emotes they've added.
9. On the topic of emotes, countless of emotes are overpriced and limited-time items, essentially serving as collectable NFTs.

Qualities That Are Still Royal

1. Despite glaring issues in the modern game, it was MUCH better in 2016-2019, and early 2020 to a lesser extent.
2. Although the music can be overused due to the game's naturally repetitive gameplay, it is still decent.
3. There are still some fun, well made game modes:
   • 2v2 and its associated modes.
   • Touchdown, which models off of American football.
   • Heist Challenge.
   • Chess Royale
   • Triple Draft
   • Classic Decks
4. Some modern updates were still done right:
   • Magic Items were largely handled fairly well.
   • The addition of new arenas and gold crates in mid-2021 was also handled well.
   • The Masteries update, released in early 2022, was arguably the best "modern" update released by Supercell, as it provides a new way of playing your cards while having good rewards.
   • Lucky Drops 2.0 is generally considered an improvement over when it was initially released.
5. Although adding another frustrating layer of progression, the new arenas and graphics were mostly positively received.
6. Some modern cards can be fun to use.
7. To be fair, despite its major flaws, Clash Royale has largely sustained its atmosphere such that it continues to rake in new and returning players every day, hence it still has a large number of players still playing. In fact, some people may be indifferent on this era of Clash Royale and may even like this show regardless of being much better in the past.

Reception

Clash Royale initially received positive reviews on release. However, Clash Royale received extremely polarizing reception as of summer 2020 that gradually shifted to an overwhelmingly negative reception. Criticism was directed at the game's quantity-over-quality ideology, often pointing to updates such as Clan Wars 2.0 and Evolutions as the game's turning point. Many fans, players, content creators, and critics have stopped playing the game completely, often leading to players moving to Supercell's other games, such as Brawl Stars and Clash of Clans.

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