Recently, in the gaming community there is news of Tempo Storm, a large American Esports team, joining in a partnership up with GamerToken, a digital marketplace for gamers to buy, sell, and design unique in-game items. Resembling Bitcoin in a sense with its digital currency, but with digital items you received through in-game activities.
What strike the interesting article is that Reynad, founder and player for Tempo Storm is working on a new game called, The Bazaar. “The game is a digital deckbuilding card game set in an intergalactic marketplace, where players go head-to-head,” according to the description on the website.
In an article from Pcgamer, Bazaar started off from a passion Reynad had in wanting to create his own card game. Reynad always spoke about how he’s dabbled in game development and without having to stream Hearthstone at a daily basis or run his organization, he has time to make his vision into a reality. Because Reynad is the owner of Tempo Storm, he’s using his Esports team to publish Bazaar under the Tempo Storms banner, which will be the first game ever from them.
It’s surprising the lack of information and articles about Bazaar. When you google the Bazaar, there are only two sources of information, the main website of Tempo Storm and the Reynad’s Youtube channel. All current updates so far about the game is on Reynad’s YouTube channel, with the most recent update back in July 10th, 2018.
There was a funding campaign on Indiegogo.com back in May 10th, 2018, which the campaign raised over $115,000 with 2707 backers for the game. The money will be used for the people developing the game and speeding the development process, as they stated on the page. Unfortunately, the game didn’t reach its goal of $150,000 by the time it ended. Meaning it would take more time in developing the game. When you view the page, you see the perk rewards were discounted, which is worrisome if it had to be discounted because of funding reasons or was the tiers too high or some other reason.
Now taking a look at the current built of Bazaar, the game looks visually identically to Hearthstone, a free-to-play online collectible card game from Blizzard Entertainment. Both games have the fantasy magic theme, but with minor visual differences. Because of the similarities of the looks, this could be a potential issue for Bazaar with Hearthstone already having a 5-year establishment.
I Initially thought Bazaar was set on a Sci-Fi theme because it stated on their website that its “set in an intergalactic marketplace.” So far, there’s nothing that have any resemblance to intergalactic, but it could be referring to its partnership with GamerToken so the description about Bazaar could confuse some people and should be clearer in its wordings
Shadowverse, a digital card game owned by Cygames that plays very similarly to Hearthstone. The game focuses on an anime theme, which attracts a different group of audience who enjoy this style of game and/or the same type of audience who play Hearthstone. It would’ve been an interesting theme add in the card building genre if Bazaar did focus on a theme that differentiate itself from Hearthstone and Shadowverse.
Reynad does address questions regarding its similar design Bazaar has with Hearthstone, and he explains in the video of the gameplay mechanics that sets Bazaar apart from Hearthstone.
In Bazaar, the core mechanic is the 4 main stores on your centerfield, which you use coin cards to either buy items to be put in your deck or money to buy even more money to build up to have higher spending cost. You also can draw attack cards that allow you to attack your opponent. There is a cool feature where there are three neutral stores on the side of the field of a neutral coin that both you or your opponent can buy, and two neutral monster you both can kill for a reward.
There’s the purgatory, where cards bought or played during the turn are sent to the discard pile at the end of the turn, and if you have no more cards in your deck than all the cards in the discard pile are shuffled back into your deck. Finally, the last feature is the mulligan, where both players can change the cards in their stores up to 4 times randomly of what they can buy.
Reynad states that once the game is completed, it’ll be completely different from the first initial gameplay video shown, especially since they’re importing it from the Unreal engine to the Unity engine – but different engines run will mainly affect graphics and frames. It’ll be interesting to know how what new changes there will be from the first initial built to the final built.
There’s no set release date and if it will be a free-to-play game yet, but overall, the game seems to have potential. The partnership with GamerToken of integrating with its market place. Tempo Storm will be able to move into a blockchain setting to enhance digital economy, generate new ways for revenue, having collectible memorabilia and crowd sourcing, and this will be GamerToken’s first entry into Esports with their partnership with Tempo Storm.
Surely, Reynad should not only focus on the game, but on promoting side to spread more awareness to people who might be interested in the game. Otherwise, it will be difficult for Bazaar to stand its ground against Hearthstone or Shadowverse.
DAILY LIFE OF AN OTAKU 