Duelyst

» see duelyst.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Duelyst's entire life ran from 2015 to 2020, and I spent those years writing computer vision code and playing nothing at all. By my thirties the games I still had time for were the ones already installed. A free digital card game that wanted three hundred hours of laddering was never going to get them from me, and I say that as someone who thinks this is one of the better designed things in this graveyard.

It was made by Counterplay Games, founded by Keith Lee, who had been a lead producer at Blizzard. The pitch was simple enough to state in a sentence: take a collectible card game and put a board under it. Two players face each other across a grid of 9 squares by 5, each commanding a General, and the cards you play become pieces that occupy space and have to walk. A minion two tiles away cannot hit you. A spell that clears a row is worth nothing if your opponent stood in a column.

That one change did more than it should have. Hearthstone's board is an abstraction where things sit in a line and the line rarely matters. Duelyst's board is terrain. Where you summon is a decision and so is where your General is standing when you do it, and a game averages about ten minutes because the geometry keeps forcing the issue. The reviews noticed. It holds an 82 on Metacritic across fourteen reviews, and Rock Paper Shotgun's line was that it "does so much more by slapping on a whole other game to the tried and tested CCG formula".

~ the dossier ~

~ the board ~

It reached its audience the hard way. A Kickstarter in April 2014 raised $137,707, well short of a war chest, and the game was meant to be sold up front until the team switched to free-to-play in 2015 so they could keep shipping updates instead of saving them for boxed expansions. Open beta ran from October 2015, the full release landed on 27 April 2016 for Windows and OS X, and the iOS version was pulled afterward, leaving the game on Windows alone.

Six expansions followed in two and a half years, opening with Denizens of Shim'zar in August 2016 and closing with Trial of Mythron in November 2018. In July 2017 Bandai Namco took over publishing so Counterplay could stop doing its own marketing and support. After November 2018 there was nothing. The last expansion sat there for fifteen months while the ladder emptied out, and across the whole of 2019 the Steam Charts figure for peak daily players stayed under a hundred.

~ farewell duelyst ~

The post went up on the Steam page on 25 January 2020 under the title "Farewell Duelyst". The servers would close on 27 February 2020 at 3:00 PM PST and the game would not run afterward, because everything about it lived on the server side.

What they did in that final month was more decent than the industry standard. Every Diamond purchase made between 21 December 2019 and 24 January 2020 was refundable on request, with a window running out to 30 March, over a month after the game itself had stopped existing. And they cut the price of Diamond Orbs by 99 percent, so anyone who wanted to spend their last four weeks opening packs could open all of them. The Wayback Machine caught the site the day after the shutdown and the homepage still said "The Ultimate Tactical Collectible Card Game with a Strategic Gameboard".

~ the afterlife ~

On 10 January 2023, nearly three years after the shutdown, Counterplay uploaded the whole thing to GitHub under CC0. Not a source release with the art held back. Every asset went too, free of charge and free of royalties, into the public domain for modders and for anyone else who wanted a copy. The studio also prepared Duelyst Classic, a build restored to version 1.96.17, which is exactly the state the game was in when the servers went down.

And before that had even happened, the fans had already rebuilt it. Dream Sloth Games got permission from Counterplay and shipped Duelyst II on Steam in December 2022, to good user reviews. So the sequence runs backward from how these things usually go: dead in February 2020, rebuilt by strangers in December 2022, and then handed over outright a month later. Most games in this graveyard are gone in the ordinary way, which is to say the binaries survive and the servers do not, and no amount of wanting brings them back. This one you can build from source tonight and play for nothing. It is the exception that shows you how rare the exception is.

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