If you haven’t fired up your Battlecast app in a while you may want to take the time to do so soon. When you do, you’ll receive a message notifying you that the digital game will end on September 1, 2017. That’s when Activision will pull the plug on their Battlecast servers effectively ending the digital version of the game. It sounds like this won’t just end the ability to play online but that it will actually prevent the game from working so you won’t even have the ability to play your single player campaign matches either. We’ll see, but that might be the first game I’ve owned digitally that has become completely useless after a server shut down. Most games allow you to continue the single player game even if you can’t download the game anymore.
If you do still have interest in the game or would like to complete your digital card collection, then you’re in luck. All battle packs and booster packs in the game are now free. I must have opened 300 packs and I’m still 4 cards short. Another 100 packs should do it.
Overall I think it’s a shame that this game is coming to an end. I thought it was a good fun card battling game. The card designs were great, the art was fantastic and I thought it had a good balance of gameplay between the different elemental types. It did have a couple flaws but I didn’t think it wasn’t anything they couldn’t fix in an update or expansion add on. But now at the end, I can see that it was just a very poorly run experiment. The first problem the game had was that you couldn’t easily play it with only the cards. There were no instructions and there were some randomness and tracking issues that would come as a result of trying to play it physically. Next, the game was never really supported. We had a slight expansion with some cards in cereal boxes. However, the cards in the boxes weren’t even complete or in some cases correct. Values were not known at the time of printing and a couple of the cards even changed their ability after scanning them into the game. Speaking of scanning cards. As an iPad player I haven’t been able to scan cards into the game for months. On apple devices the game was tightly integrated with Game Center. Game Center was eventually greatly downgraded on apple devices and after that happened, I was never able to scan in cards or play online. The game tells me I need to be connected to Game Center even though I am, and every other game I use with Game Center works just fine. Maybe that’s just my problem I don’t know. Lastly if you read that message about the servers shutting down, it will tell you that you can get more information at Skylanders.com/Battlecast and even download instructions to play the game with only the physical trading cards. However, if you go there, as of right now, it says nothing about the servers shutting down and there are still NO instructions on how to play the game with physical cards. There is still a link to download the app and there is even an asterisk and a note about buying the physical cards that states that the physical cards are NOT required for playing the game. The reality is now that they ARE required for playing the game if you want to play the game after September 1st. It just another example of how this game was poorly supported.
I hope everyone did get some enjoyment of the game, I know we did. And if you haven’t tried it, then now is the time to go download it, open a bunch of free packs, and build some cool decks. Go play the single player campaign against the AI. It may not be quite as fun as challenging someone online, but it’s still a good bit of fun. Just know that with Battlecast Shutting Down on September 1st, you don’t have long to try out the game.
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