Slay the Spire 2 has been raking in the dough and enjoying all sorts of positive feedback, but the precarious thing about making something people love is that the minute you change it, you're messing with that thing people love. Developer Mega Crit experienced this last week when its first balance changes incurred the collective wrath of thousands of negative Steam reviews.
If you missed the skinny, there's a card called Prepared which costs zero energy and lets you discard one card to draw another. A beta branch patch changed Prepared to Prepare, a one-cost card which discards two cards to gain two energy on the next turn. It's a big change and a nerf to a useful card.
There is some region-specific nuance to why a review bomb followed—many of the negative reviews were in Simplified Chinese and Steam users in China don't have access to certain features where they'd normally be able to leave feedback—but it's clear players of all nationalities were not happy.
Mega Crit responded to the drama with an X post on March 20. "Since we have a lot of new players that weren’t around for StS1’s Early Access phase and players who are new to Early Access games in general, we wanted to explain our patching methodology a bit," the studio said. "This beta balance pass was the first of many to come over the next 1-2 years … this progress will not be linear, and no change is necessarily permanent."
Mega Crit also said that "feedback we receive via the in-game reporter from players who are testing the patch firsthand is the most useful to us," perhaps to gently push back on the review bombing, and clarified that the beta branch is there in part to get a feel for "experimental changes." Mega Crit also explained that the reasoning behind any change comes down to "a mix of player feedback, collected metrics, and our own design philosophies."
It's a rough reception for the game's self-billed "first BIG post-launch patch," but as Mega Crit pointed out, nothing is set in stone just yet.
