During Marvel Snap's July Developer Update video, Ben Brode appeared ready to drop a small tease about an upcoming competitive game mode but was censored before he could reveal its name. Well, thanks to some sleuthing by Snap Streamer Tobimaro, we now have a better idea of what Brode may have been about to tease: a Tournament mode.
Tournament Mode
In the video, Tobimaro goes through a number of files in the game's code that mention tournaments, hinting at how they'll be executed and what they'll entail. While most of the lines of code that mention Tournaments don't give much information beyond that, there is one particular screen grab that's the most revealing.
Text for assets in a tournament mode (Source)
What we have here is some coded-in asset text for a future game mode, and the text "Start Tournament" gives it away that these text boxes are probably intended for use in a Tournament Mode.
What else can we glean from this? Well, the "Choose Deck" text tells us that this will be a constructed format where, similar to Hearthstone's Brawliseum, you take your best deck into combat with other players. "Purchase a Ticket to Play" means that this Tournament Mode will require tickets (purchased or *possibly* earned) to play; Tobimaro even found a Ticket icon in the game's code to lend credence to that idea. And, last but certainly not least, there is the text "Claim Rewards!" so we know that the Tournament Mode will have rewards--possibly an exclusive new card that will be obtainable first only by participating in the tournament, as the developers have mentioned before that they're going to add ways to get new cards into the game.
What else can we expect from a Tournament mode? We strongly suspect that this Tournament mode will use the format that was introduced in the first Developer Gameplay stream: two players face off in a match, and the first to ten Cubes wins that match. Thanks to the lines "SetTournamentWins" and "SetTournamentLosses", we also think that this Tournament mode will not use a single elimination bracket, but rather something more like Hearthstone's Duels mode, where you play until you get a set number of wins or losses.
But Wait, There's More!
Tournament Mode isn't the only game mode hinted at in these lines of code: eagle-eyed viewers can see mentions of a Practice Mode and a Solo Mode in the catalog folder, and also catch glimpses of lines in the link folder for "PlayCustomLeague," "PlayCustomScenario," and "PlayAiLeagueOnServer." While we have a good idea of what a Practice Mode and Solo Mode could be, we admit we're a little in the dark on Leagues and Scenarios. Are these relics of an older version of the game, or promises that Marvel Snap will be expanding beyond just a Ranked mode? Only time (or more leaks) will tell.
What do you think a Tournament mode in Marvel Snap will look like? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Comments
do the game files say anything about PC release? no?
If Hearthstone has taught us anything, it's that it is impossible to code a tournament mode for a card-based game.
how... would a tournament work based on the snap doubling mechanic being an absolute core element of gameplay???
If it works like what they did on the gameplay stream, a match will basically consist of any number of games until one of the players has 10 Cubes. So the snap doubling mechanic actually works really well here, since winning a big pot could be huge in determining the winner of the match, and a player's use of the snap in one game could be the difference between winning and losing the entire match.
Of course, that's only assuming they do in fact use the "10 Cubes to Win" format, and not something else.