Genesis League Goals - Open Beta - First Impressions

With great anticipation I have waited for the Open Beta to be announced and then it was finally done on the 3rd August and everybody could play. Luckily it was a very quick and simple process to start playing my first matches because I have already purchased packs, opened them and created my first team.

I have also selected what I thought was my best possible team, so didn't need to do any team changes in order to get my team ready for their first match.

One of the things which the developers decided to do was to make this a 7-a-side game and therefore more arcade like than a traditional football management type game. The question is then does this makes the game somewhat more unserious or less fun than if they had gone for a tradtional 11-a-side system that would reflect real life more?

With that in mind, the dynamics of the game will be quite different to anything we might have played before and it will certainly be interesting to see how this will develop.

As someone who has played football games, both action ones and management ones since my Spectrum 48k days, I am interested very much in this game as it will be the first time that you will have a football game where you truly own your own NFT assets and trade them with players IRL.

I guess the closest I have come to this in the past, was when I would play PBM "Play By Mail" games that were before the widespread usage of the internet. In these games, it was possible to trade players with others in a more rudimentary system.

With the launch of the open beta, the option was now available for all players to play the game now live for real.

In the game, you have the option to have 2 teams. Once you create your team, it apparently becomes an NFT in itself on the blockchain. Here I have just created one team as I do not think that I will be playing 2 teams at the moment. Once you build your team, your player NFTs are staked to the team.

With your team already built like I have been prepared for a few weeks, all I needed to do was click the newly available options in the team menu of Casual. This then takes you to start playing your first game.

To get an idea of the gameplay, I recorded this video. There are two ways to play the game. The first is passively like here where it automatically selects the highest probability option and then there is the more active way. First I played just passively.

My first few games I lost quite badly and I think this was because my coach had a not useful buff, so I changed him for Millwall. I also changed up some of my team to those with the highest block ability scores to try and intercept my opponents team better.

By changing my coach to Millwall whom I have 2 copies of, he then gave my team the following boost:

"Boost the chance of success for tackling, with the tackler gaining morale, while the player being tackled loses additional stamina."

With the increased tackling possibilities, I managed to bag my first wins in the game which was more satisfying than losing. The list of coach boosts are in this post here. This will take time to learn all the different abilities and skill of the players and how it will affect the game.

How the league and play2earn aspect will work will also be quite a fun journey to take part in. We can see that the players and team have a Health, Stamina and Morale factors that may work similar to the energy levels in Splinterlands so that you can play a certain amount of games each day and this can give you advantages and disadvantages in games like IRL.

Gameplay

The gameplay aspect passively so far is not amazing and only having 7 players makes the game much less realistic to just watch. It does bring out the arcade feel to the game as expected though.

Once you have watched a few matches, I cannot think you would want to watch it over and over again without any interaction though and this is where the interactive part comes in and makes it more fun and interesting.

This time I played actively and managed to win, although not by such a high margin as the last time I played Louis. However, it was much more fun having an active involvement in the running of the game. It has an arcade feel to it for sure and even if there isn't a full compliment of players it is ok, although I am sure not as good as if they did have 11 players.

Mostly I would select the option with the highest probability unless dribbling and shooting were over 50%, so that I might get a chance of a goal. I am not sure if this is the best tactic.

Here you can see the game takes around 2 minutes to play, similar to a match in Splinterlands. As this is the beta, I think the gameplay could be developed in the future with many fun enhancements that a player could do to influence the game. Maybe you have a super-sub player, or maybe a players stamina has depleted and you can sub him off for example.

Some well thought out things are the coach buffs which act as playing style enhancements to your player abilities. Maybe you want a better defensive or attacking team, you would use a coach to enhance in this way.

An important aspect why it would have been better to go with a traditional 11-a-side football is for realism and the focus on tactics and the variety of different formations that you may choose. Whether this is a traditional 4-3-3 or a Sven Goran Eriksson famous diamond formation is an important aspect of the game I think. However, maybe this would cause longer matches and lose the arcade feel to it?

With that missing and having just 2 in defense, midfield and attack, you will always have a balance leaning in each team in whether you play a more defensive team or attacking for example. This then makes currently the focus more on the individual players stats and maybe how they combine with the other players and coaches compared to having the different total field position area aggregate scores that you would normally think of.

However, I think as mentioned above this could maybe be influenced through the coach card and maybe adjusting the different stat scores of your individual players. So far it is good fun to select the 3 options during the game, I wonder if there may be more choices that will be available over time. This could make the game even more fun.

Card Ownership

So far one of the best parts of the game is owning your own players,coach and forming the team. Being a manager and then guiding your players to victories. How you may need to tweak your team for each match is not so easy to understand what works best yet. It requires some trial and error that many players are doing and sharing their experiences in the discord channel.

I am curious how it may work with leagues and matches when the beta is over and how the play 2 earn aspect will fit into everything. In traditional games you would play a management game with just 1 copy of each player or the fantasy football way where the scores are reflective of real life match outcomes.

Here we will have many players with the same cards and lineups playing against each other. I presume there will be random factors plus the health, stamina and morale that will have an effect on the final outcome. Will there be any home advantage considered and could stadiums be a future feature in the game? A big feature in real football is a plethora of injuries to players, especially if they have been tackled by Roy Keane in the past.

In the results page, will there be things improved to show goal scorers, goals scored in the season and other interesting football management stats on how the team performed?

Other suggestions I have seen are for Man of the Match and I have suggested to reduce the reaction time from 5 to 2 seconds to keep the speed of the game going. Maybe that is too short though. Championship Manager gave players ratings after each match and I wonder how this will compare to the experience scores in Genesis.

I think the game could have a huge potential and it is just the early days so far. The great thing is with the NFTs and asset ownership on the Hive blockchain, it is also like having a digital Panini sticker album and collecting all your favorite players and leveling them up or getting a gold foil version.

So far the game seems to be developing at a decent speed and it is good to be involved from the beginning. I am looking forward to playing further once the beta is over and seeing how I will progress in the leagues compared to my peers.

Have you tried Genesis yet?

Credits:

Genesis Goals in game images from source unless otherwise specified.

Titel image created using source

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