Let’s talk about Rogue Mage contracts in Gwent

Hi everyone!

Let’s talk a bit about Rogue Mage. As we know, Rogue Mage isn’t selling too well. In fact, it’s selling rather poorly, with estimated 13.1k – 100k (that 100k is highly optimistic) on steam and sad 34th page of GOG’s bestsellers.

Now, there’s a lot of good reasons why Rogue Mage doesn’t sell too good along non-Gwent as well as Gwent players and how to fix that. The most obvious answer is add more content to RM, but that’s not the I’d like to talk about. What I’d like to do, is focus on is why Gwent players aren’t interested in playing RM. It’s not like it’s unknown to Gwent players, after all there’s Rogue Mage tab right next to “Play” tab in the menu and yet, if you’d look on twitch, youtube or forums/discord/reddit – there’s very little talk about it.

I’d like to bring into attention one of the reasons, why in my opinion it’s happening – lack of connection between Gwent and Rogue Mage.

With “Gwent (…) Single-player Expansion” in its title, Rogue Mage is barely present in Gwent. Sure, there is the mentioned earlier tab in the menu and a small pack of cosmetics for Gwent, received by owning the deluxe edition, but that’s it.

Oh right! there are also contracts…

This is where the lack of connection between Gwent and Rogue Mage is most visible for me – the two contracts are extremely disappointing. Boiling down to pretty much "oh, you own the game? cool".

With Rogue Mage being considered an expansion and de facto an additional mode for Gwent, there should be a lot more ways in which playing Rogue Mage influences you experience in Gwent. In short: a lot contracts.

After all, Rogue Mage is a type of game that should encourage you to play it a lot. But even me loving the game, after completing all the achievements, finishing the story and hitting over 100 hours in, got to ask myself why play it more, even if I enjoy it a lot, when I could play Gwent and gain resources, cosmetics there? By playing Rouge Mage I get the feeling of missing out, by not playing Gwent and contracts are the best way to nullify that feeling. By playing more and more runs, player should get something extra from it in Gwent.

Here are few examples of contracts, I'd like to see in Gwent:

A simple contract for defeating standard enemies:

Defeat 5 -> 10 -> 25 -> 50 -> 100 Standard enemies.

Reward: 2RP -> title -> 5RP -> avatar -> Standard Cardborder for bronze cards.

Contracts for defeating the elites:

Defeat 5 -> 10 -> 25 -> 50 -> 100 Elite enemies.

Reward: 2RP -> title -> 5RP -> avatar -> Elite Cardborder for gold cards.

And separate contracts for defeating Elites and Bosses, in this example Maxii and Albastra:

Defeat Maxii, the Mage Hunter -> on Adept difficulty. -> on Master difficulty -> on Grandmaster difficulty.

Reward: 2RP -> Mage Hunter title -> Maxii, the Mage Hunter avatar -> 10RP.

and

Defeat Albastra, the White Dragon. -> on Adept difficulty. -> on Master dificulty. -> on Grandmaster difficulty.

Reward: 5RP -> The White Dragon title. -> Albastra, the White Dragon avatar. -> Albastra Cardborder for gold cards.

In my opinion, with contracts like these, rewarding a player for continuing playing, Rogue Mage would gain a lot more popularity among Gwent players. Not only would players gain some reward points (making up for not playing Gwent) but also exclusive cosmetics. I mean, look at these cardborders: link, link, link, link. I recon a lot of players would want to customize their cards in Gwent with these borders, right?

Overall, I think it’s a missed opportunity to enhance both Rogue Mage and Gwent’s experience and I sincerely hope that devs will consider adding more contracts related to Rogue Mage to Gwent.

Cheers