The Long Game
Will a new damage cap finally break Puzzle & Dragons’ hold on us?
There are two pillars to a free-to-play game’s longevity: successful monetisation and rapacious power creep. How do you get people to keep spending money? Offer something they don’t already have, that will make them significantly stronger. Puzzle & Dragons, the breakout gacha success story, celebrated its ninth anniversary in February – and its continued success is perhaps best expressed in damage values.
In 2015, when we included it in Edge’s 100 Greatest Videogames, we revelled in our best team outputting a combined total of seven million damage. In 2021, a few days before the game’s ninth birthday, all six members of our team hit the damage cap: 2,147,483,647, the largest value possible in a signed 32bit integer. In fact, Puzzle & Dragons was moved over to 64bit a few years ago, but the cap was kept in place, since the game had effectively been balanced around it all along.
Only with the newly released version (19.0) has the game finally moved on. Certain monsters can now gain access to a passive skill that doubles the previous damage limit. It is the largest hit of power creep the game – any game, perhaps – has ever seen, bursting through the ceiling imposed by its own technology, a legacy sacrificed at the altar of longevity.
That means we’re mere weeks away from a dungeon boss that can only be beaten by a single hit of over four billion. That’s the thing with power creep: it cuts both ways. What began life as a novel twist on the matchthree puzzler has become a game of such complexity that we now play it not just on our phone screens, but also across three or four browser tabs. Enemies bring counters to your tactics and insist you do likewise for theirs, and the stakes will keep rising until the servers shut down. Team building often feels like a degreelevel pursuit, and the hunt for the ‘perfect’ loadout – one with enough scaling to kill and sustain to survive, with the right set of resistances and counters for every devious mechanic the game might throw at you – is elusive even before you factor in the language barrier. The EU version was closed in 2018, and we’ve been playing the Japanese version ever since.
You might wonder whether all of this is really fun any more, and to be honest, we’re not entirely sure either. But Puzzle & Dragons has been part of the daily fabric of our lives for the better part of a decade. It is simply something we do. This is the mobile game’s special kind of magic: it is there in your pocket at all times, a constant potential companion for whatever idle few minutes might occur as you go about your day – or for those minutes you might choose to carve out. Four billion damage on a single card? We’ll just stick the kettle on a sec.