Vapourware Magic: Legends - online action-RPG with CCG elements from Cryptic Studios - LOL dead

[thesheeep]

If they somehow manage to not ruin it with MTX.

They can't. MTG itself is already a soulless cashgrab, failing to make it so would actually be unfaithful to the source material.

Nah, MtG is a fine hobby if you have the time & money & dedication for it. And people to play it with.
What killed it for me was the way they kept churning out more and more product - I was no longer able to keep up without making it half my life or most of my leisure time.
Well, that and the power creep.

MtG Arena on the other hand is really just a cash grab - it's even more expensive than the real deal, which is just hilarious.

 

[J1M]

PoE 2 and Diablo 4 are on the Horizon. It really seems like an excellent time for a company to enter the action rpg market. No competition at all is there?

Sliding out before those is actually a good idea. You let the big boys remind people the genre exists and then offer them a taste when they are blue-balled by delays.

 

[Sharpedge]

For those curious (I don't expect anyone is), it is a (failed imo) Diablo clone. I got invited to the closed alpha/beta, decided to try at out and was not very impressed with what I saw. I don't think the people making it understand what people who like hack and slash games like about those types of games and so weren't able to make a game which is appealing to that type of audience. I suspect it will fail both at capturing the aRPG audience and the Magic audience.

 

[Norfleet]

Diablo Sans Loot was the word I got, which seems to firmly miss the mark.

 

[Sharpedge]

Diablo Sans Loot was the word I got, which seems to firmly miss the mark.

Yes, its basically an action RPG without any items, with a hotbar where your keys randomly change every time you use an ability so you can never learn what ability is on what key. The hotbar switching is so frustrating that it is actually impressive. I am not sure who thought it was a good idea to create a system where you basically have a randomizer on your hotbar.

 

[Norfleet]

With creative keybinding, you can actually entirely bypass that issue by manually binding keys to specific abilities rather than ability slots. Catch being you have to update your binds every time you change any ability. But at least pressing a button will consistently invoke the same ability.

 

[deuxhero]

For those curious (I don't expect anyone is), it is a (failed imo) Diablo clone. I got invited to the closed alpha/beta, decided to try at out and was not very impressed with what I saw. I don't think the people making it understand what people who like hack and slash games like about those types of games and so weren't able to make a game which is appealing to that type of audience. I suspect it will fail both at capturing the aRPG audience and the Magic audience.

Can you make a girl and take off her clothes?

 

[Norfleet]

I heard the character customization is the weakest of all the Craptic games. There were no customizable clothes from what I heard and saw, so I'm going with "no".

 

[Sharpedge]

For those curious (I don't expect anyone is), it is a (failed imo) Diablo clone. I got invited to the closed alpha/beta, decided to try at out and was not very impressed with what I saw. I don't think the people making it understand what people who like hack and slash games like about those types of games and so weren't able to make a game which is appealing to that type of audience. I suspect it will fail both at capturing the aRPG audience and the Magic audience.

Can you make a girl and take off her clothes?

No. You can't really make characters either. The characters are all iconic magic characters.

 

[ADL]

Fucking LOL
No cosmetic changes in gear? I'm sure they'll sell skins so it's pretty much Black Desert with even less visual customization because at least in Black Desert there was a small number of visual sets per character.

 

[Sharpedge]

Fucking LOL
No cosmetic changes in gear? I'm sure they'll sell skins so it's pretty much Black Desert with even less visual customization because at least in Black Desert there was a small number of visual sets per character.

I didn't see any cosmetic changes in gear, but I assume there will be some. Basically, the way it plays is you pick one of these (what I am assuming are iconic magic characters, since I know nothing about magic), then you pick a selection of powers out of the entire list of powers available to you. Its designed sort of like deck building in a CCG. Then when you go into combat, every time you use a power it removes it from your hotbar (the idea behind it is that it is like you are playing a card), your hotbar shuffles over, a new power is "drawn" and added on the far right and all of your hotkeys have now changed to accommodate the shuffling of the powers. I suspect the main monetization will be selling random card packs to acquire new powers and selling heroes.

There isn't really any gear progression to speak of at all, so it fails pretty heavily as an action RPG.

 

[deuxhero]

Really, having powers drawn as cards that the player has to work out how to combo in the heat of it isn't a bad concept, Baten Kaitos and it sequel did it really well as did Lost Kingdoms 2. The problem is the UI here is clearly set up so the "hand" size will never exceed 4. In Baten Kaitos 1 you had a hand size of 5 by the time you fought a boss with a full party of three (who each had separate hands and could discard cards every time an enemy attacked). At end-game you had a hand size of seven and most end-game cards could be used four different ways in a combo. In Lost Kingdoms 2, you could quickly send cards you didn't want at the moment to the bottom of your deck and the main limitation on the ability to do so was time (it was too slow to do more than more or two cards during a fight due to the need to dodge enemies and the time on your summoned monsters running out). In Baten Kaitos 2 you had one hand of eight for the whole party at the very start but a comparatively small variety of cards and much faster pace.

 

[Sharpedge]

Really, having powers drawn as cards that the player has to work out how to combo in the heat of it isn't a bad concept, Baten Kaitos and it sequel did it really well as did Lost Kingdoms 2. The problem is the UI here is clearly set up so the "hand" size will never exceed 4. In Baten Kaitos 1 you had a hand size of 5 by the time you fought a boss with a full party of three (who each had separate hands and could discard cards every time an enemy attacked). At end-game you had a hand size of seven and most end-game cards could be used four different ways in a combo. In Lost Kingdoms 2, you could quickly send cards you didn't want at the moment to the bottom of your deck and the main limitation on the ability to do so was time (it was too slow to do more than more or two cards during a fight due to the need to dodge enemies and the time on your summoned monsters running out). In Baten Kaitos 2 you had one hand of eight for the whole party at the very start but a comparatively small variety of cards and much faster pace.

Concept might not be bad, execution surely is. In my opinion a better execution would be a hotbar with 20 abilities, where abilities are greyed out until drawn. This way there is no constant reshuffling of your "hand" and a player is actually able to learn which powers are bound to which keys. This will never happen however, because the game is undeniably designed with consoles in mind.

Also, there are potential problems with a drawing mechanism (holding a bunch of dump cards in your hand and then only spamming 1 key) which the devs tried to resolve by, on top of just having a drawing mechanism, also giving every card a mana cost and a cooldown.

 

[deuxhero]

Each card has a cool down? Can you even have multiple copies of a card in your deck in this shit? How badly do you have to fuck up to make your game around cards and force uniqueness? It's a key balance factor on top of being important for customization: A single copy of a more powerful card can be obtained, but the player can't use it consistently, and when the player can freely get whatever cards they want, more powerful cards can be limited to one.

How did they handle non-Red? Red seems the easiest to adapt since it's full of direct blasts and mana acceleration (temp mana in a hack and slash), but I have no idea how the other four (let alone colorless) could be done.

 

[Sharpedge]

Each card has a cool down? Can you even have multiple copies of a card in your deck in this shit? How badly do you have to fuck up to make your game around cards and force uniqueness? It's a key balance factor on top of being important for customization: A single copy of a more powerful card can be obtained, but the player can't use it consistently, and when the player can freely get whatever cards they want, more powerful cards can be limited to one.

How did they handle non-Red? Red seems the easiest to adapt since it's full of direct blasts and mana acceleration (temp mana in a hack and slash), but I have no idea how the other four (let alone colorless) could be done.

Each card has a CD and you can have multiple copies of 1 card. The benefit of having multiple copies of coarse being that it increases the probability of drawing what you want. They have adapted all of the colours, but I don't know anything about the card game itself and as far as I could tell, aside from thematic differences there wasn't any real gameplay difference between them.

 

[Infinitron]

Epic-exclusive, beta on March 23rd: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/magic-legends/home

 

[ADL]

Cryptic. Epic Games Store exclusive. Magic IP. Not even released and people are already outraged by what has been said about the monetization. I can only imagine how they'll monetize exclusive classes, deck slots, loadouts and probably even the cards themselves. Hardest of passes on this shit.

 

[Gerrard]

How can you kill that which was never alive to begin with?

 

[thesheeep]

Don't care about Cryptic or EGS exclusivity, but that trailer just... I mean... generic epic battle music + generic mobile cartoon graphics + mobile-looking interface + apparently only 4 action buttons and that's it?
At that point, why even bother with the MtG license.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Delterius]

this looks like top down fortnite

 

[Infinitron]

 

[[UCHIHA]XxDarkSasuke420xX]

wow surprised they managed to actually make something worse than both diablo 3 and diablo immortal, and 10 years late
what an accomplishment

 

[Infinitron]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

cryptic already being cryptic


also, why isn't this in the mmo forum Infinitron