Magic: Legends State of the Game - May 2021 Update
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Steve Ricossa, the executive producer on Cryptic Studios' online action-RPG Magic: Legends, brings us this state of the game update where he talks about some recent changes and improvements and outlines his team's plans for the near future.
On top of that, we get this developer blog dedicated to the game's new story content, and this one describing the Pyromancer class. The latter comes with an overview trailer:
And here's the big update:
Hello again, Planeswalkers! Your Executive Producer Steve Ricossa here with an exciting announcement that the Late May update will drop in just two days! After over a month of talking about what this update could feature, we have it ready for you to play this Thursday.
Before we jump into the update I wanted to take a moment to say that based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback of the Summoner’s Draw event, the summoning mechanic from that event will now be a permanent part of the random hand. We’re aware that some synergies that worked well before will need further attention from the development team, but as a whole this change seems so positive that we want to keep it going. Now that we’ve covered the event, let’s take some time to go over what changes have been made, what new features have been added, and how your feedback has shaped Magic: Legends.
COLLECTION & DECKBUILDING
The feedback from the majority of our open beta testers is that while the collection aspect of Magic: Legends is fun, it was taking far too long to collect enough spells to make meaningfully different decks. Our planeswalkers wanted to be able to get to the point where they could mix and match spells and colors earlier in the experience so they could play the way they wanted to. We’ve heard you, and while collection will still be part of the game, we’re making sure no one has to wait too long to get right into the experience. We’ve already doubled the spell drop rate, added full starter decks with all class unlocks, and are unlocking your second class as soon as the tutorial is over, and we’ve taken all of this a step further.
NEW USER EXPERIENCE
Part of getting people into the game more quickly was streamlining our tutorialization so planeswalkers had a solid understanding of the game mechanics before heading out into the Multiverse. We’ve already made some changes by reducing the duration of overworld time in our tutorials, but we wanted to go further than that. Players are now earning spells for their starter deck 3 spells at a time (up from 2 at a time), so they complete their starter deck in a shorter amount of time. On top of that, players will only need to progress about half way into the Tazeem region to unlock their realm, second class, second starter deck, and the main player hub in the Sanctum. By entering the Sanctum twice as fast with twice as many spells and now two classes, players will already be in a spot to make meaningful deck choices. The doubled spell drop rate and access to the unique spells per mission will also make acquiring more spells for your library even quicker. We feel these changes still help players understand our systems, while getting them into the deck building mechanics that make Magic: Legends unique.
PERFORMANCE
Over the last few blogs I’ve spoken quite openly about improving performance for Magic: Legends, and there have been a variety of avenues we’ve taken to make these improvements. We’ve touched our shadow tech, lighting choices, object counts, triangle counts, nav mesh optimizations, AI optimizations, and more. All of these changes have resulted in an experience that should keep most players on machines with older components (GTX 750 or equivalent cards, Intel i5 Processors @ 2.3 GHz) in a much better window of performance, and players with more recent machines will enjoy an even smoother play experience. These improvements are looking good in compatibility testing, and we have even more changes lined up after the May Update to continue and improve performance. While some maps are still receiving some adjustments, and varying-spec PCs have received differing levels of optimizations, we estimate an average gain for older hardware of ~45% across the board.
'QUICK PLAY’ QUEUE
As was discussed in previous blogs, in order to make playing the wide variety of queueable content across the 4 difficulty modes easier we’re bringing a ‘Quick Play’ feature to the game. You’ll be able to select a story mission or ordeal mission, choose your desired difficulty mode, and be automatically queued into a mission matching those parameters with other players. This provides a simple way to get into team based content quickly, and also provides additional daily rewards for playing this way. All-in-all this should get players into group content faster and grant greater rewards for those that enjoy teaming up with other planeswalkers for any type of content.
PARTY AND CHAT
Going along with the Quick Queue system, we wanted to improve the chat and party experience. The chat UI will now have the All, Global, Party, System, and Private tabs which allows players to focus on their conversations more easily. In order to reduce early chat spam, the Global Chat tab and the ability to whisper are gated behind achieving Planeswalker Level 5. On top of these changes, the Party Invite window has been improved, and the social menu now includes Nearby Players and Recent Players.
BATTLEPASS
The Battlepass has evolved over the course of Open Beta, most notably with the addition of the Dimir Assassin Class to Battlepass level 50. In addition to that change we have two more we’ll be making with the May Update. First, we’ll be adding a new class, costume, and a variety of early spell unlocks to the first 7 levels of the Battlepass (and carrying it over to all subsequent Battlepasses) so all players, veteran or new, can have more deck-building and loadout variety. The new class being added to the early part of the Battlepass will have more details revealed over the coming days - we think it’ll bring the heat. Second, we’ve added the ability for players to buy Battlepass levels - which will allow people to speed up or catch up on their Battlepass progress more easily.
BOOSTER PACKS
The Booster Pack is also moving in a new direction that more closely mimics the booster packs from Magic: The Gathering. With the May 20th update, the Dimir Assassin Class will be removed from the Booster Pack, and in its place is a bundle of 10 spells as the grand prize. Each of the 10 spells included in this Grand Prize can also be acquired through upgrading the Mystical Study in your realm through normal gameplay. Each grand prize win will grant you one random spell from that pack, and you won’t get repeats. Due to the nature of needing to win multiple times, the odds have been improved dramatically. They’re now 10:1 which is closer to pulling an actual mythic spell from a pack of Magic cards, and the full odds will be posted directly on the booster pack purchase page. Our goal with these changes is to allow players to speed up their normal progress through Boosters without giving them a power advantage over others.
THE FUTURE
With this release essentially behind us, we have a lot more on the horizon for Magic: Legends. We’ve been discussing adjustments to currency caps by looking at where players are at, where the real pinches exist, and how we can adjust them to keep the game balanced but make sure you all feel rewarded for your time in the game. End game has also been a big topic for the team for the last month, we’ve been talking about what types of missions we’d like to create, what higher level difficulty modes mean, and how progression and new rewards factor into the system. While end-game is a heavy topic that takes time to conceptualize and implement, the team is working to flesh it out and deliver a great experience. On top of these community topics, there will of course be new missions, new planes, new sorceries, new summons, and new events to constantly provide new content to the community. Last and certainly not least, the console version of the game is well into development and some members of the team have been playing exclusively on console test kits as we continue to optimize the experience.
I’d like to thank everyone in the Open Beta community that is helping us shape the game as we work towards full launch. The team has been working hard to iterate based on your feedback, and we’re looking forward to even more feedback with this update.
Thanks for playing, and I’ll see you in the multiverse!
Steve Ricossa
Executive Producer
Magic: Legends
