Might & Magic X: Legacy Dragon Blessings Detailed

It's time to pay another visit to Ubisoft and Limbic's open development blog for Might & Magic X: Legacy, with today's entry revealing the team's intentions to replace the environmental travel skills of yore with "dragon blessings" that will allow us to enter dense forests, walk on water, and more. My biggest concern with this implementation is that "restoring the ancient altars" to access regions of the map may lead to a linear progression through the game or at least the exploratory areas:

Since abilities like Pathfinder and Mountaineer are more like on/off switches, we decided to put them in a separate category: rather than (skills), they became what we eventually called (Blessings).

The Blessings are received from the Elemental Dragon Gods of Ashan (click here to learn more about them). For instance the Blessing of Sylanna, Dragon Goddess of the Earth, is the equivalent of the old Pathfinder skill.

Another problem we encountered came from the visual representation of the game's world. It's easy to walk on a forest tile when the trees are just 2D sprites - in a 3D world, where objects have volume and the ground is not necessarily flat, it becomes much more complicated.

That's why in MMXL dense forests and mountain areas are closed off by special (seal) tiles that can only be passed through if the party has the corresponding Blessing. Walking on water still works the same way as it did in the old games however (although you cannot walk where the water is too deep).