Magic the Gatherings' Diablo Game now in Open Beta

[CriticalGaming]

Perfect World Entertainment

The official corporate homepage of Perfect World Entertainment, publisher of high-quality, free to play MMORPGs

www.playmagiclegends.com

Called Magic Legends, the people over at Wizards and Perfect World entertainment have been making a Diablo-style Action RPG based around the popular tabletop card game Magic the Gathering. Yesterday the game launched into a Free-to-Play open Beta and as a fan of both Diablo and Magic The Gathering, I jumped in to give it a try......

And oh boy it's definitely a Beta. Sadly the game runs like absolute dogshit, poor frame rates make combat difficult most of the time, and graphical pop-in is knarly. If I didn't know any better i would say this is still very much an Alpha version of the game, because there is still way too much missing for me to justify it as a beta. Animations are broken, voice over lines sometimes don't work or aren't in place yet, some spell effects are outright missing, changing Keybinds does not work, graphical options do nothing, and on and on it goes.

However the fucking cash shop works. So at least they know what the most important aspect of their game is don't they.

All that being said the game does have a lot of promise. Combat is really interesting because they've found a way to include the card game into an action RPG setting which is done in a really cool way. Basically how it works is this, you collect spells that take the form of cards from the tabletop game and can put these cards into your "deck". During the game two spells from the deck will appear in your hotbar and as you use these spells they will rotate out at random based off of all the cards/spells in your deck. Basic attacks will fill a Mana bar which is used to cast your spell cards and targeting is done like DOTA or LoL where you hold the button down and aim with your mouse then releasing the button will cast the spell at the pointer's location or direction depending on the spell.

The system is really intuitive and players of the card game will undoubtedly find a lot of cool ways to customize your deck to create crazy character builds. I haven't seem any actual loot in the game yet but I'm still working through tutorial missions so hopefully that stuff unlocks later.

Right now my biggest fear is that they've done all this work on the spell/card combat that they've forgotten the key aspect of a ARPG and didn't design a good loot system. Which means i don't really know how they expect character progression to work. And I hope the META wont end up making players forced to buy booster card packs from the card store to keep their characters power level up with the higher end content.

Still beta though, looks promising, it's free to check out and hopefully it doesn't collapse itself upon it's own greed.

 

[Samtemdo8]

Always wondered how you can take something like Magic the Gathering and make RPGs out of it.

 

[meiam]

All that being said the game does have a lot of promise. Combat is really interesting because they've found a way to include the card game into an action RPG setting which is done in a really cool way. Basically how it works is this, you collect spells that take the form of cards from the tabletop game and can put these cards into your "deck". During the game two spells from the deck will appear in your hotbar and as you use these spells they will rotate out at random based off of all the cards/spells in your deck. Basic attacks will fill a Mana bar which is used to cast your spell cards and targeting is done like DOTA or LoL where you hold the button down and aim with your mouse then releasing the button will cast the spell at the pointer's location or direction depending on the spell.

The big problem I can see from this is that the best strategy in cases like these is to aggressively reduce the number of cards in your deck so that you only have like one or two and can always use them. Hopefully there's a system in place to insentivise having multiple card in your deck.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Always wondered how you can take something like Magic the Gathering and make RPGs out of it.

Well what's in place seems like a good start, and honestly using the cards as your spells is really smart. I just hope there is more flushed out depth to it than just cards and card packs.

 

[laggyteabag]

It looks interesting, but it is also F2P, and F2P tends to bring along heaps of bullshit.

Are there any decent ARPGs that aren't Diablo, that aren't F2P bullshit?

Because Torchlight 3 came out, and that seemed to have been a bit of a dud.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Always wondered how you can take something like Magic the Gathering and make RPGs out of it.

Probably the same way you can take Warcraft and make a TCG out of it, but... backwards.

 

[deleted20220709]

DELETED

 

[Gordon_4]

I wonder if I still have my copy of Shandalar somewhere.

 

[Kyrian007]

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, Grim Dawn, Warhammer 40k: Inquisition - Martyr/Prophecy, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing (at least 1), Warhammer: Chaosbane. Those are the ones I can think of on the top of my head.

And one of those, Grim Dawn, I can fully endorse as a perhaps even superior ARPG to Diablo 1 and 2. I don't include 3 only because I never played it, the auction house stuff and the awful launch kept me away. But I never went back to 3. By the time I would have been tempted, I had already found Grim Dawn.