Magic Legends is now a handful of weeks into its open beta period and the feedback keeps rolling in. The development team seems to be listening closely and has already rolled out a handful of significant patches, including the usual bug squashing, but also some tweaks to controversial monetization.
That said, there's still a lot of work to do. The Magic Legends beta testers are still delivering a lot of feedback and the developers are working on implementing additional changes throughout the beta window and before the game's full release on PC and consoles later this year. Executive Producer Steve Ricossa has been delivering weekly State of the Game updates to keep the community in the loop on where things stand throughout the beta.
The latest update arrived last week and focuses on some of the major remaining areas of feedback right now. Two of the biggest topics that Ricossa tackles in the blog post surround the length of the tutorial content and the currency caps that are in place. There are two topics that are frequently discussed on social media and on the game's forums, so it makes sense to take a closer look at them and give the community an update on what the development team has planned.
There are some real, concrete ideas for how the tutorial content length can be trimmed down immediately, but obviously currency caps are going to be a bit more complicated. The development team is aiming to maintain some control over the game's economy and avoid any dramatic market swings based on over-rewarding certain tasks or something like that.
Fans can dive into Ricossa's full notes now...
PERFORMANCE
Last week I spoke about our team discovering some performance wins for Tazeem, and that we discovered even more opportunities to crank up performance in the game. I’m pleased to report that the team has already spun up work on addressing these key issues throughout all of our environments, and will continue to do so for several weeks. While these fixes will not make it live immediately, the team is hard at work on them and I’ll keep you posted in future blogs regarding our internal progress.
TUTORIALIZATION WORK
We’ve heard everyone’s desire to get into the ‘meat’ of Magic: Legends more quickly, and we have a multi-tiered approach. In the very near term, we’ll be reducing the breadth of the overworld progression missions in Tazeem while also removing the requirement to fast travel back up to Briarthorne Glade to turn in your missions. These fixes will help newer players get into the game more quickly, filling loadouts with Equipment and Artifact drops, and building up spell libraries with the recently-doubled spell drop rate.
BATTLEPASS PROGRESSION
There’s been some concern with battle pass missions either not being available or not completing, and while we’re rapidly moving to fix these specific missions, it does mean that some Planeswalkers are missing the opportunity to earn XP. In addition to the huge grant of XP we delivered last week, we will also be running battle pass double XP weekends from time to time while constantly evaluating the overall duration to hit the max level of the pass. We want to make sure the battle pass experience is as clear, fun, and rewarding as possible.
CURRENCY CAPS
We’ve heard a lot of feedback about the presence of various currency caps, with some understanding as to why they exist, but many ultimately having concerns about the cap level. Currency caps allow us to make sure the economy doesn’t get too out of whack if we end up over-rewarding somewhere, while we still get to provide solid numerical rewards without needing to worry about them being too over the top. That being said, we are hearing your feedback and are evaluating some ways to reduce the pinch and provide some options for players that want to engage more deeply than the current currency caps allow.
MID-APRIL UPDATE
I’ve been talking about the Mid-April update for some time, and we’re getting close to when it’ll go live! You should expect to see a pretty large set of patch notes as over 450 bugs have been resolved so far, along with the popular request of removing player to player collision in the game. On top of that we have some of our very initial performance work going live, which won’t make the biggest impact but should provide some help on those early maps. As I said above, the team is actively hard at work hitting the maps in the game and we’re fully engaged on providing a more solid overall play experience. Beyond performance fixes in this update, we also want to help make building out your spell library more efficient - by now including the full 12 spell starter deck for every launch class you unlock. This means if you unlock a class through the realm or the store, that full starter deck will be added to your library. Of course many people have already unlocked classes, and we’ll also be retroactively adding those spells to your library at the same time. We want to make sure everyone can really get into the thick of deck building and explore their own play style with the game.
LATE BREAKING FEEDBACK
We’ve seen feedback coming in recently on the following items, and I wanted to at least briefly touch on them this week.
Multiplayer Missions ending and losing out on drop loot if the reward chest is opened hastily.
We will be taking a look at potential solutions for this, because we definitely want everyone to grab their hard-earned loot before being pulled out of the mission/ordeal instances
AFK Players Farming Rewards - Our engine has built in AFK penalty tech, and since this issue is coming up we’ll start spinning it up. It will take a little time for us to get the values correct for each mission, but getting this online is something we’ll work on.
Mission Queue Notifications - We’ve heard that the “Public match taking too long notice” is obtrusive in the UI, and people would like the option to simply keep waiting while they do other content. We’ll evaluate the ability to make these changes.
There are also reports that when a queue pops users are stuck in place until everyone accepts or declines. This isn’t ideal behavior, and we’ll look into it as well.
Overworld Reliquary Audio Ping - There is some sentiment within the community that they’d like to turn off the reliquary ping in the overworld and simply use the radar on the minimap. We’ll evaluate this for a future update.
It's definitely been a bit of a rocky start to the beta period in terms of the most vocal feedback making the rounds, but it is definitely encouraging to see the development team communicating frequently and releasing lots of patches and updates that directly address player concerns. Magic Legends is still just at the start of its open beta period, so hopefully the developers continue listening closely and compiling a long list of features to improve the game's current experience.
Magic: Legends is available now as an open beta on PC, and releases fully in 2021 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: Play Magic Legends