Magic Legends arrives on PC, PS4, and Xbox One in 2021 and aims to bring the essence of the iconic collectible card game to the action RPG genre. It's a serious task to undertake, but Cryptic Studios is no stranger to handling established IP and translating the world to a new format.
Game ZXC recently had a chance to sit down with Magic Legends Executive Producer Stephen Ricossa and chat about the game's newly announced Sanctifier class, Power Nine Easter eggs, and lots more. Prior to joining Magic Legends, Ricossa was the Executive Producer for Star Trek Online where he lead the Xbox and PS4 console conversion project and delivered over 10 seasonal updates and expansions on all platforms. The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why don't you start off by telling us what you can about the new Sanctifier class?
So, the sanctuary class is our white class. Well just for people that are reading that don't know, our classes are made up of a variety of different parts. They have their primary abilities, so they have their primary attack. The primary attack for the Sanctifier is a Piercing Bolt and so it's a long range class, but that Bolt will hit anything in its way until it gets to the end of its shot. And then when it's upgraded it becomes a triple shot and so it's going in triple directions and then piercing a bunch of creatures along the way.
The next one is called Wave of Radiance. Your Sanctifier kind of has a big staff and it makes a wave a bit like an arc. That arc kind of flows outwards not slowly, but not super quick across the screen. So if you're playing against a player things can move out of the way. But it'll do damage to anything it hits. When you upgrade that any friendly that the wave hits will also heal. That'll heal your personal pets and your allies. So if anyone is on your team you could set that up so that there's this great line where it's going to hit your friends and your enemies. It'll be heal, heal, damage, damage, heal, heal.
Then there's the last one that's pretty cool. It's called Devotion and you kind of kneel down and you're immune to damage for like two seconds and you do a heal to all of your allies and you will rez the strongest ally that died in the last 10 seconds. When you level that up every time you do it you gain a little counter until you have this little holy ball spinning around you. When you get three counters and you cast it again you're gonna spawn a 4/4 angel that'll fight with you at the same time that you're doing all your other healing stuff.
Another aspect to our classes is the skill progression. So every class starts at one and they level up to level 30 and there are a bunch of unlocks along the way. Some of those unlocks are what I just talked about the upgraded primary abilities: upgraded Wave of Radiance, all those other things. But there's also your Spark Power. We've talked about these a little bit, but your Spark Power is... You have this meter that you fill up and at certain points you can choose to activate a mana surge which just gives you a massive boost to mana regen so you can cast spells really quickly. Or you can save it up until the bar is full and kick off what we call an ultimate or your Spark.
So for the Spark Power for the Sanctifier, your primary attack gets replaced with a Wave of Radiance that you can cast non-stop instead of having it on a cooldown. And as you're doing that you start summoning ranged and melee angels that just start filling up the battlefield for that entire time. I think it's about 15 or 20 seconds that you're able to do this.
So we consider these spark powers to be kind of like the ultimate expression of that class while also giving you kind of a tide turning moment. You know we've seen it with some of the other classes that were revealed. As we're playing our content it's like 'oh man we're not going to make it' and you'll run the ultimate and you basically reset the battlefield.
Do the angels spawn for 15 to 20 seconds or do they stay out for 15 to 20 seconds and then disappear after that time period?
They stay in for that time period and then disappear. The goal is that you're overpowered, you know? You're hitting up your Divine Angels for X amount of time and then they go. And, again, all of our classes are like this. You have this obscene amount of potency and then you're back to normal.
I'll use an example from a different class. Your geomancer when you hit your Spark Power you go from whatever your geomancer model it is to like a 15 or 20 foot obsidian rock monster. All your powers are changed and you're just like destroying the battlefield with rock and lava for, again, 15 to 20 seconds and then it goes away. So it's that kind of true expression of that class.
But wait, there's more! As you progress through your class you get to your perks. You have one in your late teens and one in your early 20s. So these are what really push your class kind of to the next level. For the first perk, every time you cast a sorcery you gain a boost to Lifelink for 15 seconds. And that stacks up to six times so you're casting those sources you're getting a Lifelink boost so every time your creature does damage you get it back as healing. Then the second perk, half of all your incoming Lifelink damage also heals nearby allies. So now you're bleeding off that Lifelink as a heal around you to friendlies or your own allies or anything else. So it's super super cool.
And then the very last thing you unlock is your trait. The trait system allows you to slot traits. You can slot up to three traits so if I progressed my Geomancer and progressed my Mind Mage and then I progressed my Sanctifier; I can have all three of those traits. The trait for the Sanctifier is anything that receives your heals also gains a shield or temporary hit points anytime they take a heal from you. So, a lot going on with that class above and beyond you know the cosmetic clothing options that come with unlocking that class you can bring to any other class and customize them.
It's sounding kind of like a true healer class in some ways, obviously with some DPS as well. How does that play when you're playing solo?
A lot of heals go to yourself and your summons. And as a ranged class, it has the longest range of the game. As you know we're roughly three-quarter iso and so you can shoot almost all the way across the screen diagonally, corner to corner. So what you're going to want to do from a gameplay perspective when you're by yourself is to get your creatures out there, you want to keep them healed, and you want to stay back and just pepper into that group while your creatures do a lot of work.Â
One of the key things that we have right now with the Sanctifier is with all of these heals they're hard to take down. It might take you longer than a Geomancer to clear that map but you're probably not dying at all or very much. While you're an amazing teammate, by yourself it might take you a little longer, but not much is getting through because you're just like stacking these heals up on yourself. When you're level one you don't have all that stuff, but as you're accumulating your leveled up versions of your primary abilities and you're getting these perks and you're unlocking your Spark Powers, you're just living that healing life.
Whereas, again, you look at the Geomancer I used as an example and it's just like 'Oh do you like damage? Well there's more damage deal! You need health? No, just more damage.' And with the Sanctifier sometimes a good defense is a good defense. Just healing all the time. It's pretty crazy especially with that utility ability where if you look at some of our classes we've kind of split it up some of them have like a little dash to get out of trouble or a leap. With this they don't move they just kind of kneel down and throw those heals because they can take the damage.Â
And whenever you're playing multiplayer online it sounds like a lot of the healing. Is it smart healing that's going to feed out to those who need it or are you targeting your allies specifically to get heals to them?
Depends on the spell. Some spells that you cast will just like be an AoE and they'll just hit anything in that area. So you can like place with two-stage targeting exactly where it's going to be and then you've got you know 'Oh okay, cool my buddy's there and most of our summons are there and i'm going to hit that spot and heal them.' But some of them could just be AoE coming off of you. We want to make them intuitive and easy and we don't want it to be like 'Oh i've got to click this person to click this heal, but I'm just going to like cast something in this in this cone or in this shape and i'm going to tag everything in that area and i want to make sure my buddy's in that area or you know this gigantic creature that he has in that area.'
That's part of the part of the fun of these kind of games, right? How sort of chaotic the battlefield can get, but at the same time there's definitely a balance there between having control of what's happening without you know having to click this particular guy in this little area when there's 50 spawns around and tons of enemies.
Exactly. And especially with everyone having the possibility of being a summon class, right? You could choose to have no summons in your deck and run all Sorceries. or you could choose to have someone that's running like two of the biggest creatures in the game because that fills all of their available creature points. So yeah we need to have healing in all those situations where maybe you want to concentrate your healings on that big guy and just let the guy with the weenie deck just deal with the fact that he has to re-summon his little one ones and you're going to keep that 5/7 alive for as long as you can.
So you mentioned some cosmetic items and things like that that come along with this class. Are there cosmetic items specific to this class that will come along with it?
Yeah, so if you've seen the art for the Sanctifier, that's the entire arrangements of what they're wearing. The robes and the kind of gloves and the arms and all that stuff. All of those when you unlock the class then become customizable parts within your tailor.
So you're kind of looking at your classes and at first everyone will kind of have one costume, but as you unlock classes you unlock costumes and you'll also unlock costumes from play. So, in a very short period of time, you will be able to make your class look however you want and you have a couple of options as we kind of diverge on the tailor a little bit, but you can choose to say when you build your loadout 'oh I want whenever.'
So you're always the same Planeswalker and you can play as a Geomancer one day, Sanctifier the next day. And minute to minute too. If the three of us choose to go and play a mission right now and you guys are rolling like 'We want to do DPS', so I'm like that's fine i'll just swap my class to my Sanctifier, I'll swap my deck, I'll swap my artifact load out. And you might just have a healing loadout ready to go so all you got to do is go down through your loadouts, swap it, and now you're going with your white or maybe your white blue deck because you want to do healing and control. You've got your artifacts that kind of focus on healing and support and maybe you're ready to roll.
And you can swap between those between any levels or missions?
Correct, so you can't swap it in a mission but in between missions in an overworld as long as you're not in combat. You can swap your loadout, or if you're happy with your loadout you just want to like swap your deck, or you want to just swap one spell in your deck. Maybe you've got a new spell as a drop or you got a new spell from a mission unlocked. You're like 'oh I want to trade that one out i think it might be better than this one.' So you can kind of make those swaps in safe spaces as long as you're out of combat and not within an instanced mission.
So it sounds like this would probably come in the form of your deck loadout in this game. Is there any inventory management in this game the way that ARPGs sometimes have?
We intentionally built a game that didn't have you managing space for your inventory. So you will collect eventually probably all of the spells. You will eventually collect probably all of the artifacts. And so what you're managing is which ones you have active at a time as opposed to... It's like more like a sticker book, right? Like have I collected all the spells? Have I collected all the artifacts? Now you're giving yourself all the options in order to give yourself maximum flexibility on building your deck and your loadout as opposed to like, 'oh i got my third rusty dagger, i guess i'll go vend those.'
On the same topic of customization that you were talking about with all the different loadouts and aesthetic, is there a way to customize the way your starting planeswalker looks as far as race, gender, acial features, and things like that?
Yep so you will have a variety of different race options. We'll have a variety of race options and gender options, though the way we're setting up the gender options is we're just calling it body type. So we're not assuming gender, it's just you've got, you know, you have this body type that you can determine whether or not you're male, female, or whichever non-binary choice that you have. That was an intentional choice made. You'll never tick a male or female box, you're just going to pick a body type and that's all it is.
So how has the pandemic impacted your target launch and development in general? It's kind of been crazy for everyone, how has it hit your team?Â
Yeah, it's been crazy. I wrote about this a little bit in a state of the game blog maybe a month ago, but it was was crazy. We really didn't do work from home at Cryptic, and as we kind of saw the writing on the wall, we were able to deploy in about a week a way to get the entire studio running from home. And you know we probably had similar challenges to any other software developer trying to get people collaborating and coordinated from remote and you know in some ways it is less productive, but it's certainly more productive than not working.
So it did impact the launch of the game and I mentioned that in my little write-up, but yeah it's been a challenge. I'm really proud of the team. The way that they responded you know we've shipped our first closed alpha entirely from remote. We're currently in the middle of our second closed alpha, again shipped entirely from remote. So it's a challenge but the team is meeting that challenge and overcoming even though it's slightly less efficient than of course all being together working in the office.
I know early on you talked a lot about having some pro tour players in the studio and other magic designers and people who worked on Magic Arena and things like that. How did how did that sort of influence the way that the game came together?
A lot. They're used to paper magic and it helped a lot because they had so much knowledge of the cards, the lore, and the design decisions. It helped a lot, but then on the other side of it, we are kind of reimagining the card experience as an ARPG. And so sometimes it's like well you know we're reimagining that card exactly as opposed to trying to replicate the card game. We're making an ARPG so there's some some shifts we have to make but having those people in there was huge and especially the Magic Arena person. She kind of did a lot of work on their economy so we're able to bring that knowledge in and do that economy work for us. And economy doesn't just mean money, it means like the rate at which we're giving rewards and the rate at which it takes to level a spell and those types of things.Â
Are there any plans for a power nine easter egg or even power nine in the cards available at launch? Or other hidden references to iconic Magic cards and lore?
Yes, the goal is that people that don't get a reference will think 'oh that's cool,' but we definitely want to let the people that are deep in the lore or at least even the card game have have those types of references. If you look at STO or you look at Neverwinter, those those games are also rich with references for people to kind of enjoy and we want to bring that same level to the game.
As the cards that are available, can you say if any of the power nine will be a card that you can equip? Like a spell that you can equip or an artifact that you can find?
So we are slow rolling that out, but a member of the power nine will probably make an appearance at launch. But yes we'll slowly be accumulating. Can't have everybody's favorite nine at the very beginning! So that's all right now and we'll trickle them out. [END]
There is only one remaining launch class left to reveal, so hopefully the team at Cryptic is ready to offer a look at what the Black-mana planeswalker class has to offer in the very near future. Until then, be sure to check back for more Magic Legends news, updates, and features.
Magic Legends plans to release in 2021 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
