Wizards of the Coast, in connection with Cryptic Studios CEO Stephen D'Angelo, announced today an upcoming Magic: The Gathering MMORPG. Cryptic Studios is an American video game developer specializing in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Cryptic Studios is responsible for the major MMO hits Star Trek Online, Champions Online, and Neverwinter.
Let the excitement take you away as you discuss this announcement, speculate, and scream in anticipation here, in our brand new MTG MMO forum!
Then I read a little further and saw Cryptic and was like, "Oh damn. That's not good".
I played Neverwinter for a couple months. It was very grindy. It was very P2W or more accurately, Pay-2-(Be able to do anything). It felt like I was playing a state-of-the-art game circa 2004. It felt like something I could have played on the original Playstation. The special holiday events are pure grind and not at all fun.
I currently play Star Trek. If I wasn't a big Star Trek fan, I wouldn't keep playing it. It's less grindy and less P2W than Neverwinter. It even lets you fairly easily earn cash store credit through in-game activities. So, there are certainly some good aspects to it. But, it suffers from the same non-modern feel that Neverwinter has...perhaps state-of-the-art 2010. Playstation2 quality maybe. The special holiday events are grindy, but it's more of a log on for 2 minutes a day for a month type of grind. The developers have NO CLUE how to do PvP and any new PvE group content they add is completely unplayed after the first 2 weeks because there's just no reason to do it. Their gear system is a 100% crafting grind. They fix major bugs within a week and minor bugs go unfixed for months...some significant bugs still exist from the game's Beta stage.
I'd choose Cryptic over Trion or literally any made-for-Asia company. But, I really wish this had been the one company that would have no reason to do it...Blizzard. Even though they'd steal my money every month.
Get it?:laugh2:
1. The MMO industry has been rehashing the same model over and over and over and over and over. Make something original.
If this game starts with me running through quests to gain levels and ends with me running high level dungeons and raids to gain gear then I have no interest in this whatsoever. It should not feel and play like World of Warcraft. This needs to be an original title with original concepts or don't bother making it. A fresh IP to crap all over with the WoW model will only carry you so far. Look at everyone else who has tried it. Users are tired of playing the same MMO again and again. Make something new, make something original, make something awesome.
2. Consider where you want to make this game fall in the timeline. I'd rather see planes I love then meet all the main planeswalkers at their current age.
Think about the state of planes in the current timeline. Each set that gets released tends to cause radical alterations to the plane it happens in. Some to the point of destroying the plane.
My favorite planes are Alara and Innistrad. And my favorite versions of them was the way they were first introduced to us. Five shards each devoid of two colors of mana and separated from each other, and a horrific world of werewolves, zombies, spirits, vampires and religious humans opposing it all. No Eldrazi.'
Take us back in time a bit. Close enough in the timeline that we can visit all our favorite planes and they are recognizable. Far enough back in the timeline that half our favorite planes haven't been mostly destroyed.
For me the best way to bring the magic feel on a game online ( without being a card game, but a 3D game focusing the story) would be a game with online multiplayer missions with diferent modes ( co op, teams, one vs all, etc ). The "multiplayer missions" type is like the Raid mode on Resident Evil Revelations 2.
My ideal concept:
Name:Tastes of the multiverse, or something in those lines
Start up Menu: Multiplayer ( where most of the missions can be played) and Single Player ( where the player can play missions that at least train hin for the multiplayer ones)
On Game: Players can choose to see what missions have people waiting to start or to see the available planes. Then the player can choose to join in a mission or wait for one.
For exemple:
You open the Tarkir Plane, there are 5 missions: Last Stand, for 5 players(In Khans' Tarkir, u get a random character from one of the 5 clans, have your time to choose spells/ habilities from a small number of available ones, and then go on a Death match agains other people, however wins gain some score points); Rob the Dragon's Treasure ( In Dragons' Tarkir,for 2 to up 8 players, players gets a random rebel of the Dragon Clans, Khan Clans, and have ro kill a Dragon that will be played by a random player, or by one specific player, depends on the mod choosen for the mission, if team wins it gets X points, if Dragon wins it gets X*(n-2) or X n=number of players X if n=2 , for exemple ), etc...
Then You can choose a mission to wait for people to join ( if there aren't another of the same mission alread with people waiting ) or u can go to a mission that has alread some people waiting for it to start.
How could people know when a mission is starting or talk to people to join missions? Well, there could be chat rooms for the game in game, soo people could ask for someone to play mission X from plane Y with them...
Why the points? Leaderboards and maybe later introduce a planeswalker feature where players could create characters playable in all missions after hitting some score in the game, and maybe make tournaments where part of the prize would be getting your character printed in the card game.
Other ideas for missions on planes:
Innistrad: could have some missions with mechanics similar to Dead by Daylight ( one monster hunting people, or in that case a monster being hunted but the hunt could become the hunter ) ( A survive the Zombie apocalipse mission )
Amonkhet: 5 missions, one for each trial
Theros: Kill the "...." kind of mission, path of the Hero thing
Mirrodin/New Phyrexia : Invade the phyrexian building and put the bomb, or Hunt the Mirrans ( Monster kind of game, like Dead by Daylight )
Zendikar: Retrive the tresure from this dungeon ( that could have or not Eldrazis ), Rally the Allies against the Eldrazi giant
Ravnica: Could have missions more like Team vs Team like Boros soldiers trying to arrest Dimir assassins, Assassination atemp against a Selesnyan cleric (more like overwatch, with all those sub missions )
_______________
Well lets hope its not a garbage that ends up in the shadow of WoW
Then Cryptic made Champions Online, heralded as City of Heroes 2.0! It sucked, a lot, especially for a game with a monthly subscription. It went free-to-play, and became overburdened with micro-transactions. I've heard that Neverwinter suffers the same problem.
I'm not going to hold my breathe for this. Get ready for mismanagement of another beloved IP, and lots of micro-transactions.
You could easily do classes based on color builds, with split classes becoming available based on your colors.
They could make part of the gameplay involve heavy exploration and finding mana sources, islands, plains and so on and aligning with them.
It'd be pretty cool to see monster summoning go out of control, particularly if you had to beat monsters and take their essence as part of gameplay, kind of like what you do in persona.
Obviously there'd be limitations to how much you could summon, but imagine going into a major city and there's a war going on with dozens and dozens of summoned monsters.
Artifacts could be found or, obviously, crafted and enchantments could be found and learned, and enchantments that represent a location could be found and aligned with similarly to mana sources.
Now i must only wait 5 years to play.
That game is like entering a casino, I don't want to imagine what would happen to MTG...
It isn't some random mmo gamer.
This is a guy who loves magic.
A guy who spent ungodly hours on a site devoted to it.
A guy who made reference docs and rulings before they were a thing.
A guy who lived and breathed magic.
This gives me a lot of hope.
Not just hope for a good MMO, we know they can do that.
Hope that it stays true to the magic we know and love.
On the other hand, where is the Magic Movie?
Even with following a WoW (or even Elder Scrolls) model, a game based on Magic would be able to introduce 2 major mechanics (or 3 depending on how you count them): Color/Mana and Planeswalking.
Many RPGs have some sort of mana bar or other resources system, but Magic's mana system and color pie would be an interesting spin on it. Your color or colors (possibly chosen in character creation, possibly defined in a 5 way morality system, possibly leveled up as skill trees) determine what sort of magic you can access, and spells don't just draw from a mana bar, but from colored mana bars. Adding more colors to your character would give you access to more kinds of spells, but you'd either have less access to each color of mana or some other mechanic could be introduced to simulate the unreliability of getting a rainbow by turn 5. In any case, it would create a game in which every character is a mage of some sort, but they all play very differently.
Next, Planeswalking would allow for a massive and varied setting. You could set the game over multiple planes, and reactions to your character's race or skills will vary from plane to plane. Instant travel between worlds in a fantasy setting could be really cool.
Demonstrate to me that turn-based card-based combat can be handled organically in an MMORPG open-world environment, and that planeswalking has any chance of being meaningfully explored as a mechanic, and I'll change my mind. Until then, this sounds like some company got the rights to a popular setting and have plans to butcher the implementation, slap the name on the front of the box, and sell it to whatever early-access chumps they can find before giving up on it.
EDIT: Also, the way Leaping Lizards got handled when they first put out MODO is a pretty strong indicator that WotC will never give enough creative control to another company to allow them to make an actual good game out of their IP, nor that they will ever invest the money necessary to do it themselves.
Different situations. With MTGO Wizards were very clear that they wanted to transfer the physical game of magic up to a digital platform intact and to follow the similar release schedules to the paper game. Other than the UI there was very little creative stuff that needed to be done for MTGO. The major issues were all in the coding needed to get the game to run through the step/phases in the right order and make sure the spells/ablities worked as they are supposed to.
Here there is going to be a larger scope for creative license just due to the fact that it is a MMORPG. But even with that WOTC are going to want to make sure that nothing goes in that is directly contradicory of their established world building similar to what Lucas Arts did with Bioware for the Star Wars MMORPG.
Edit: Reading the article it seems like it will indeed be the former. Ah well... Still it will be interesting to see how they use the IP and it does have plenty of opportunity to have great settings. Ravnica, Kamigawa, Mirrodin, ect... Plenty of great and varied environments to play with. Depending on how the do Planeswalkers and battle systems it could even be quite epic in scale (summoning creatures, wide area enchantments, ect... not just basic fire bolt type spells).