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Magic Legends is closing after open beta
qultuq
Member Posts: 988 Arc User
Steve Ricossa put a statement on the Magic Legends page saying that the game will not be released after Beta.
I did try the game, but did not enjoy it. However I wonder if there are implications for STO—will we get more developers? Will the expensive decision to end development mean that STO may face retaliatory budget cuts? Maybe there will be no effect.
Also why did they give up? I didn’t like the game—but it looked ok—it seems it may have been salvageable. I hope they don’t give up on STO with so little warning someday.
Anyway speculations and ruminations abound—you are welcome to share yours here.
https://www.playmagiclegends.com/en/news-article/11490313?eh=AEAF4BE9EE1D9DB15913715FCC73CC5C8098C8527AF5707E2E0C58568C82CCBA
I did try the game, but did not enjoy it. However I wonder if there are implications for STO—will we get more developers? Will the expensive decision to end development mean that STO may face retaliatory budget cuts? Maybe there will be no effect.
Also why did they give up? I didn’t like the game—but it looked ok—it seems it may have been salvageable. I hope they don’t give up on STO with so little warning someday.
Anyway speculations and ruminations abound—you are welcome to share yours here.
https://www.playmagiclegends.com/en/news-article/11490313?eh=AEAF4BE9EE1D9DB15913715FCC73CC5C8098C8527AF5707E2E0C58568C82CCBA
Post edited by darkbladejk on
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BTW I don't think this was "little warning" as they said, it will remain playable until Oct. 31, this year and the Zen players spent will get a full refund. Little warning was those idiots at NCSoft cancelling City of Heroes and selling players an upgrade just prior to the announcement.
This is upsetting to me though for one major reason. This is why the foundry died. The developer who was responsible for keeping the foundry alive as long as it lasted was moved over to work on Magic Legends. And now Magic Legends is being closed before it even truly releases. So the foundry died so that a failed mmo could be made.
No that's not why the Foundry died. The way the Foundry was created it essentially functioned as a mod for STO. Although the rest of the game over time got updated code, the Foundry was still based on old 2011 code. As another already pointed out, it would break nearly every patch and gradually took longer and longer to fix each time it broke until it became unfeasible to keep it working. Sucks for everyone but that's just how it was.
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@westx211 & @darkbladejk I am sure money and manpower was key to the Foundry shutdown. More over, they should have invested the money into monetizing the Foundry, making it separate database from the base games, and updates would not have been an issue. Making the Foundry 2 tier would have been the better way to go. A Foundry Lite version would be the free for players to make simple side quests and the premium version would allow for higher customization and have its own Zen market to buy special add-ons.
That is all moot, it is very obvious they have no clue what the players are willing to purchase. Even if they rebuilt the Foundry, the authors will not return, as there is no trust. My wife was a Foundry author ready and willing to spend cash, but they never asked for it. Instead they removed rewards and finally deleted it. She knows for a fact (through Facebook) the other authors had the money, many were doctors, engineers, lawyers, comic book publishers, and other professionals. It is a simple life lesson, know where your bread is buttered.
@qultuq asked, "However I wonder if there are implications for STO—will we get more developers? Will the expensive decision to end development mean that STO may face retaliatory budget cuts?"
I wouldn't worry too much about STO and the other games, unless PWE decides to sell off Cryptic Studios.
As for Magic... I hadn't been following its development. I didn't even know it was in Beta.
I think you missed hotfrostworm's point when he said, "making it separate database from the base games". You see, changes to the game database broke the Foundry in every new module and update. All they really needed was it to be a separate static entity that never or seldom needed updates. Most modules never introduced new models into the game, it was nothing more than database offset errors that made the Foundry break. It would have been an easy fix, they could have made money from me. I pay cash for my Zen. However I am pretty sure all my Foundry missions are toast after 2 years.
Magic is still there, free to play, and they are even removing the Zen store to allow you to play 100% free until the end of October. They will be allowing you to use the game currency instead of Zen.
It just shows that some IPs should never be MMOs. Even STO doesn't require teaming up except for the TFO events.
Putting the choo choo back on the rails... I don't want to go into office politics, but there has been some people who left or was dismissed by Cryptic a few months ago. The only way the players found this out was following their LinkedIn information. Chris Whiteside was hired in about a year ago as a producer. His profile now states he is working for Tencent as a director. Meanwhile Douglas Miller had long reputation at Cryptic and was Senior Game Designer for over 7 years. Now it would seem, when someone like that leaves, there would be good-bye messages all over the place. However not a peep. He left and went to work at Intrepid Studios about 4 months ago.
As I said, this was pulled by users from social media, there was no big announcement that Douglas or Chris was leaving the company. I don't know who or how many people left, quit, or got a better position, but there is an old saying where there is smoke there is fire.
I don't know if that was the entire team or not. I do hope some of the people who got pulled from STO are able to come back though. From something Bort said couple streams ago, it seems like the possibility of getting more Squadron pets is contingent on something Jette/Spartan did to make them work. (I was kind of sad when they moved over to Magic, Jette's understanding of STO's game mechanics was/is superb.)
I know there was some outreach from people at Blizzard, Activision, and a couple other companies for those who were let go. I certainly wish them well.
I gotta wonder just how bad the game really is if they aren't even going to publish it. They really must think it's so terrible that releasing it would potentially harm Cryptic's or WotC's reputation.
And it really must suck for the folks who worked on it too, especially the ones now out of a job.
Wow...
Losing faith in humanity, one person at a time.
This is just how much of the software world operates, not just games.
As for whether any of the talent working on the project will move onto Cryptic's other IP I'd hope so. Feels like it would be a missed opportunity to let good talent go when you can make good use of them on existing products. We'll likely never know unless a familiar name pops up on the forum, reddit, or other social media. It's common practice (legally mandated in some countries) to find replacement roles for redundancies where it's possible to do so. It's also just good business sense.
At the end of the day it all depends on cost, and the expected RoI. Cryptic won't keep on a developer if they don't think their contribution to another project will return greater benefit than it costs. RoI doesn't only mean profit, far from it, but profit is clearly a factor.
If the game had been more like the classic Shandalar, it probably would have done much better.
I've heard that the person who was responsible for Squadron pets was amongst the people fired
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