Magic: Legends

» see playmagiclegends.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Cryptic Studios announced an untitled Magic: The Gathering game in June 2017 and called it an MMORPG. By the time it was formally revealed at The Game Awards in December 2019 it had become an action role-playing game in the Diablo shape, free to play, with the card game's five colors of mana as the character-building system. That genre shift took two and a half years and it is the first thing anybody should have read as a warning.

The open beta opened on 23 March 2021 for Windows, through the Epic Games Store and Perfect World's own Arc client. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions were announced and never shipped. There was no release date, and in the end there was never going to be one, because the beta is the only form the game ever took.

On 29 June 2021, three months and six days in, executive producer Stephen Ricossa published the notice. The vision for Magic: Legends had missed the mark. Both console versions went with it, along with the planned Steam release, and the servers would go off on 31 October. Around 44 people were laid off with the announcement.

~ the chronicle ~

~ four years to a beta ~

Cryptic is not an inexperienced studio. It built City of Heroes, which is one of the most-mourned games this site has a page for, and it has kept Star Trek Online running since 2010. What it had never done before was take one of the largest tabletop licenses in the world and convert it into a genre that was already crowded by 2021, against Path of Exile and Diablo III, with a Diablo IV everyone knew was coming.

The five-color mana system was the honest attempt at making it feel like Magic, and it was the most interesting thing in the build. It was not enough to carry a loot game whose loot nobody was excited about, and the beta's reception said so within weeks.

~ the refund ~

This is the part that makes the shutdown unusual. The Zen shop closed the moment the announcement went up, and everything in it was made purchasable with Aether, the free in-game currency, so the last four months were played with the monetization switched off. Every player who had spent real money across Arc and the Epic Games Store got the full amount back.

Refunds went out by channel. Credit card purchases through Arc were reversed automatically to the original card over about four weeks, while prepaid card purchases got Arc credit plus a $10 bonus on top. Anything bought on Epic went back through Epic's own payment gateway by 14 July. A publisher cancelling a game does not owe players a refund for a beta they knowingly bought into, and Perfect World paid anyway.

~ what it cost Cryptic ~

Four years of work and a license that will not be handed out again soon. Magic: The Gathering has had digital adaptations going back to 1997 and the successful ones have all been card games, which is to say the ones that were Magic. The experiment in being something else got seven months and closed at 11:59pm Pacific on Halloween.

I was 37 in 2021 and working on computer vision, and the Diablo-shaped free-to-play market had stopped being somewhere I spent evenings well before that. What brought this one to my attention was the refund notice rather than the game, because a company handing money back on the way out of a failure is rare enough to read about.

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