#magic legends

I’ve been looking forward to trying this game for about a year now.  I like how the gameplay and character progression is structured.  The deck, equipment and artifact setup is unique enough to give the game character without trying to fully rewrite the genre.  It’s very satisfying to have so much customization control over your character an playstyle, in a way where you don’t need to level up ten different characters.  The challenge feels very well-balanced, which is impressive in a beta release.  

So far after completing the first location there’s not much storyline to speak of, which can on its own be fine.  My issue here is that the game manages to quickly shaft you from one character and objective to another so what little storyline they have is also hard to follow.  I think the guy who brings you into Tazeem meets you for one or two quests later and then just disappears.  The storyline also occasionally intersects with team events, and since nobody but me wants to read the actual dialogue, I either have to speed-read through it or it gets aborted before I can (and if I do finish fast, am I stopping other players from finishing?)

The graphics are nice.  The landscapes are fun.  They’re nothing that I would expect to greatly tax my 2-year-old gaming computer which plays it proficiently but hisses like it’s going to melt down after just ten minutes.  The “low” graphics setting unloads major details like torches and bricks in all but a couple paces around my character, which is a very bizarre experience in a third person game with a fixed camera distance.  There were also issues with lagging for many players in the first couple nights, possibly due to high server load.

(Edit: The strain seems to occur only when I’m around other players and events, like in overworlds and especially Sanctum.  The game seems to have trouble filtering out what ungrouped players on the other side of the world are engaged in from my own activity.)

Tackling some after-story content I managed to get into a situation where I almost completed an overworld objective and then someone possibly three times my level came by and decimated the last part of it and, oh that’s fine, I thought, until I received absolutely no loot.  Likewise I knocked down quite a few of these trying to get the big boss to spawn, arrived in time with the other players, gave a good battle and walked away with absolutely nothing.

Since the game is in beta some of these issues may be fixed with time, but most I feel are inherent in the game design.  I’ll try playing through some more of the main quest but I can’t see myself making a long-term commitment out of it.