After months of waiting and a couple of delays thanks in development thanks to the pandemic, it is finally almost time for players to get their hands of Magic: Legends when the open beta kicks off in just a few weeks. Hype for the free-to-play ARPG is still building and some new information from the developers offers another sneak peek behind the development curtain, this time focusing on the game's difficulty levels.
It's a pretty standard feature to include multiple difficulties in this type of game, but Magic: Legends is going a step further to offer players additional chances to modify the gameplay with more challenges that will require carefully built class loadouts to handle specific map modifiers. As gamers might expect, there are item rewards for taking on those extra hard challenges and successfully making it through levels featuring difficult modifiers.
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Magic: Legends features four difficulty levels: Normal, Hard, Expert, and Master. Planeswalkers have to unlock the higher difficulty levels by hitting certain milestones in the campaign before they are able to scale up the challenges (and rewards). In addition to those option, which will increase enemy health pools and damage output, there are also regional and world enchantments that can add even more challenge to each level.
"During your adventures across the Multiverse, expect to encounter numerous enemies ranging in size from small to large, each with different power levels and special abilities -offering varying degrees of effort to overcome. We designed the difficulty systems in Magic: Legends so that you can choose your path and make the game as challenging or straightforward as you’d like."
"By increasing the difficulty level, you face more potent and demanding enemies in terms of health pools and damage output. You can further augment your missions and ordeals through Regional and World Enchantments as well. These changes and the challenges they introduce will encourage the experimentation with and assembly of new Loadout builds to adjust moment-to-moment gameplay on the battlefield. Of course, with higher difficulty comes more and better rewards!"
An APRG like Magic Legends that has aspirations of becoming a game service with a long lifespan definitely needs to nail the delivery of scaling difficulty levels for various player types and tempting item rewards that can offer motivation to players to stay engaged and keep working up through the game's endgame content at higher difficulty levels to keep the grind alive. It will be very interesting to see how well these features land when players get their hands on the title in the near future.
Some potential fans began to worry in the late fall when announcements about the ARPG seemed to dry up and go quiet, but after the announcement of the open beta things have definitely picked back up. The development team is releasing blogs detailing features and hopefully an open line of communication remains once the open beta is underway later this month.
Be sure to check back closer to the open beta release window for lots more coverage of Magic Legends news, updates, and guides.
Magic Legends releases in open beta on March 23, 2021 on PC.