Magic: Legends - We Hardly Knew Ye

I didn't see anyone else posting about this on Hive, so I wanted to at least make a quick post about it. I am going to keep this relatively short. I was using this July 4th holiday weekend to try to catch up on playing some new games to review, and I ran across this announcement: Magic: Legends will be shutting down in October of this year! (source).

The game never even made it out of Open Beta, though they were still letting people make in-game purchases prior to the official release. To be fair, the developers have said that they will refund purchases made during Beta. I don't see the need to do a full review of a game that's going to be unplayable in a few short months, but here are my thoughts:

In brief, Magic: Legends was a Diablo clone with Magic: The Gathering properties used for the heroes and monsters. The game was designed to be free-to-play, but rife with micro-transactions. In my own brief time testing it out, I found it to have a somewhat unpolished feel. The combat felt a bit stiff and movement felt awkward. Granted, that might be the outdated nature of my PC and my lack of trying to mess with the settings to improve performance.

From my point of view, a lack of focus on entertaining single player gameplay likely was the main cause of player disinterest. Grim Dawn and Path of Exile have shown that you can make a Diablo style game that people enjoy. In my short time playing the game, I didn't feel the need to do much other than smash buttons and it didn't look particularly cool while I did so. Sadly, I can see why this game didn't make it to a full launch.