For the past month and a half, we have been blown away by the community’s enthusiasm for Legends. Sparkypants has been hard at work on the game and a complete client and backend refresh. We see your messages and posts and we want to give you an update on where we are in the process.
As you can imagine, Sparkypants is in the middle of a huge undertaking. They are rebuilding Legends from the ground up with brand new code – while allowing you to keep your progress and achievements. While the cards and gameplay will remain identical, this effort will improve the look and feel of Legends while building a thinner client that is easier to update and improve with long-requested community features.
While we are all incredibly excited about what’s next for Legends, a project of this magnitude takes time. We’re committed to releasing a polished game that keeps all the same functionality and feel – and this means giving Sparkypants the time they need to get it right.
We are also in the middle of the first season of The Elder Scrolls: Legends Masters Series, with the grand finals coming up on August 9-10 at QuakeCon. Releasing a brand-new app now could potentially affect the integrity of Legends’ most prestigious tournament. For these reasons and more, we are not ready to release yet, and it will take more time.
For more information about the future of Legends, mark your calendars for the keynote address at QuakeCon and don’t forget to tune in to the competition, where we will witness some of the highest-level competitive gameplay ever!
We appreciate your patience during this transition. In the meantime, we’ve invited Sparkypants to give you a bit more visibility into the development work going into the refresh. Sparkypants’ Lead Producer, Andrew Auseon, has taken time to put together more information on the game. Take it away, Andrew:
Andrew: Thanks, Christian. You expressed it perfectly: blown away. That’s how we feel about the response to recent hands-on showings of the game at E3 and ongoing discussion in the forums and online. It makes all the hard work worth it. No joke. Before going any further, I’d like to say a resounding thank you from everyone at Sparkypants for the continued enthusiasm, goodwill, and patience as we forge ahead on this amazing game.
So, onto our first big announcement, which concerns the Legends design team. We at Sparkypants are thrilled to be bringing MTG Hall of Famer and card designer extraordinaire Josh Utter-Leyton on board as a key member of our growing design team. As many players know, Josh has been with Legends game since its earliest days and played an important role in what it’s become. With Josh on the team we’re very confident that we can deliver great cards and collections into the future.
Speaking of new content, we’re finishing a new Story expansion that will explore another fascinating region in the Elder Scrolls universe; in addition, we’re designing a new thematic set of standalone cards that will add some interesting new wrinkles to the game’s meta and get players trying new deck compositions. Our focus is on designing “big” cards that will see a lot of play. This will be Sparky’s first foray into designing original cards for Legends, but we have experts like Josh to guide us, and as always, we’ll be eager for feedback.
We continue our push forward on the refresh, redesigning the look to fit within the new art style, making user experience tweaks and fixing issues as they come up. We’re especially pleased with some newly created menus and layouts for mobile UI, which should make navigating and playing the game on the go much easier. We’ve also shortened the player tutorial to get new players into matches sooner. A lot of fans are interested in dates for console SKUs of the game, but unfortunately those won’t be part of the relaunch, so we can’t talk about those quite yet.
Moving forward, the Sparkypants team wants to continue building a strong connection with the Legends community. We plan to incorporate a release calendar in our regular updates and share new features in their early stages with influencers, garnering feedback to address what’s best for the game and its players. Tournaments will be the first of these new features, and we can’t wait to roll them out later in the year. Everyone here is excited for what’s to come!