Might & Magic X: Legacy Open Development Blog Updates

We’ve rounded up a couple of recent “open development” blog posts from the Might & Magic X: Legacy development team. The devs are obviously making a fairly serious attempt at communicating with their fanbase and offering a look at the development process, and this is especially impressive when you realize that this is still a publisher-backed project. Certainly a point in favor of Ubisoft in my book (let’s just forget Uplay for a moment).

In “Fun: What we have learned” the team mulls over the feedback they’ve received on what’s “fun” in a game, and how they’ll handle these elements in the full game:

EXPLORATION

Have you ever taken the Bartle test? If you did, then you know how important exploration is for your gaming experience. Or how unimportant, if you’re not so much into exploring. (The other factors are socializing, achieving and killing.) Exploring the map and discovering hidden things is one of the aspects that many RPG players consider fun. Another point that many of you seem to like is an open world with a non-linear game play, which means you can go wherever you want to on the map at whatever point of time you like. (Only if your party is strong enough to fight their way to wherever you want them to go, of course.) Besides, the map needs to be big enough and full of surprises.

Marcus (LE-Marcus) and Julien (Marzhin93): The Agyn Peninsula is an open world, and it is full of opportunities for people who like to explore.

STORY

A good story makes an RPG interesting – that’s a statement that many of you agreed on. However, some prefer not to be “the chosen one” in the plot, but rather some adventurer that gets roped into greater events that force him to take side.

Julien (Marzhin93): We did our best to write an enjoyable story with some twists and turns. Besides, you are definitely not going to be “chosen ones”. You will be just a group of Raiders that will make a difference.

There’s also a Q&A, and it’s apparently “hardcore”:

The trend in today’s games is “accessibility” (which translate to making the game easy enough for a 3 yr old to play), how can you make this truly “old-school” content and gameplay-wise yet still keep Ubisoft happy/ assured that grandma can play it?

mindx2: Ok, I guess I agree about “accessibility”. But I think I disgaree that “accessibility” translates into making a game trivial. If we talk about accessibility we have topics like handling and GUI in mind. For instance as much as i love Xeen games – the inventory handling is something you just wouldn´t develop nowadays.

mindx2: On top of that we want to give user´s the opportnity to get into the game. What we implemented is a “hint” system which helps you at the beginning of th game – but only if you want to. So in case you atre an M&M veteran you just hit the check box “dont show more hints” and move on….

There’s also a post with some ruins tileset concept art, which will be used for a dungeon that is being developed with input from the fans and a couple of “Meet the team” posts: Karsten, lead level designer, Thomas, technical lead, Julien, creative designer, Marcus, game designer and Stephan, managing director.