The Vision of Legacy: Steel & Sorcery

Notorious Studios first game is unveiled!

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery box art

Six months ago we finally showed our first trailer for the game I left Blizzard 3 years ago to build alongside some great devs from Blizzard and beyond— Legacy: Steel & Sorcery! Starting last month we’ve had the game playable during closed Alpha playtests that have been going great. (If you’re interested, signup here!)

It’s been a wild journey to get to this point, and its not over yet — next year we will release the game on Steam for early access (wish list here!) and we’ll find out if we will sink or swim with players and the market.

As mentioned on this blog previously, we’re in an incredible transitionary period in the games industry where we’re all trying to figure out how to make games again, and more importantly, market them. Because of this, publishing deals and subsequent pre-release VC funding rounds are few and far between. So, in result, founders and studio heads are releasing their games early to players through Steam Early Access feature (us included). This does mean that when we ship Legacy to early access, it won’t be fully finished in terms of content, features and art. There are a lot of pros and cons to the Early Access system, but I do think in the end it’s the best thing for studios, players and developers. If a game is released Early Access and doesn’t resonate with (at least) a small cohort of players, it probably isn’t worth continuing. So many AAA projects that flopped on release could have been killed earlier, freeing up capital to be diverted to other shots on goal as well as (more importantly, IMO) free up devs to work on something that could work. One of the most depressing things for a creative is working on projects that never ship or worse, ship and fail despite everyone kinda’ feeling it on the team. And that sometimes can take up to 8-10 years to ship. Imagine working on a game for 10 years for it to release and fail. Devs reading this know exactly what I’m talking about. (Sidebar — check out Laura Fryer’s excellent analysis of Concord and how its a failure of dev culture)

Communicating the Vision of a game is important for any project, but for Early Access games I believe it is absolutely critical. If the game is going to be, essentially, unfinished at EA release then the players need to know what it is supposed to be, where it is going and what the team’s plan is for getting there. And as it turns out, there is an interesting story to the vision of Legacy that I’m excited to share.

In essence, the vision of Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is the ultimate fantasy RPG world PvPvE experience. It has extraction gameplay where you can lose everything you have in a match. It features classic RPG fantasy classes like the Warrior, Hunter and Priest using a modern 3rd-person Action Based combat system.

Want to know more, though? Read on…

World PvP

Like most kids in the 90s in America, I spent my weekends and entire summers biking to friend’s house to play console games together. Games were an IRL social experience. You’d play from morning to night, often having dinner with your friend’s family and, if your parents let you, you’d stay the night. At some point though, around when I became a teenager, my best friend wasn’t interested in hanging out and playing what we call today “couch co-op” games anymore — he was busy playing a PC game called Ultima Online. I grew to hate Ultima Online because it pretty much killed my gaming ritual with my friends, and I also didn’t have a PC and wasn’t going to for several years.

At some point, I too, became a PC gamer playing mostly Blizzard games like StarCraft, Warcraft III and ultimately World of Warcraft. With WoW, my social experience from games returned with my guild and the social aspect of an MMO. In WoW, I finally understood why my friend was addicted to and loved Ultima. I loved all aspects of WoW — the world, leveling, classes and combat, raiding, dungeons and perhaps most of all, like my Ultima friend, I loved PvP.

PvP in WoW originally didn’t have structured PvP like Arenas or Battlegrounds. The only PvP in the game was what we call “World PvP.” Similar to Ultima, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and other MMOs you could roam around the open world doing your quests, gathering and monster slaying and sometimes encounter enemy players who you could have an unstructured PvP encounter with (aka gank or be ganked). PvP is a notorious feature in MMOs for being divisive — many players (we call em’ carebears) can’t stand it, which is why they usually have their own designated realms called “PvP servers.” But despite its divisiveness, there was always something special and interesting about World PvP. Today I distill that uniqueness to the player stories it creates. No encounter is the same — sometimes someone ganks you and you win with 1% HP, sometimes you win 2v1 or maybe you save another random player in a 3v2 and win. At its best, it creates some heart pumping thrills and memorable moments that other systems like dungeons and raids can’t emulate.

Every MMO has their own player “heroes” in its community. Today they’re streamers and influencers, but back then in 2004 the World PvPers were the most famous. Players like Drakedog, Vurtne, Laintime and Happyminti were known for their videos showcasing a collage of combat clips with catchy music posted on sites like Warcraft Movies. Even my brother created a few videos on Warcraft Movies and gained a fanbase.

But after battlegrounds were added a year after WoWs release, World PvP died out. The Warcraft Movie creators started to make arena or battleground videos, which just weren’t as interesting. You didn’t have any incentive to World PvP in the game, and instead everyone grinded battlegrounds for “PvP gear.”

In 2007 I joined Blizzard as an Associate Game Designer, reporting to one of the Game Directors — Tom Chilton. Tom had come from Origin and had worked on Ultima Online. While most of the WoW team were originally raiders/PVErs from EverQuest, Tom understood the magic of PvP. Without him the Arena feature would have never happened, or probably a lot of PvP content in general. Together we would brainstorm systems and content to try to spark that elusive World PvP magic. Battlegrounds like Alterac Valley, World PvP zones like Lake Wintergrasp, Tol Barad, Ashran, that Silithus sand.. thing, a ton of content was created throughout the years to try to spark the elusive World PvP magic. Before I left Blizzard in 2020, I spearheaded the War Mode feature and suite of content for Battle for Azeroth as my last effort.

The world in Legacy: Steel & Sorcery

But trying to make World PvP content in an MMO is a huge challenge. An MMO is a huge suite of features with many cohorts of players who want a different experience, and it’s hard to create a specific experience for PvP when you have to account for players using PvE gear or the game having to be balanced for every aspect at once. I was jealous of games like DOTA/League where they didn’t have to balance for PvE. I also began to wonder: why isn’t there a dedicated RPG World PvP game?

It’s interesting because at that time there were so many games I would consider World PvP games becoming popular: PUBG, Apex, Rust, DayZ, The Division (Dark Zone) and of course Fortnite. These are all PvP games (or have PvP as a feature), but they aren’t exactly objective based. They became popular with streamers because viewers liked seeing what would happen each match. In PUBG, you could win a match by driving your car over the last remaining players and drive into the circle to win. I began seeing collages of PvP videos on YouTube of these games that reminded me of Warcraft Movies.

Internally at Blizzard I had pitched a dedicated 3rd person action Warcraft PvP game. While it had elements the studio liked, they weren’t quite sold on the core loop (and tbh, neither was I)). Then I stumbled upon Escape from Tarkov. Originally, I wasn’t interested in it because military simulation doesn’t really interest me, but I usually try to play everything to check out their systems design. And in Tarkov, they had the perfect mechanic to round out my vision for my RPG Fantasy World PvP game: the mechanic that we now call “extraction.” Extraction reminded me of using the hearthstone in WoW after a World PvP session. Except here, it would be like Ultima from the 90s: you’d have full loot.

Full loot is the mechanic of being able to loot another player if you kill them. This was what Ultima had and why my friend was so addicted to it. It was something I always wanted to do in WoW but never really had the chance (though you could loot player kill tokens like Blood Elf Ears). And now it became a cornerstone feature in hit games like PUBG, Fortnite, Apex and now Tarkov.

Action RPG Combat

One of my core roles on the WoW team for most of my tenure there was to design and balance the core classes such as the Hunter, Priest, Druid and Warlock. For me, this was my absolute dream job as the classes in WoW were a huge passion of mine. I had played PvP games my entire life, mostly fighting games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Smash Brothers. Imagining and designing spells, abilities and mechanics was something I did even in my free time before I worked at Blizzard.

Strangely, there aren’t many RPG Fantasy PvP games that aren’t MMOs. You do have DOTA and League which are some of the most popular and successful games in history, but DOTA is older than even WoW and so is the combat system. In MMOs, I would describe the combat system and class design as stagnated. Every MMO has the same system: a stick camera (that you control using the mouse), a hotbar of sometimes dozen abilities with cooldowns, the global cooldown, etc. This formula hasn’t changed much since EverQuest.

Today one of the fastest growing combat systems is still a system that doesn’t really have a good name. Some call it Action RPG — but this could be confused with ARPGs like Diablo. Some call it 3rd-person Action RPG, but that’s a mouthfull. Some call it Soulslike, but that can be deceiving because Souls is a very specific game with a lot of other rules. Whatever the name, this system has the following features:

• A 3rd-person camera, pulled out enough to see the gamespace but not super far like most MMOs, which loses immersion

• Weapon attacks and spells that have windup, active and recovery frames. This is similar to fighting games like Street Fighter, Smash Bros etc.

• Concept of stagger or hit-reacts, where enemies who suffer weapon or ability attacks are stunned or incapacitated for some point of time (frames)

• A stamina system that governs movement like evading and sprinting.

• An energy system that governs ability use and/or weapon attacks.

Modern Action Combat is rooted from fighting game combat, such as Street Fighter

I don’t believe there is a “best” combat system or design objectively speaking. Different systems work for different games and different visions. But for Legacy, this combat system allows us to create a lot more variety of experiences that I, for example, couldn’t do on WoW. MMO combat comes from text-based MUD combat, which comes from paper RPG combat. Originally, the fantasy of dodging, blocking and parrying could only be achieved through rolling the dice. This turned into a RNG system in MMOs. But with this new combat model, dodging blocking and parrying could be active abilities. This is how Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Zelda Breath of the Wild etc. work. And this what I believe to be the natural evolution for the original vision of Fantasy RPG combat.

Most Fantasy PvP experiences are in MMOs — where the experience has stagnated and all very similar

Instead of Block being a stat on gear that is a dice RNG roll, now it is a core active ability/mode on all of our classes. This allows us to key in other mechanics like the warrior gaining more “energy” (or Rage?) when attacked and blocking. It allows the Warrior to feel more like a tank by blocking attacks in front of injured allies. For game designers we love to have a variety of “hooks” to key into game mechanics, and in this system there are so many more hooks. For WoW, I had to key into events like RNG procs and events like “when your health drops below 25%” to create interesting gameplay. In this combat system, we get so many hooks out of the box with the core design. Not only is this more interesting for the player, its more interesting for the designer.

The history of Action RPG combat systems (image is a few years old)

This type of combat system has been around for a while — my earliest experience was Zelda: Ocarina of Time where you could Z-target lock-on and dodge attacks but it has been more popular in Japanese and Korean games, less so in Western games until recently. Probably the best 3rd person action gamedev in the West is Suckerpunch with Ghosts of Tsushima, and most of the great combat designers in the USA have at some point worked at Sony Santa Monica on, probably, a God of War game. So, while the West has a shit ton of shooter combat designers, the amount of combat designers (not to mention combat engineers, animators, network engineers etc) for 3rd person Action RPG is shockingly low. Because of this, we had to learn and teach ourselves how to build this system. Compared to the standard MMO combat system we’re used to, it is orders of magnitude more challenging, and we’re still not done yet with the foundational systems — as noted by some savvy players who saw our gameplay trailer (yes, we’re working on that jank!).

I haven’t even mentioned the challenges with server backend/networking with this type of combat system. Its why Smash Bros doesn’t feel as great online as it does in person, and why many studios and indie games don’t dare tackle this type of combat system in a networked game. Some exceptions that did it relatively well are For Honor and Naraka Bladepoint.

Combined with this 3rd person Action RPG combat system and Fantasy RPG class spells & abilities, I think we’ll have something truly unique and special not found on the market. The closest thing I can think of is if Dragons Dogma had PvP, but then again, our core combat is more similar to Souls than Dragons Dogma. It’s also truly what I would have done and would have expected for the elusive WoW2.

Warrior vs Hunter in Legacy: Steel & Sorcery

There is so much more to talk about regarding the combat and class design — how we’re making every class be differentiated and feel almost like they could have their own game, how abilities interact with the world and environment and cross-class, etc. But that’s for another blog.

Return to Classic Fantasy

The fantasy genre is one of the most globally recognized genres for film and video games. It has many subgenres ranging from High Fantasy (LotR, Final Fantasy), Low (Harry Potter), Wuxia (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Wu Kong) or Isekai (Sword Art Online). Recently Dark Fantasy has had a moment with Dark Souls, Elden Ring and ARPGS like Diablo and Path of Exile.

Frank Frazetta

In the 70s and 80s, the most popular fantasy genre in film was Sword and Sorcery (Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, Willow), which carried into games in the 90s like Baldur’s Gate, Elder Scrolls, Ultima, Dungeon Keeper and Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos. For Legacy, we’re attempting to bring these 70s/80s fantasy vibes with their darker, gritter tones in contrast with the happier, bright and accessible fantasy that is found in so many games today.

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos

For the art style of Legacy, we’re developing something that we call internally “Stylized Realism” which is a mixture of stylized shapes in the characters and environment, but with realistic textures and lighting. We believe this will be a nice contrast to the either hyper-stylized or hyper-realistic games right now.

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery’s art direction is Stylized Realism - using stylized shapes with realistic textures and lighting.

The Core Experience

The core experience in Legacy is actually pretty simple: the player queues solo or with a party up to 3 into an open world PvPvE session. They can slay creatures, players and loot them. They can stay in this session for a set amount of time (currently around 30 minutes max), but they have to get out alive. You can do this through “extracting” at some set locations within the map.

When the player is out of the session (an “Adventure”), the player can store the loot they acquired in their Stash. They can also sell it to the Merchants (vendors) in the hub world (a UI, for now). They can also complete quests and other objectives to level up, where they can learn new skills and traits.

Work in Progress Wireframe of the merchant UI

Our vision of progression is that there will be a seasonal journey of sorts — players do an epic quest line that culminates in something special at the end of the season. Eventually during early access we will ship the Guilds feature, where players can also have a shared social progression.

Legacy is littered with small innovations that I and the team have thought about for years working on WoW — all loot, for example, has a Perk on it similar to what you’d find in a talent in an RPG. Your build is literally your item build. For sophisticated players, you’ll be able to tell the build a player has by their items and adapt the way you approach (or not approach) them in the world — there are no banana suits in this game. (We’re probably going to post some tidbits on the system design on YouTube — so follow us there!)

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It’s said that any game that ships is a miracle, and I can totally understand that. Making a game has all of the challenges of a tech company and art/film studio combined. What gives me confidence in the development of Legacy is the passionate and talented team that we’ve built at Notorious. At Blizzard, the design team was bigger than our entire studio but I’m constantly taking aback at the speed and quality that we’re able to achieve.

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is a vision of a player experience that I feel is missing from games today and I can’t wait for you all to play it.

You can support us by wishlisting the game on Steam and following us on X/Twitter.