After Four Years Of Development, Magic: Legends Goes Offline This Weekend

If you're still mourning the fall of Magic: Legends, Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios' attempt at a Magic: The Gathering ARPG, then you'll be plased to know the game is still operational -- for about two more days.

As we covered in our announcement of the game's impending closure four months ago, Magic: Legends will go offline on October 31. That was the date posted in the official announcement, while the game's Twitter account says that servers will close "at the start of the month, November 1, 2021." We'd guess that means that everything will go away at midnight, probably in the Pacific time zone, so we'd suggest you get your time in before the clock hits 12 on Sunday.

Magic: Legends was originally announced in 2017 as a "AAA RPG" and later confirmed as an "MMO Action RPG." After being delayed from its 2020 launch window, the game finally was opened to the public in March. The random deck mechanic, while not as offputting as I initially feared, was enough of an obstacle for many players to write the game off, while its other systems were simply unintuitive or difficult to grasp. The marketing blitz for the game -- consisting of countless dev diaries and lore articles -- kicked off in earnest in late 2019 and lasted longer than the game itself, which failed to meet profit expectations despite being in open beta for just a few months.

Cryptic Studios CEO Stephen D'Angelo originally described Magic: Legends' relation to the card game as being similar to that between Neverwinter and Dungeons & Dragons, saying that Cryptic didn't "copy" the pen-and-paper D&D experience but instead "created an excellent video game that captured the feeling of that world." That's a good approach to take, but while Neverwinter is a perfectly decent, if not amazing, MMORPG, Magic: Legends seemed to try too hard to invent new mechanics and probe new ideas to differentiate itself from its source. It tried to be different for the sake of being different, and not because it was a good idea for gameplay, which was probably a major factor in its demise.