Legacy Quest is a mobile title from Nexon that aims to bring a nostalgic retro feel to players who love 3D pixel art. We had the opportunity to chat with Mike Borras, CEO, Socialspiel Entertainment, Helmut Hutterer, COO & Game Director, Socialspiel Entertainment and SongYi Chae, Global Launching Team, Nexon Korea to find out more.
MMORPG: What was the initial inspiration for Legacy Quest?
MB: Much of the Socialspiel team started the playing classic RPGs imported into the US and Europe on platforms like the PC Engine, NES/SNES, and the Mega Drive as kids and never stopped. We even have a few 10+ year WoW members, so we’ve grown up with a lot of RPG and MMO inspiration pumping through our veins. Several years ago, our design team was chatting over some beers and started talking about bringing a more “core” handheld action role playing game experience over to mobile devices, combined with an incredible looking art style using magical “blocks” as the core building block for the world, everyone, and everything in it.
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MMORPG: How would you pitch this game to fans of traditional MMOs and RPGs?
HH: Legacy Quest is a full-fledged action role playing game for your pocket. It has everything fans of the genre would expect, awesome loot, a deep crafting system and cool boss battles. Combat is fast paced and focused on action and skill. Movement, positioning as well as your choice of weapon and your skills are very important too.
And then there is of course the perma death component that makes Legacy Quest stand out from other mobile role playing games.
MMORPG: It's sometimes hard to convince core gamers that the mobile platform is a place for good, fun, and in-depth gaming. How is Legacy Quest aimed to appeal to the core gamer?
MB: With Legacy Quest, we’re trying to bridge this gap between handheld portable gaming and mobile gaming. Creating an intense, AAA ARPG while still having an accessible art direction gives us the chance to both open up more core RPG fans to the concept of core gaming on mobile, but also open up traditional, casual and mid-core mobile gamers towards the concept of core gaming. The hardware is certainly getting more and more powerful, so we’re starting to see some pretty amazing-looking and intense core gaming experiences on mobile. I think we’re well on our way with doing that with Legacy Quest.
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MMORPG: How will Legacy Quest be monetized?
HH: Legacy Quest is free to play and monetized via micro-transactions. Players can buy additional resources and items, but not all of them like in most free to play role playing games. Another thing players can buy are additional skills. All skills can be found in the game but if you want to try out new skills early you can speed things up by spending premium currency.
Also there are a few cosmetic items in the game that we monetize.
MMORPG: What sorts of things will players do minute to minute in LQ?
HH: Killing monsters and collecting loot is a big part of the game. Between dungeon runs, which usually last a few minutes in the lower difficulties, players need to craft items, unlock new skills or level up existing ones and try to optimize their hero build to face the next challenge.
MMORPG: Is there an "end-game" or something that will keep people coming back once they've played the game extensively?
HH: This is something we are currently working on. We will release various end game modes and content updates especially for players that are far advanced in the game. I can’t go much into detail yet but there will be a game mode that allows players to compete with each other and there will be more single player content as well.
We also want to know what our players want, player feedback is very important for us and has been driving the game’s development since the soft launch and we hope that this will continue for a very long time.
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MMORPG: What sorts of updates do you plan to add to the game over the coming weeks?
SYC: We have a slew of updates planned for the coming weeks! We plan to have a couple of mini updates between our “Grand” update to help players become more familiar with the game. We’re also working on optimizing the game more.
As a next step, we are focusing on providing more game content to please our players. So adding in more dungeon levels and new dungeon systems to add more diversity to the Legacy Quest world are at the top of our list of things to do. One update feature we’re excited to add will allow players to fight together or against each other, in addition to adding new dungeon levels will (which will be released very soon).
Also, we are doing our best to add more social and competitive systems into the game to encourage building relationships between players. A chatting system, ranking system and some more social features are in our plans to be added soon. So, be on the lookout for some fun game updates.
