Cryptic’s New MMORPG
443 words.
Last Wednesday, Cryptic announced they are making an MMORPG based on Magic: The Gathering with help from Wizards of the Coast. As yet it apparently doesn’t have a title.
That’s basically where my interest ended but in the name of thoroughly documenting the event and making a more appropriately-sized blog post, I’ll add some more thoughts.
There was some confusion at first, but this is going to be a real live MMORPG with characters that walk around, as opposed to a card game. I’ve never played Magic: The Gathering, and I don’t know anything about the lore or setting or the so-called “multiverse.” I’ve always understood it to be a fairly generic fantasy setting, but it’s hard to see why the game would remain popular for so long if that’s all there was to it.
It’s also hard to understand why a “setting” is required in any way, shape, or form for a card game. To me, this announcement is somewhat similar to announcing that they are making an MMORPG out of Poker. Um …. okay?
By which I mean this announcement contains a lot of words that are very confusing to me when you put them together. MMORPG, Magic: The Gathering, and Wizards of the Coast do not belong in the same sentence in my limited little world. I had no idea Wizards of the Coast had anything to do with Magic: The Gathering. That’s still the D&D people, right? Did I miss something? I guess they own the Magic IP.
Anyway, as for the MMORPG, my main concern is that given Cryptic’s history with Neverwinter and STO, it’s more accurate to call their games a series of loosely connected instances, which is not quite the same as what I’d call a traditional MMORPG. I hope this new game is different. But all we have to go on is “free-to-play,” “action MMORPG,” and “next generation MMORPG.”
And that’s about all I have to say until we get more information. It’s really hard for me to get excited about “announcements” anymore. I guess I must be dead inside, because I very rarely feel anything resembling “hype” until I can actually sit down and play the new game for a little while, or at least look at a gameplay video.
P. S. As I’m scheduling this, I realize this post sounds incredibly jaded. Believe it or not, I am glad to see that new MMORPGs are being made, and I can’t wait to try it out. (I mean, unless it turns out that there’s a big card game component.)
Archived Comments
athiev 2017-06-15T17:51:07Z
Wizards of the Coast essentially created Magic: The Gathering. (It’s a little bit more complicated than that, involving an outside collaborator and a temporary shell corporation to shield the Magic business from ongoing lawsuits.) It was about 4 years later that Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR and Dungeons & Dragons. Then a couple of years after that, Wizards of the Coast was purchased by Hasbro, so for the last 18 years or so, Magic and D&D have both been Hasbro products published under the Wizards of the Coast brand.
For people who care about these things, there are Magic: The Gathering novels, etc., as well as snippets of lore on each card. This is part of how the company can keep selling cards; unlike poker, there’s always something new happening in the world of Magic, and new expansion packs to go with it…
UltrViolet 2017-06-15T19:02:16Z Cool, thanks for the info!
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