To make its fantasy extraction game, this studio of ex-Blizzard devs had to teach itself the art of third-person combat design: 'There's a science to how those are built'
Late last year, I played in a closed alpha playtest of Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, an upcoming extraction game pairing World of Warcraft-style high fantasy with third-person action combat. Over a couple of hours, I got an early taste of stringing together longbow headshots on skeletons, smashing wolves with maces, and panicked escapes as a priest tried to murder me for my backpack full of goblin ears. This week, Legacy enters early access, aiming to offer its own artisanal blend of RPG extraction.
Ahead of Legacy's early access launch, I spoke last month with Chris Kaleiki, Notorious Studios co-founder and former World of Warcraft class designer. In our interview, Kaleiki explained how Legacy grew out of an idea he had about redesigning World of Warcraft's class fantasy with more action and less action bars.
«I was trying a more action-based model—something which is a lot more popular today, but I'd based it on games I was playing at the time, like Dark Souls, Dark Souls 3,» Kaleiki said.
Kaleiki's concept didn't gain much traction at Blizzard, but his departure from the company in 2020 left him free to revisit and flesh out the idea, founding Notorious alongside other former WoW devs to pursue the project. As the vision for Legacy crystallized, Kaleiki said, it was driven in part by the team's passion for MMO world PvP.
«World PvP puts the players into an open world exploration map, and they have objectives they want to do—usually crafting or killing creatures. And PvP can occur, but it's not scripted. It's not like the designers are saying, 'go kill this guy,'» Kaleiki said. «It creates all these player stories, and I always thought that was compelling.»
With Legacy, Notorious hoped to give World PvP, something that had always been relegated to a side activity in WoW and other MMOs, the focus it deserves. As Notorious started melding action combat with an explorable PvP world, they were unintentionally forming a nascent RPG extraction game just as the extraction
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