State of the Empire Address
My Fellow Legionnaires,
Emperor BugsPray here. Let me speak candidly: There has been some debate amongst the development team, testers, and players about whether or not to release information to the community on the state of the project and where it’s headed. Our intent behind hiding this information is not to keep you in the dark, begging for scraps of information from your overlords. InstantAction had a tendency to make promises that they were, in the end, unable to keep. This is no fault of any one individual, but the fault of their circumstances at the time. Either way, this resulted in some animosity toward the developers, and created a sense of distrust amongst the community.
This is something we’ve been trying to avoid. As any development team knows, there are some things we think we are going to do that wont get done as a matter of resources and time. At the same time, we might be able to some things we never thought we’d do. As a community that is actively involved in the development, you have a unique perspective on what is happening compared to other communities. This perspective lends itself to some good things and bad.
The Good: You get to participate in things like Public Testing phases and see new features and content before they’re ready to come out. You have the opportunity to give your input earlier in the development process and have developers actually listen to you (despite how grumpy we can be, we do listen!).
The Bad: Everything is subject to change. Since we do listen to feedback, and since we watch and see how everything plays out, features and content will change because of it. This means that some feature you see today might be different or even gone tomorrow.
The policy up to this point was, “Don’t tell them until we’re just about to release the content, that way they aren’t disappointed if we decide against the feature or are unable to do it.” However, many of you are interested in how we’re developing the game and what the plan is for the future. So with that in mind, we want to give you some perspective on what the plan is for the future of Legions: Overdrive (oh, and some art and screenshots too)!
The Plan
When we approached InstantAction about taking on their game, we had originally intended to add content and some fun features to the game while they were busy doing other things, in hopes that they would pick up Legions again. As we were nearing release of Legions: Overdrive, InstantAction was shut down by IAC. The news was a bit scary at the time, but we thought about it and realized that it opened up the ceiling for what was possible to do with Legions. As a team, we tried to think of all of the things Legions meant to us as a game, what it was best suited for, and how we could modify it to be the great game it was meant to be. We decided to focus on a few key aspects of Legions: 7v7 to 10v10 game sizes, gameplay depth, freedom of movement, newb-friendliness, and content. Now we'll give you a quick look at what's coming down the pipe.
Custom Loadouts
Legionnaires need control over your armors and weapons - not just selecting pre-made armors, but making your own! We’ll be implementing custom inventory system so that you can tweak your loadouts and perfect your own style of play.
New Weapons and Hand Grenades
Legions is full of bread and butter weapons: the rocket launcher, chaingun, grenade launcher, and the sniper rifle (that one is a little different). Some weapons have variations that make them a bit more powerful. We want to expand those four base weapons and give you more options on how you frag your enemies. Here’s a teaser of the upcoming plasma rifle:
Overdrive Cores
Overdrive is Legions’ most iconic feature, and we are going to take it to the next level. Using custom loadouts, you’ll be able to switch between a variety of overdrive cores, each with its own powerful abilities that will help you and your teammates.
Base Assets and Deployables
Soon you’ll be able to bolster your defenses and support your offense by using base assets and deploying your own. These assets and deployables would be destroyable. Base assets must be repaired to function again and deployables must be redeployed when they are destroyed. Here's an early shot of the new inventory station model:
Client-Side Modding
There are some players modifying the game already, but we want to make this more accessible to the general public. This means you’ll be able to make changes to scripts and textures in order to fully customize your Legions experience.
Player-Hosted Servers
We’ve been mentioning for a while that we don’t want to stay in control of the servers forever. We don't believe it's scalable, and it takes away from our development time trying to manage these servers. In the future, you will see us make dedicated server hosting available to all of you so that you can run your own public and private servers for team practices, matches, pickups, or building that giant 32 player tower you’ve always wanted.
More Maps and Gametypes
As always, we’re committed to continuously expanding the number of maps and gametypes available in Legions. Here’s are some shots from the upcoming map Fallout:
Want to Know More? Tune in to Legions Live
Apcizzle just announced the return of Legions Live in the forums. We will be releasing more information and answering your questions about these upcoming features during their debut broadcast next Wednesday at 9pm ET. Keep your eyes locked on that thread for more information and updates.
See you on the battlefield, Legionnaires!