Our primary goal with Dragon Age Legends was to create a “social game for gamers.” This social RPG combined the interesting decisions and difficult trade-offs found in traditional games with the innovations of the social game world. The game loop would still work and all the energy gate, friend list, and free-to-play complications could just be dropped.
Looking at the core gameplay systems now, I can’t help wonder how the game would play if remade with a dynamic XCOM -style campaign, with each turn-based battle moving the game clock forward, which would then determine how fast the characters heal and consumables are crafted. These novel formats – appointment mechanics, friend recruitment, limited session lengths – seemed interesting at the time, but I now believe what should have been obvious – that a game’s format should enable and support the game experience, not limit and complicate it. With Legends, however, the asynchronous format screwed up an otherwise solid gameplay loop – the energy system artificially limited game flow and tying the game’s mechanics to real-world time made balancing for every type of player a nightmare. I do still believe in the potential of asynchronous gaming, especially for limited-scale, turn-based games (like Hero Academy or Ascension ) or for long-term, real-time games (like Neptune’s Pride or Civ4 ’s PitBoss mode). (Having said that, I also feel one of Legends main problems was that we priced some items, such as energy, far too high.) Legends never attracted the whales necessary to sustain itself, which is perhaps for the best anyway as I’m not sure how I feel ethically about players spending that much money on my games.
I have largely soured on the potential of free-to-play gaming as it almost inevitably leads to an unhealthy addiction to whales – customers willing to pay thousands of dollars for various items and perks. My thinking today is different from back then. However, as the game has now been offline for over a year, and most of the development team has moved on from EA, I feel comfortable posting my thoughts from that time period.
Because the game was still live at the time, the piece was never published. I wrote the following post-mortem on Dragon Age Legends during the summer of 2011, a few months after release.
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