chadz, are Devolver Digital your publisher?
Nope
I am actually the publisher. We're renaming from M:BG to M:BG, except this time the M stands for Magic. That's right, all the things you love about historically inspired low-fantasy games will be replaced with flying carpets, casting spells, and dragons. All armors are currently being replaced with 4k texture robes, which come in a variety of stylish colors and alluring cuts. Don't worry about protection though, all you have to do is hold block for an omnidirectional mana shield. There will still be a variety of weapons of course. For 1H there will be wands (dual wielding!) and for 2H and Polearms there are plenty of staves to choose from. Knowing the cRPG community like we do the inclusion of upgrading equipment is mandatory. However this is a world of magic, and as such all items may be enchanted with any of the game's spell effects. Just think, you could create your own [+11 Rat Smashing Rod of Thorns]!
Combat will still be the heart and soul of of Magic:Battlegrounds so don't panic. The team is still hard at work creating the most innovative wizard combat system that has ever been released. The basics of combat in Magic will consist of inputting a series of keys in a quick time event in order to cast spells. Obviously complex spells will require a longer chain to be input, and one wrong key stroke will cause the entire chain to be broken. With practice and patience any player will be able to utilize high ranking spells but only a true magus will be able to effectively use spells like meteor shower. Our intent with this system is to create combat mechanics that are easy to learn but hard to master.
Above I mentioned the blocking system, and while at a glance it may seem overpowered we have developed checks to prevent combat devolving into turtles hiding behind force fields. First, as it is a mana shield, the duration of your active block will be limited to your mana pool. Additionally any damage absorbed by your mana shield will be deplete your mana, eventually causing your shield to break and throwing your character to the ground, stunning them. Investing points into the shielding skill, or equiping items enchanted with shielding magics will increase the resistance of your mana shield and decrease your stun if it breaks.
In addition to active blocking with mana shields the team has also been hard at work developing a countering system for intercepting inbound spells. Currently two mechanics exist for spell countering: reflection and negation. Reflection will allow a wizard or magus to redirect an incoming projectile, wave, or beam spell by quickly activating their mana shield at the moment of impact. With proper timing reflection can be used to redirect projectiles off of spherical mana shields on varying trajectories, from oblique angles to hostile projectiles to their casters. Negation focuses on using offensive spells to cancel other offensive spells. To negate an incoming spell the defending caster must cast an offensive spell of their own which is elementally superior and theoretically opposed to the incoming projectile. Elemental superiority is relatively simple, water defeats fire, etc.. Theoretical opposition is determined by which school of magic a spell is from. Of the seven major schools of magic (divination is excluded as neutral) each school has two compatible schools and two incompatible schools. If two spells from incompatible schools connect they will cancel each other out. In spell negation you can intercept a hostile projectile with an elementally superior spell from an opposing school to over power your enemy's attack with one of your own. Doing so successfully will dispel the incoming attack while your counter spell continues forward. Additionally spells from compatible schools and of similar elements can be combine by teammates to generate devastating attacks, which will be very useful in our wizard siege game mode.
That's all the information you get for now, consider it a reward for finally figuring out the meaning of chadz's cryptic posts and the silence from the dev team. Expect the next dev blog soon where we'll cover our progress converting the game to our voxel based MMO survival sandbox engine.
