In an yearly recap article today, Wizards of the Coast talked about the past year for Magic Online. The team had done a lot of great work for the client, adding in some new functionality with sets like Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, but things are about to change. Today, Wizards announced that starting in 2022, they will be transitioning the development and maintenance of Magic Online to a new studio.
Daybreak Games
The new studio who will be taking over is Daybreak Games. This studio is responsible for some classic games such as Everquest 1 and 2, and H1Z1. With this transition, the team that’s currently working on MTGO will form a new team under Daybreak and transition everything over over the next few months. Once that’s completed, the team will share more about the direction the game will take.
Wizards did state that a few key points at the top of mind for the new team will be updating the interface to accommodate for Commander and Multiplayer play, as well as modernizing the underlying systems that make the game function.
What We Want to See
With this new focus and presumably increase in resources, there’s a lot of things that we, as well as the community would like to see. First off, Magic Online‘s overall interface is dated. A little sprucing up of the graphical quality could definitely go a long way. Next, one thing that I personally had experienced, and one that I know plagues the community is the client’s memory leaks. Having to relaunch the client after each game is not a good user experience.
Next thing is the Multiplayer aspect of things. 4 player Commander games are not the greatest to play in, so this is a huge hurdle to overcome. Another thing that needs to be addressed is the capability for the client or servers to handle the intense and complex situations that Magic can bring. For example, when large amounts of triggered abilities go on the stack from a card like Glimpse of Tomorrow should not completely crash the client. MTG Arena handles these triggers a lot better, and even though it struggles from time to time, it’s leagues better than Magic Online.
READ MORE: MTG Arena’s Decathlon Events Are Exactly What The Game Needs
Why Is This Move Happening?
While this move sounds amazing, the one question that this announcement leaves us with is, Why? Why would Wizards be moving staff and the direction of the game off to another studio? There’s a couple of theories here. The first being that Wizards is committing to the longevity of Magic Online, and by doing this, they’re affording the platform more resources. The other could be that Wizards wants to distance itself from this platform, in favor of more support for MTG Arena.
Does this mean that we might see a potentially sped up, more productive MTG Arena release schedule? We’ll have to wait and see. Either way, we’re very excited to see what comes from this move for MTGO.
READ MORE: Is Alchemy an Excuse for Overpowered Cards in MTG Standard Play?
