Perfect World Entertainment, Wizards of the Coast, and Cryptic Studios have now announced an upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) title that will be based on the highly popular trading card game, "Magic: The Gathering."
The game, which is hailed as one of the most popular trading card games in existence, will be expanded into a brand new world that is filled with the creatures and lands found in the franchise's rich lore.
Official announcement
All three companies recently published a press release to officially announce the project.
The upcoming game has been described to be an AAA RPG title that will not be a card game. Instead, the game will have characters and graphics based on the franchise set in a rich virtual world. The game will apparently be developed from scratch and will be built for modern consoles and for the Windows PC.
Bryan Huang, the CEO of Perfect World Entertainment, explained in the press release that it has always been their dream to bring the franchise into a modern RPG title. The game is also aimed at long time fans of the original card game, seeing as that the game will be transforming the world of "Magic: The Gathering" into an entirely new format.
Taking the franchise to a new level
The original game, which was first released back in 1993, has spawned a vast and rich lore that spans into different planes and storylines.
However, most modern games based on the franchise have just been digital versions of the original card game, such as the free-to-play title "Magic Duels."
The companies apparently wanted to create a title that is not focused on the cards themselves but on the stories behind them. Other games that have been released based on the franchise is the real-time combat strategy game, "Battlegrounds," and the mobile puzzle game, "Magic: The Gathering Puzzle Quest."
The first of its kind
The upcoming MMORPG will be the very first game to take the franchise into an entirely new gameplay platform.
All three companies have previously worked together on "Neverwinter," which means that this will not be necessarily their first rodeo when it comes to building a large-scale big-budget title.
There isn't yet any details on whether or not the game would follow the free-to-play business model. There have also been no announcements regarding its possible release date, but the developers have revealed that they are ramping up its production at their headquarters in Los Gatos.
