The Future of Legions - Part One
Hello Legionnaires,
It's been longer than I hoped between updates, but sometimes you just need to work things out when they change. From the information given through the three puzzles, you got a lot of ideas around the upcoming 1.40 update, a bit of text reading "Torque3D" and one more clue pointing to "Steam." We've explained the update and are nearing its completion, but we haven't given you info about Torque3D or Steam. Today you'll hear about Torque3D.
An Engine Change
Legions is a fun game with solid core gameplay. There are a lot of fun elements and some unique twists that sets Legions apart in the world of the FPS, even against games with jetpacks. Nevertheless, it doesn't take a professional game critic to see that there's a serious gap in what the current engine can do visually and technically compared to what modern engines have been doing for years. We're planning on fixing that problem.
Now it's time for something you may not have expected. When we were first scoping out what engine to use, Torque3D was an obvious choice. It was the same underlying tech, which means greater portability - we could churn something out more quickly since much of the code and assets are based on the underlying tech. We also suspected the engine would cater better toward the type of technical requirements we had for it, especially those centered around the physics and netcode. Right around that time, we posted those puzzles.
Since then, we've been seriously debating the pros and cons of using Torque3D over other engines. We've decided that our best course of action would be to bring on a technically superior and better supported engine that caters to what we want to do with Legions in the future. Given those considerations, we've decided to move to the Unity engine. There are a lot of benefits to this engine that will become clear as development begins and you all start seeing the result. What this also means is that the next iteration of Legions is a bit farther off. We don't have timelines and no guarantees, and you wont see us giving them any time soon.
We're releasing the 1.40 update soon to tide you over until we can launch the next version of Legions. Hopefully you'll have enough to play with until then. :)
Regarding Steam...well, all that will be revealed in the next blog post sometime "soon."
Stay Crunchy, Legionnaires.