To make its fantasy extraction game, this studio of ex-Blizzard devs had to teach itself the art of third-person combat design: ‘There’s a science to how those are built’

Late last year, I played in a closed alpha playtest of Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, an upcoming extraction game pairing World of Warcraft-style high fantasy with third-person action combat. Over a couple of hours, I got an early taste of stringing together longbow headshots on skeletons, smashing wolves with maces, and panicked escapes as a priest tried to murder me for my backpack full of goblin ears. This week, Legacy enters early access, aiming to offer its own artisanal blend of RPG extraction.

Ahead of Legacy’s early access launch, I spoke last month with Chris Kaleiki, Notorious Studios co-founder and former World of Warcraft class designer. In our interview, Kaleiki explained how Legacy grew out of an idea he had about redesigning World of Warcraft’s class fantasy with more action and less action bars.

“I was trying a more action-based model—something which is a lot more popular today, but I’d based it on games I was playing at the time, like Dark Souls, Dark Souls 3,” Kaleiki said.

Kaleiki’s concept didn’t gain much traction at Blizzard, but his departure from the company in 2020 left him free to revisit and flesh out the idea, founding Notorious alongside other former WoW devs to pursue the project. As the vision for Legacy crystallized, Kaleiki said, it was driven in part by the team’s passion for MMO world PvP.

“World PvP puts the players into an open world exploration map, and they have objectives they want to do—usually crafting or killing creatures. And PvP can occur, but it’s not scripted. It’s not like the designers are saying, ‘go kill this guy,'” Kaleiki said. “It creates all these player stories, and I always thought that was compelling.”

With Legacy, Notorious hoped to give World PvP, something that had always been relegated to a side activity in WoW and other MMOs, the focus it deserves. As Notorious started melding action combat with an explorable PvP world, they were unintentionally forming a nascent RPG extraction game just as the extraction genre was emerging. For the team of former WoW designers, however, building a third-person action system from the ground up took some doing.

“There are so many idiosyncrasies, things to learn about building this kind of system. It’s almost like building a fighting game—you have these anticipation frames, the active frames, the follow through frames at the end,” Kaleiki said. “There’s a science to how those are built. On an MMO, you don’t really go by frames, right? That was a huge learning curve.”

It was a big enough task that even some of Kaleiki’s own studio members weren’t convinced it could be pulled off. “When I started the studio, there were people who had worked at other triple-A like EA and Activision itself, who were like, ‘We tried making that game internally. Don’t do it,’ because it’s really hard to do,” Kaleiki said. “And I feel like we achieved it.”

In Kaleiki’s words, “combat is king” in Legacy. Notorious, he says, places an overwhelming emphasis on making sure the warrior’s axe abilities have a satisfying heft and the ranger’s bows place arrows with precision. If the thrill I felt when chain-pulling an enemy rogue player out of midair and clobbering him to death was any indication, it seems like that work has paid off.

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery enters early access tomorrow on February 12.