BU Interviews: Secret Level
Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds
Developer: Secret Level
Publisher: Atari
BU: The 'Quest' in MTG:BG serves as a training ladder and a way of unlocking spells and duelists, but also has a storyline of its own. Who was responsible for tying the six chapters and cut scene cinematics together with a plausible storyline?SL (Leif): It was really a collaborative effort with an experienced WotC writer and the design staff at Secret Level. The spells and characters in Battlegrounds come from many different time periods in the Magic Universe, so putting a story together that incorporated those elements was a bit of a challenge.BU: In playing the 'Quest' game mode, the levels vary from quite easy to extremely challenging, but never so tough that one feels like giving up. How did you approach making things tough enough to provide a real challenge to experienced gamers, but not ridiculously hard? This is a difficult line to draw in the sand.SL (Leif): We tried to get as many people playing the game as possible, including employees from other projects playing in their free time, to the teams relatives. We also had QA testers on site, but they got so good, they were bad judges on difficulty. We put together questionnaires for every quest for people to make their comments. The feedback we got was very useful.BU: Can you provide some hints to people on how to be successful in Arcade Mode, where you can unlock a number of special duelists?SL (Leif): You can use the cheats… just kidding. No really, either play through the quest mode to get better, or check out the hints page on the Atari community forum (ED: We'll have those hints for you on the last page of this interview)Top players usually are very good with their melee attack and efficient using their shield. Having those skills saves a lot of mana.BU: The Xbox version promises downloadable content to be made available. Any idea when, what types (new spells, arenas, etc.) and if there will also be content and or patches made available to owners of the PC version?SL (Leif): I don’t have an ETA on when they plan to deliver the downloadable content, but before they can release it, we have to finish it, which will be this month. My guess is soon after Christmas.BU: Are you considering doing future work with the MTG franchise?SL (Leif): We had a lot of fun making Battlegrounds, and I know my team would like to continue working on a project like this in the future. BU: Thanks very much for taking the time to answer our questions!SL (Leif): No problem!More on MTG:BG