Welcome to Legions & Legends
It is hard to believe that our studio, Azra Games, didn’t even exist in January of this year. In a few short months, we’ve pulled together a team of 30+ veteran developers, a $15M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz @ Jonathan Lai and NFX @ Gigi Levy-Weiss, and a syndicate of luminaries in crypto and gaming, including Justin Kan (Twitch, Fractal), Gabby Dizon (YGG) and Roham Gharegozlou (Dapper Labs).
Our backers have since told us they came alongside Azra Games for two reasons.
Firstly — the bench strength of the team. We are both core gamers and crypto-natives. Our CTO, Travis Boudreaux, deeply understands both the pitfalls and incredible opportunities of building in web3. I, on the other hand, have dedicated my career to the craft of game-making, and most of the dev team that has followed me to Azra Games have worked together before.
Secondly — the vision for our first game. This is a game that builds upon and perfects the genre I’ve spent my entire career developing. A game built on a time-tested philosophy of fun. A game where web3 isn’t bolted on, but rather a match for the design.
We’ve built-in public and teased our early ideas, but today we’re ready to unveil this labor of love. We are proud to present: Legions & Legends.
We created a visual illustration to capture the feeling of our game’s franchise vision. You command a legion against impossible challenges. In a similar way, in the ’70s, Dungeons and Dragons released their splash visual to engage you. As a Dungeon Master, I fondly remember seeing the brave fighter against a dragon and how I felt. I was inspired to be a hero in the world that Gary Gygax, the creator of D&D, created. He gave us tools that facilitate unlimited storytelling. In our universe, you are that very hero, commanding your legion to glory.
Legions & Legends is a collectible and combat RPG, set in an uncharted galaxy where magic and technology collide. Here, powerful civilizations, as yet unknown to Earth, are embroiled in an eternal war. You, dear player, will be among the first to venture into the fray in your own bid to become a legend. Your time has arrived, call your legion forth to battle.
Making games takes practice. Like everything in life building towards mastery requires deliberate repetition.
This will be my ninth collectibles and combat RPG, and with it, an opportunity to crack a game design challenge that’s eluded me until now. CCG is an enduring genre because it taps into the very core of how we play as kids — collecting toys and testing them in combat.
Recently, one of our Discord community members shared a photo of his children, lining up all their Star Wars LEGO figurines to play a physical version of my last game, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.
Yet, in their imagination, those kids are able to do something we as developers weren’t able to crack on that game, nor any before it: balancing a game for any scale of combat, with any number of characters of any size on the same team. An AT-AT and a Jedi. An Archdemon and a Grey Warden. All of them powerful, all of them balanced, and none of them hogging the camera.
Balancing combat is hard. Get it wrong, and you can break the immersion, ruin the fun and tank the economy. That’s a reason that most CCG games pit similar type characters versus each other. Squads of humans, squads of little creatures, etc. They’re fun games but they can’t capture that same untethered scale of playing with your toy box. After years of trying, I believe we’ve finally stumbled upon an innovation that solves this design dilemma in Legions & Legends. As they say, “the ninth time’s a charm.”
There are three types of characters at the center of Legions & Legends — Legionnaires, Commanders, and Behemoths. Legionnaires are your front lines — tough, loyal and best in large numbers. Commanders have unique attacks and buffs that bolster your forces, but are vulnerable if left unguarded. And lastly, there are the Behemoths — powerful war machines and monstrosities. These massive mechanical, biological and spectral creatures are slow, but devastating in their ability to turn the tide of war. Mix and match your collection carefully to overcome the impossible challenges ahead of you.
The key to getting all three to feel powerful and desirable in a collection game is a finely tuned battle system. This is our primary focus and investment on the development team and I couldn’t be more proud of the innovations I see coming from the designers each week. It’s not an auto-battler, a turn-based RPG, or a twitch-heavy RTS. It’s something in-between these things and all its own. We can’t wait to share more about the specifics of this experience in the future. For now, what I can say is that I’m more excited about this innovation than the battle system in any previous game I’ve built.
I’m equally excited about the lore of Legions & Legends. From the beginning, our goal was to create a world that went beyond the game. What is the history of the Corvus Galaxy? How did these civilizations crop up here? What’s the origin of the monstrosities? Who is Arcanas? You’re not the only ones asking these questions. The most successful games are the ones that inspire you to roleplay in the ways that you want outside the game, with your own stories!
The Genesis Explorers, the characters in our first NFT collection minting this summer, are newcomers to this uncharted galaxy. They will be your guides into the lore of Legions & Legends. As members of the Genesis Merchant Company, these are the scrappers, miners, prospectors and traders of our world. They seek to extract the valuable relics of these warrior civilizations from their abandoned battlefields.
In our first playable feature coming this year, players will deploy their Genesis Explorers on Exploration Missions, competing to discover behemoth parts used to craft legendary combat units in Legions & Legends or trade with other players. We call our Genesis Collection Play Forever Passes. The collection will mint on Ethereum, and the NFTs will be able to interface with games we build on any other blockchain. That’s important because a Play Forever Pass allows a holder to mine exclusive resources in every project released by Azra Games. No other NFTs we sell will provide this access. We believe in taking the time to release quality experiences that fit together organically as a whole. We won’t always get it right, and we’ll adjust with the community’s feedback. We also believe in crafting systems and economies that will provide value to both passive and active players for years to come.
My gaming roots are in Dungeons & Dragons, BattleTech, and Warhammer. It was a simpler time when players owned their character sheets and invested in their uniquely crafted figurines. I believe web3 gives us the opportunity to recapture that spirit while innovating in a timeless genre of sci-fi & fantasy.. As the onset of mobile gaming and web-based gaming before it, blockchain gaming is still in its infancy, dominated by projects looking to define themselves simply by the technology they are built upon. That isn’t enough, and we all know it. With Legions & Legends, we aim to usher in something distinctly new, based on the bedrock of something distinctly enduring: games that are fun.
Your journey deep into the Corvus Galaxy awaits. Thank you for letting us be your dungeon masters.
Mark “Myong-Sik” Otero
Founder, CEO
Azra Games
