Historic Times in the LoD Fandom!

Greets yall! It’s been quite awhile since our last article – sorry about that. There are many things coming your way that are sure to please. For now, let’s get back into the swing of things by reviewing some absolutely historic milestones in the community over the last month.

Multiplayer in Legend of Dragoon

Just two days ago on March 6th, the seeds of multiplayer functionality were planted within Severed Chains, the PC port most of you know about by now. To be sure, LoD is great as a single-player game. However, there are worthy explorations into aspects like co-operative play and PVP, among other things.

Monoxide is starting us off with co-op combat because that’s simplest. Within a single devstream we went from no multiplayer at all, to sending a host player’s savefile data to another player. When the host started a battle, that triggered the same battle for the second player! Not bad for one evening of code. This will continue to be worked on over the next few weeks, but we wish to clarify that it is not being included in the next major release of SC (Rec. Build 3). This is just an exploratory mission for right now. Once it’s ready for public testing we’ll let you know.

Eventually, work on multiplayer functionality will also lead to PVP. Despite being a story-driven game, LoD has some interesting combat between physical and magical attack options as well as different builds via equipment choices. Of course, there are many variables involved such as party size, levels, and game balance, so we’ll take it one step at a time. Finally, we’re considering leaderboards for PVP as well as minigame scores, and even minigame PVP! Yall are hyped for PVP vegetable chopping on the Queen Fury, right?

Fan Music Mixes

This is something I’ve wanted us to do for years!! We’ve reached enough of a critical mass on the Discord server that many fan musicians came together to make a music mix, or compilation of songs. They can be any group of songs, from a totally random arrangement (a-la FM radio stations) to purposeful themes. We started off with the latter to make the Feelings Mix, our very first community-built set based loosely on Valentine’s Day and, well, feelings!

These sorts of mixes can be comprised of songs made in the past, and/or new songs that debut in the mix! Multiple songs in the Feelings Mix are brand new, and it’s so great to see new LoD fan music being created nearly 25 years after the game’s release. Next up: we’re not sure yet, but we might do a set based on town and city tracks! If you’re a fan musician or know one in the fandom, we’d love to have you join in!

Big News: PC Gamer Featured Us!

Imagine my surprise when last month, a writer for PC Gamer sent me a DM out of nowhere to feature the LoD fandom and Severed Chains. “Yo Drew. My name’s Rich and I’m writing from PC Gamer.” Yes, I’m an adult, but when my brain processed what this could mean for the fandom I nearly lost all my composure! In my head I’m going “Ah, erm, uhhh..” but I managed a coherent “Hello Rich! It’s so good to meet you.” He explained that it’s a small-time article but wanted to get some key details right and help us get some exposure alongside all the other articles they’re working on.

As a fandom we’ve gotten news coverage before, sure. However, not quite so big as PC Gamer. Even a small bit of coverage from them could be rad. I answered Rich’s questions as succinctly as I could, and the article was published a mere three hours later! Talk about a fast turnaround.

This also led to our latest video upload getting a ton of views on Youtube, even though it was just showing the intro sequence of LoD with recent improvements like 60FPS animations and a working demo of the upscaled graphics mod. We’ll talk more about the Youtube channel in one of our next articles.

Another Historic Day Coming Soon!

We’ve got some secret stuff in the cooker that’s gonna be ready to unveil in about three weeks. I can’t tell you what it is, not even a hint. However, I can tell you it’s definitely going to be another breakout milestone. You won’t believe it when we reveal it.

Now that I’ve been a torturous tease, we’ll end the article here. Thank you all so much for your continued interest in LoD and its community. This is our golden age, and we’re all in it together. Long live LoD!