We knew that we wanted to build a world-class blockchain game, and one of the first decisions was whether to add blockchain to our live game (Legendary: Game of Heroes, which has been in continuous live operations for over six years), or build a new game from scratch. Another question was to go back to Legendary or else build a new game world.

At N3TWORK, we are obsessed about the player experience. When we thought about adding blockchain to a game that has been live for over six years, we could see countless ways this could go wrong. Perhaps our existing community would be alienated by blockchain. Perhaps we would completely upset the balance of power. Perhaps our veteran players would have such a large advantage from their years of play, it would be impossible for new players to compete.

Similarly, an ownership economy built on blockchain is completely different from a traditional free-to-play game economy. In investigating the possibilities, it became clear that a new game built from the ground up for blockchain would deliver the clearest, fairest and most fun experience to our players.

Additionally, designing a new game and a new battle mechanic particularly will allow us to build new and satisfying ways for you to use your heroes. We want your heroes to be valuable across a wide range of activities, and especially for older heroes to be able to retain their value in the system for years after their release. For all these reasons, a new game was necessary.

Legendary is a game that is all about heroes. And we spent years designing, illustrating and animating beautiful, unique, high quality heroes for you to enjoy. From high fantasy dragons, to steampunk samurais to three little pigs riding an armored tank (a personal favorite), the range of Legendary heroes is truly amazing. And so is the art, especially when we revisit the high resolution source files. However, when we look at the original Legendary with the distance of time, we feel that the game does not take the best advantage of the hero art. You rarely see the heroes in their full, animated glory, and the user experience does not feel like it was built around the heroes. We are deeply invested in the Legendary heroes and the world of Korelis. The opportunity to return to Korelis and build a game around this amazing hero art was one we could not pass up.

LHU will be a completely new game, but with familiar elements to fans of Legendary: Game of Heroes (LGH). LHU will stay, at it's core, a hero-based collectible card game. The heroes we use will all come from LGH, but we are not treating all the existing fiction as canon. Given the frequency of new hero releases in LGH (usually 5 a week) we'll be the first to admit that hero names, skills and backstories vary in quality and hardly tell a cohesive story. So, when playing LHU, you will see familiar faces, sometimes with familiar names and sometimes with completely new names and/or backstories.

The gameplay itself will be changed for LHU. It will still feature two teams of up to 5 heroes battling each other, or a team of five against a raid boss. But we will not be using the match-3 component familiar to LGH players. The stats and skills system will be completely different, as will the battle mechanic.

There are two main drivers of this decision. First, we want the game to be easy to play across mobile devices, web browsers and desktop computers. The fast paced gem-matching game simply isn't as satisfying when played with a mouse or trackpad. Second, we want to be able to bring you new types of activities with your heroes. There is a fundamental design decision in LGH where heroes and enemies actually use different stats underneath the hood. As a result, we feel the PvP and GvG game modes have always used an inelegant solution of transforming a hero card into an enemy, and have forced you to battle other players' heroes 1 at a time. With LHU, we are designing a new battle mechanic around stat parity between heroes and enemies. This will allow for more satisfying PvP and GvG modes, as well as new battle types like large scale battles where your heroes lead squadrons of troops into battle.

Core to the experience of playing LHU is ownership. The entire reason we are building this game from the ground up for blockchain is that we believe we will deliver a more delightful player experience by putting ownership of in-game items in your hands.

Unlike Game of Heroes, where Heroes, Gear, et all can only be purchased from us, the game devs, or won through play, we anticipate that fellow players will be the majority seller and beneficiary of Heroes, Gear, Land and other NFT classes.

Growing up, many team members’ first experience with digital game design was building maps using mod tools in Starcraft, Warcraft, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and similar PC classics. In that era of PC gaming, it was common for games to ship with polished versions of the tool the developers used to build the game. Some games let you make one-off maps, some let you build full campaigns, and some games had tools so extensive you could build complete game experiences within them. Many of the world’s best game designers got their start building levels or mods that got noticed by professionals.

As we've moved to mobile phones being the predominant devices for playing games around the world, and for games requiring always on connections and stable server architectures, we've lost much of that spirit of co-creation with the community.

Now, thanks to decentralized blockchain tech, we have the opportunity to discover the next evolution of community co-creation. Thanks to LHU, not only will you own all your assets in the form of NFTs, but other developers will be able to build completely new experiences using those NFTs. The community can take Legendary in unexpected directions that allow you to use your Legendary heroes in completely new contexts. This is possible thanks to the provable ownership provided by blockchain.

Additionally, you will own your heroes, your gear and your land. If you play Legendary for 3 years and decide it's time to move on, the money and energy you spent in Legendary will not be wasted. You could decide to hold on to your heroes for another day, or else sell them to another player on the secondary market, retaining the lion's share of the profit for yourself. While playing the game, you can earn crypto-tokens you can spend to power up your heroes. Or, if you don't need those tokens, you can sell them to other players who want them more.

These are just some of the use cases for how blockchain transforms Legendary beyond what it has been to date. Blockchain technology is truly ushering in a new era for game making, game playing, and community co-development. We couldn't be more excited to explore this new space with you.

We are developing LHU for cross-platform play across mobile phones, web browsers and desktop PCs.

We believe that the future of blockchain gaming is cross-platform, and will support the ability to play LHU when you want, where you want. The game will initially launch for web browsers, but we will release iOS/Android clients as well as Mac/PC clients over time. LHU is built on the Unity game engine by a team of highly experienced Unity developers.

Technically, N3TWORK Studios is a brand new company on a mission to build genre defining game experiences around the blockchain. But if you peek under the covers, you will see that we are a continuation of the game development work and teams from our predecessor, N3TWORK inc.

We are the developers that have built and run Legendary: Game of Heroes, Tetris and Funko Pop Blitz for mobile. The game teams within N3TWORK have worked together for years, and we are bringing our chemistry, our expertise and knowhow around building and operating digital economies, and our existing characters, pipelines and technologies to build new blockchain gaming experiences. Along with this rebranding as N3TWORK Studios, we have brought in new financing to ensure our long term success and to bring new people and projects into the company.

As a result, N3TWORK Studios is well positioned to lead the blockchain gaming space in the long term. We have the people, the funding, the knowhow and the tech. Now we just need you to join us in co-developing LHU and other blockchain based games.