Legendary Wars

Legendary Wars(LW) is an RTS-Action-RPG game for iOS and Android that was developed by Liv Games. Build up massive armies with twelve unique heroes, including Elven Archers, Hulking Golems, Powerful Wizards, and Magical Unicorns. Your journey will put you toe to toe with over 20 different monsters and 12 evil bosses bent on your demise. It's up to you to save Legendaria.

Legendary Wars was able to garner 29,802 reviews on the app store before its removal, indicating a fairly successful game. In April 2, 2011, Legendary Wars Free was released to give everyone a game they can truly enjoy to get a feel of the full game, although it was shortly removed. While Legendary Wars originally lacked HD Retina support, in May 7, 2011, Legendary Wars received an HD version, separate from the original game, was released, although HD support came to the original game in Version 2.0. In February 2014, Legendary Wars also received an Android port. Because the game's last update pre-dated iOS 11, the game was not available to be played for users at iOS 11 and above, and thus, eventually got a rerelease for iOS 11+ in September 2019 by GameClub, a company that makes old games playable on the current iOS, and thus, the original game was removed from the app stores.

The Basics
In Legendary Wars, there are a few different gamemodes, most of which utilize the progression that characters can receive. The main campaign includes a level of all of the gamemode styles except Arena.

The first and main gamemode of Legendary Wars are the Castle Defense sections. In these, you start with a castle to defend, and you choose what units do you want to bring, so long as you unlocked them. To train units, you need to collect gems from Mineys, who can be summoned and will bring back gems after a few seconds, by then you collect the gems by tapping it or by letting the mineys run back to the castle to deposit them automatically, which takes longer than manually tapping the gems. After clicking on a unit icon with sufficient gems a unit will be trained and that unit will enter a cooldown before you can train that specific unit again. You are able to control where those units can go, and you can give commands to units to move forward, stay back, or retreat, and these commands are either applied only to that specific unit type if selected, or to all units if you have not selected a unit. Each unit also has a special ability, which uses essence points earned by killing enemies, that perform different effects.

The side modes include a Sidescroller where you do certain objectives with a set unit that constantly moves towards a direction, an Arena mode where you can only train each unit once and you have to kill a specific number of enemies, and more!

Progression
Progression involves two currencies earned by playing any mode: Gems and Moonstones.

Gems are the primary currency earned through gameplay and they are used to upgrade unit stats, essence, and the castle health. Moonstones are rarer, as they are only awarded once in certain levels per campaign difficulty playthrough, or once for every milestone hit in the sidemodes playable from the modes menu. Moonstones are used for more crucial and gamechanging upgrades, which include upgrading a unit's tier, unlocking certain units, unlocking a different ability and more stat upgrades, certain castle upgrades, or improved spells. Upgrades will affect any gamemode except sidescrollers, where the unit provided will always have the same stats.

Beating the game once will unlock the next difficulty, which is more akin to a NG+ mode than a traditional difficulty setting, and will go up to Monster difficulty, the fourth difficulty level. Each new difficulty raises the damage and health of enemies, but in return, give you an opportunity to earn more moonstones.

Monetization
Legendary Wars normally costed $2.99 to $0.99 depending on when you bought it, and even went free on some occasions. It also has in-app purchases which allow you to buy more moonstones with real money. Later on these iAP also awarded gems with the moonstones, and a gem doubler, which doubles the amount of gems earned in levels outside of gems you collect, was sold for $2.99. At some point early on in the game's lifespan, you could refer up to 3 friends to buy the game, and each referred purchase would earn you 3 moonstones. For a long while as well, you could click links to their social media, or a special link every time a new update was released, that generally would earn you 500 gems or 1 moonstone (usually 1 moonstone for special links).

In the Android port, Legendary Wars after May 9, 2014, was free to play with ads that pop up when you get into a loading screen. Players who previously paid for the app or purchased an in-app purchase will not have ads.

In the GameClub version, the only monetization is paying the subscription fee to gain access to the full game.

Development
The development of Legendary Wars first began in 2009 when Orian Liv and two of his friends brainstormed ideas for a game. Previously, Orian searched for a games development job in 2008 after quitting retail at GameStop and acquiring a business degree, but was unable to find a job. Because of this, Orian chose to develop the game on the iPhone, because he contacted many game companies, but heard nothing back from them, and iOS had a low barrier of entry. Originally, Legendary Wars was prototyped as a "musical physics space puzzler" known as "Protostar", but after they listened to the music they developed, which according to Casey McGuire, is the track for Frostburn, and taking into account the games Orian Liv heavily played at the time, the game was shifted to become an "epic strategy rpg war defense game." Some of the titles that inspired the shift was titles like Cartoon Wars, which enjoyed immense popularity, and titles that Liv played at the time, ranging from RTS classics such as Dune II and Warcraft 2, indie hits like Castle Crashers and Plants Vs. Zombies, and the aesthetic of Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, lead art designer Felix Embree quit working at Blizzard to work at Liv Games. Lack of work due to the recession helped push many of the developers to focus on Legendary Wars. Within four months, they put together a demo to recruit members, thus forming the full dev team as Liv Games by the spring of 2010. The remaining development of the game took 10 months, leading to Legendary Wars launcing on January 27, 2011.

For Legendary Wars, the engine of choice was Cocos2d, while the code written in Objective C, and C. Orian looking back would had used Unity instead of Cocos2d due to the ease of getting the game on multiple platforms. Legendary Wars runs natively on all iOS devices below iOS 11, and it received an Android port on February 11, 2014, that was developed by Apportable.

Post-release updates
After launching Legendary Wars, Liv Games added a plethora of updates to Legendary Wars, up until December 3, 2013. Updates did a variety of things, such as add full support for newer devices and their technology, to adding content. Even when there were less than 100 sales of the game every day, Liv chose to stick through and continue updating the game, as he believed that the way to create a success was to slowly build a community around your game. This philosophy paid off, as the 2.0 update generated unprecedented interest in Liv Games, according to Google.

There are four important updates that were added to the game. Version 1.4, released on June 8, 2011, added Tier 4 unit upgrades, made endless modes free to all users, added a new command that neatly organizes units to separate into every row, and balanced many levels. Version 1.5, released on August 26, 2011, changed the miney from costing 5 gems to train, to being a unit that is trained for free at the mine. It was also the first time a new unit was introduced called the healer, and a new gamemode, the Arena, was added. The largest content patch, Version 2.0, released on November 22, 2012. It added Tier 5 unit upgrades, four new units, 21 new campaign levels, and a new gamemode called Legendary Challenges. It also overhauled many previous levels with new tier monsters from Monster Wars, added a hero selection screen before the start of a level to choose what units you bring to a level, and added iPhone iOS 6 support. The final update, Version 2.3, released on December 3rd, 2013, adding a waypoint system for improved unit targetting while micromanaging, a 2x speed button to accelerate levels, made the rogue and centaur unlocked at Frostburn, added more iOS 7 support, and added the Gem Doubler.

Music
The soundtrack of Legendary Wars are orchestral tracks that were composed by Casey McGuire, consisting of 8 tracks, one of which was added post-launch.

Reception
Legendary Wars received positive reception at launch. Most of the reviews praised the game for its mashups of many genres, most notably of the RTS, RPG, and Castle Defense elements, and for the amount of content in the game. Castle Defense games generally do not offer control over your units, as you normally just sent troops down one lane with no agency over what they do. Reviewers mentioned that the ability to control your units, over three lanes, provided one of the most complex castle defense experiences. Legendary Wars also offers many levels with some levels being what you wouldn't expect from a Castle Defense game, giving a lot of content with a good amount of variety. However, Legendary Wars was also criticized for it's excessive micromanaging and lackluster AI.

While exact download figures of the game are unknown, Legendary Wars was successful enough to self-fund the company long enough for the development of Monster Wars. In addition, by September 16, 2011, Legendary Wars had over 1 million downloads.

When Version 2.0 of Legendary Wars was released, it was praised for having fixed most of the problems people originally had with the game at the time of the update. By then, a button to have units form up separately into different lanes was added, allowing better control of the units, and you were able to select what unit type you wanted to command.

Monetarily, the game broke even within 2 months of release. By 2014, the game had 20,000+ reviews on the app store, and the facebook page has 20,078 followers, indicating that the game sold a fair amount. By the time the game was removed and the review count had somewhat of a reset due to iOS 11 (only reviews/scores done after 2.3's launch were kept), the review count is 2,393. Liv Games also had enough to release two similar games, Monster Wars, and Stellar Wars, and attempted to develop two more games in the Legendary Wars ip, which more than likely indicates that the franchise was fairly successful at the time.

Future Plans and Cut Concepts
According to Casey McGuire, Liv Games wanted to release Legendary Wars for PC, but because Legendary Wars was primarily built on iOS technology, there were coding issues with trying to port the games. So far, a PC port is not in the works. Orian Liv has stated in an interview that he wanted to have a skeletal system that allows for more compact and smooth animations, and the ability to visually (and mechanically) swap weapons, but the technology used at the time did not let this happen. However, Wizardlings, and later Stellar Wars, were finally able to implement a skeletal system for units which utilizes flash, although it did not implement a multiple weapon system. Liv also wanted to eventually incorporate PvP and Co-op in the series while working on Legendary Wars, but that has yet to happen. Group specials were another concept Liv wanted to add, but like a skeletal system and Multiplayer, that concept was too technologically ambitious for Liv and his team at the time. During an interview during 2021 January 22, a new content patch was planned for Legendary Wars involving the island of Mysteria, introducing aquatic levels and enemies. However, Cocos2D support by then was dwindling, making supporting the game tough. The developers wanted to use this idea for Legendary Wars's 10th anniversary, but as only 3 people were able to work on the content update, the update was not complete by the deadline, thus the update was canceled. Other things the developers wanted was a zoom feature to make selecting units easier, finishers, and making units unable to stack on each other in the same lane. In the future, Liv Games wants to do a Legendary Wars Remastered for the switch.

Achievements
Legendary Wars launched with 50 achievements to earn through Game Center. More achievements were not added with additional updates, unlike Monster and Stellar Wars.