• Exploring Legends of Equestria Alpha - A Tour of the World!


    Legends of Equestria is running an open weekend at the moment, as many of you have noticed if you follow EQD's daily stream of posts at all.   I decided to hop on and run around taking screenshots of some of the cooler scenery.  When it comes to re-creating out favorite locale's from the show, this project does not disappoint!

    If you have trouble accessing the game, download via the torrent, and keep trying at login.  Torrent is faster, and login lets you in eventually. The site itself is super congested at the moment, so hopefully you all made accounts beforehand!

    Anyway, head on down below the break for all of it! 



     I started off as a unicorn, because my favorite pony of all time is totally a unicorn.  Their primary traveling ability (which is mainly what this Alpha is for at the moment) is teleport, which you can spam if the server is cooperating.


     The inventory screen is your typical fair if you have ever played an MMO before.  Ponies have a bunch of slots to accessorize on, and at the moment there is a vendor that sells a bunch of this stuff.  More on that way below. 


    A good amount of the buildings have been built to look pretty much identical to their show counterparts.  Quite a bit of effort went into making these things look like show accurate one-to-one models.


    They also have a dungeon open in the form of a giant gem cave.  This was the second thing I ran into after wandering around at night.   The day/night cycles are pretty long from what I have seen so far.  Luckily I got a bit of daylight later on in the traveling. 


    Just another shot of the cave.  Looks good! 


    This was the first NPC I ran into.  The dialogue is what you'd expect from a pony run mmo.  These guys also work as quest givers handing out various tasks, but the amount of people camping crystals made me move on from that one! 


    I did get a bit of combat in though.  Unicorns have a few abilities, but Ground Pound seems to do the trick.  


     It looks like they even have a swimming system in place.  As someone who has gone through the works when it comes to MMORPGs, it's always refreshing to not meet an invisible wall when you try diving into the water.  I don't think they can actually go under it yet though. 


     Time for an upgrade! I saw Pegasus zooming every which way up in the sky, and my measly Teleport couldn't do what I needed it to do, so "Totallynot Trixie" grew wings. 


    Cloudsdale itself is awesome.  Out of all the cities I ran into, this was by far my favorite one.  Everything from the rainbow falls to the various cloud platforms and their respective buildings were just straight up impressive.  Rerolling pegasus was more than worth it.  


     Just another shot of general Cloudsdale.  Awesome city.


    They have a pegasus training ground set up for you to practice your flying skills on. 


    ONWARD TO DANCE.  Something you will run into all over the place is massive dance parties.  The clip clop of hooves is almost relaxing in a way. 


    My second destination was Canterlot, which links directly to Cloudsdale via the Zeppelin in the image above. 


    This is where my poor laptop really started to suffer. Being able to fly around definitely impacts the performance a bit when gazing into those giant clusters of buildings.   I probably should have tossed this game on my actual PC. 


     While the majority of these places are empty at the moment, the alleyways and streets are still an impressive site.  Not a whole lot of buildings were copy pasted over.  You can tell the team has been putting their hearts and souls into making these places look great. 


    Pretty much everything you'd expect to find from the show is here, from Donut Joe's to the giant Canterlot libraries


     This was probably my favorite one, with the giant spiraling staircases and Alladdin style buildings. 


    One more shot of Canterlot before we move on to Ponyville.  It looks like the sun is finally starting to come up.


    Day/Night has a transition period in between with sunsets and sunrises.  


    And now for the day! Looking back, I probably should have done the entire thing with daylight.  My bad!


    This is the shop I mentioned earlier on.  You can buy various pieces of equipment for your pony to wear.  Some were a bit too expensive for my meager 10 gold though, so I went with the potion belt.


    And that is what it looks like equipped.  


    A couple of the buildings throughout ponyville have been outfitted with interiors, including Twilight's Library and Rarity's Botique 


     Inside above.  This one was a single room.


     And that would be the inside of Twilight's place, which actually includes 2 rooms. 


    The schoolhouse. 


    Yet another massive dance party at Sugarcube Corner.  It seems like most people hung out here.  


    My final destination was the dark and gloomy Everfree Forest.  As you can see from the image above, day or night, it's always sinister looking.


    I did take a pretty massive hit on performance due to all the trees.  That may have just been my laptop though.  It's outfitted for gaming with a dedicated card, but it's not anywhere near what a PC would do.  Expect this game to require a bit of power to pull off smoothly in the alpha. 


     The monster models are looking great so far.  This deer thing was especially impressive. 


    And an obligatory timber wolf. 


    One final shot of the Everfree Forest via a giant fallen log and the river.  Their water animation actually looks really good here with this style of graphics. Apparently this place plays host to Zecora's Hut and Nightmare Moon's castle too.  My laptop couldn't take any more of it though. 


    And that about covers it for the sights of Legends of Equestria, or at least what I ran into in my short visit before getting stuck on the screen above! I'd highly recommend checking it out if you have the time. Feel free to toss your screenshots down below in the comments if you ran into something awesome.   The machanics aren't all there yet, but the world is a blast to just fly around in and explore.  They did an awesome job at creating/recreating the areas we have seen in the show.  You might want to run pegasus for the sake of not having to hoof it everywhere though.  The energy bar runs out pretty quick with sprint on.

    I'm looking forward to what they come up with in the future.  This has a lot of potential to be something great once all the kinks are smoothed out! Happy travels!