Realm of Legends Brings Old-School MMORPG Grinding to iOS and Android

Realm of Legends has launched on iOS and Android, arriving with a decidedly old-fashioned proposition: an online fantasy world where progression is supposed to come from actually playing the game rather than merely opening increasingly elaborate menus. The new isometric MMORPG offers a shared persistent world, character progression, equipment hunting and multiplayer interaction in a format clearly inspired by the PC MMORPGs that consumed entire weekends before battle passes had even been invented.

Its arrival is interesting because mobile MMORPG design has increasingly drifted towards automated combat, quest navigation and enough red notification dots to make a dashboard engineer nervous. Realm of Legends instead leans into a more traditional progression loop, asking players to explore and develop their characters in a persistent online environment.

Whether that philosophy survives contact with the long-term monetisation model remains the important question, but a mobile MMORPG deliberately pitching itself around classic PC-style progression is at least a refreshing change of emphasis. Modern phones are perfectly capable of running sophisticated persistent worlds; convincing players that they should manually participate in them rather than watching an avatar complete its own errands may be the harder technical challenge.