• New Free to Play - Solstice Arena
    9 replies, posted
[url]http://store.steampowered.com/news/11623/[/url]
Yawn.
As if Dota(2)/LoL was not stressful enough, now you have this game that is "fast".
[QUOTE=robo126;42535093]what's so great about mobas anyway[/QUOTE] whats so good about the games you like and i dont anyway
[QUOTE=robo126;42535093]what's so great about mobas anyway[/QUOTE] Huge emphasis on teamwork where you need -everybody- working together in order to win a round.
[QUOTE=robo126;42535093]what's so great about mobas anyway[/QUOTE] Emphasis on teamwork, variety of strategy, large cast of characters with varying abilities and roles.
It says it's the first speed MOBA, but isn't Awesomenauts also considered a MOBA? That seems like a pretty speedy MOBA to me.
HoN will always be the fastest Moba, This looks equally slow as LoL.
[QUOTE=robo126;42535093]what's so great about mobas anyway[/QUOTE] Hmmm, well, let's see; there's the matter of every match being different in different ways, like rarely do you see the same composition of heroes on either side, and people have different item builds most of the time. And even if you have the exact same composition of heroes on either side, there is still the variable of who goes where, like you'll end up laning with a different hero or against a different lane composition. Then there's the fact that you grow in power throughout the match; you start out as a weak Level 1 and become more powerful as you level up and upgrade your skills and buy the items that best suit your hero. It's kind of like a rather brief action-RPG in that respect, except you are part of a party of five that is pitted against another party of five; sure you don't go on many quests other than the main quest of "destroy the enemy's Ancient", but as said before it's more action-RPG than something like D&D or Arkham Horror. The way I see it is that when people are sick of the current oversaturation of "MOBAs" (I kinda hate the name because it doesn't explain anything, but it's the most well-known one so I gotsta use it), they are actually probably sick of the traditional style of 5v5 top-down three-lane setup that games like Dota and League popularized, when the genre itself has interesting ideas that could be applied to different kinds of games. The current problem is exactly what happened with World of Warcraft; WoW came along and was super-popular, then all these other companies saw the money and decided "let's make a game like that", resulting in a bunch of WoW clones, without considering the fact that the fans of WoW will probably just keep on playing WoW because they have so much invested in it. The current MOBA glut is pretty much the same; people see the money in League and are making a bunch of MOBAs in the League/Dota style, failing to take into account the fact that the fans of League and Dota are for the most part too invested to spend their time on your new MOBA when League and Dota are still in full swing and aren't going away any time soon. The way I see it is that instead of making something like League/Dota but a bit different, look at the elements of what make League and Dota so compelling and interesting, then work out how to design a game that incorporates those elements into other genres (and does it well). This is the kind of thing that Ronimo Games and Uber Entertainment did; Ronimo took parts of the MOBA formula, namely the concept of growing in power as the match goes on, and translated it into a 2D platforming playstyle, as well as making the levelling system based around collecting Solar (essentially a unification of Gold and XP) to buy upgrades for your "hero". Being on a 2D plane also introduced a vertical element in that you could go up or down, and most importantly jump, which is something that most MOBAs don't seem to have. Uber Entertainment on the other hand combined the MOBA genre with the third-person shooter with the Monday Night Combat series; their first outing (Monday Night Combat) was very much a MOBA third-person shooter, but instead of a larger variety of heroes they had a small pool of classes a'la Team Fortress 2, with three active abilities and a passive, and I believe they also had some sort of vertical element as well. The sequel, Super Monday Night Combat, went with a wider pool of heroes like most other games in the MOBA genre. Another thing that MNC and SMNC did differently was that money could also be used to spawn extra waves of minions, which I don't think other MOBAs have done. The point I'm trying to make, and have probably been trying to make many times in the last couple of months, is that the MOBA genre shouldn't be discounted because of a bunch of Dota clones that don't do enough differently to warrant spending time on it in favour of solid pre-existing titles, and instead look towards games that take the good MOBA elements and see the potential they have in different types of games. Hell, in theory a non-traditional MOBA probably wouldn't need to have the usual trappings of traditional MOBAs like towers or creeps or even lanes, assuming the right mechanics are applied, like a twitch shooter with that has special abilities and crazy guns that become more awesome and interesting as you invest skill points in them, or a third-person brawler a'la Devil May Cry where you start out weak but grow in power as you perform interesting combos. So what I'm trying to say (and probably failing to convince) is that whilst we have a load of Dota clones about, that doesn't mean that the MOBA genre in general has been overdone. And whilst we're at it we need a better fucking name for the genre.
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