MOBA Archives - Page 3 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Playing as Women

June 4, 2015 by Belghast

Chaos in Motion

Last night I had no real intentions of doing anything serious. I started off the night on my gaming machine upstairs, but had every plan to eventually filter downstairs to the sofa with my laptop for some more casual gaming while watching television. For a period of time I was spending my Wednesday nights helping out the second free company static raid, but as they started getting more people interested I became scarce by intention. I never really wanted to be part of two different raid groups, but was willing to help so long as my presence was really needed. Last night however they had four absences, so while I did not intend to do anything I stepped in to help out as best I could. What made last night all the more important is that it was the inaugural raid night of my good friend Wulf, the paladin tank from our World of Warcraft raid. The only problem being that even with me being pulled in we were still sitting at only five players.

So we shifted around our sights on simply knocking out some early content and opted to queue for Garuda Extreme instead. It is at this point I realize that while I know how to do these fights… I suck at explaining them. Wulf is very much a tank that likes to know all of the information about something before going into the fight. I on the other hand tend to be very much an “adjust to things on the fly” player, and as a result I only ever have a vague cliffs notes versions of fights in my head. There are a lot of things I “know” about a fight, but I don’t really “know I know them”. This makes me the least reliable source of information for someone who craves to make order out of the chaos. To make matters more tenuous we were pugging in three players on each attempt, and Wulf was being hit by the dreaded instance server lag that sometimes hits me in FFXIV. All things considered we had a great night and managed to take down Garuda Extreme for him as well as Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn Four. I am hoping he enjoyed himself at least a little, even though most of the night was pretty much unbridled chaos.

Playing as Women

Over the last few months I have come to a bit of a realization, that apparently my brain works slightly differently than I thought it did. For years now I have thought that I simply did not like playing female characters in video games. When I attempted to do so I felt like I just could not get into playing the characters as much as I could the male counter part. All this time I thought it was simply me favoring a character that was “more like” me personally, much the same way as I tend to create all of my MMO characters as some sort of idealized version of my self. It turns out I am apparently completely wrong about the motivation behind this. Granted when it comes to a character like Sheppard in Mass Effect I will always still prefer the one that is more like me. I’ve come to the realization after a series of tests of this theory… that I simply have a problem playing female characters with horrible armor and weapon choices. If you give a female character proper armor and really good weapons then I seem to be perfectly happy bashing things in the face as them.

Admittedly the trend of placing women in video games in ridiculous outfits has always bothered me on some level, but I had no clue it was my actual impediment for enjoying playing women characters. The realization of this slowly started creeping in when I found myself really enjoying the newest Tomb Raider awhile back, after never really being able to get into the original during college. Since I am not really big into narrative game play, I was trying to figure out what made the difference all the sudden… and the only thing I could land upon was “because she is a badass”. The original one always bothered me because it seemed to focus more on showing off her pointy polygon boobs more than anything else. Then when I was presented with a character like Zarya, I immediately thought… “I would totally play as her, she is a badass” and I had a similar reaction yesterday upon seeing Johanna in Heroes of the Storm. Give me a woman decked in armor and wielding a badass weapon… and I will happy play as her any day of the week. Give me a wilting flower in what is essentially a bra and panties… and you can have all of my “NOPE!”.

Finding my Groove

Last night after the raid in Final Fantasy XIV I decide to poke my head into Heroes of the Storm to check out what Johanna looked like in game. I had intended to do the “try” option to poke around as her for a bit, when Damai asked if I wanted to play for a bit. Now I have been poking around in this game since alpha, and played a significant amount when the game went into beta and I finally had people to play with. That said over the last several months I have not played at all, and was completely out of touch with the current state of the various heroes. Previously my champion had been Muradin because I could build him tanky or I could build him extremely “murdery”. The problem being that I was just “off” on playing him because it feels like maybe his survival got a whack from the nerfbat. I was spending more than my fair share of time running back in from the nexus because I kept dying to stupid crap that I would have been able to survive when I played the game last.

Damai mentioned that he wanted to switch to playing support so that he could work on one of his quests… and I had honestly forgotten this was a thing that Heroes of the Storm had. I had the quests “Play 3 Games as a Warrior” which I was already doing and “Play 3 Games as Diablo Character” so I opted to play some Sonya. This was a champion that I got through a hero bundle that I purchased, and had never really spent much time playing her. My god.. I think I have found my champion because upon switching over to her I started having a blast last night. I went ahead and ponied up for the more armored “Wrath” set look from the store, and it is pretty badass that she is wielding Ashkandi in one hand and Quel’Serrar in the other. What I like the most about her is that she quite literally uses “Fury” as a mechanic meaning you are not gated by running out of mana, but you are instead gated by having to earn fury through combat just like a World of Warcraft Warrior. We played a half dozen games or so before I decided to head on to bed. I could have easily stayed there playing another half dozen more. The state of the game is extremely fun, and I need to grab Damai and do this more often. At some point I am absolutely going to have to also pick up the Shatterstar themed skin since I am a sucker for all things New Mutants/X-Force.

About League and HotS

June 3, 2015 by Belghast

“Last Hit” Builds Contention

Yesterday Heroes of the Storm officially launched around the world. As a result there has been some gnashing of teeth lately discussing how HotS is essentially a “dumbed down” version of League of Legends. The complaints I am seeing revolve around the lack of complexity in the individual champion builds, and the team focus rather than the single player focus. All of these things I see instead as positives. I have spent more than my fair share of money and time on League of Legends because I have a significant number of friends who really enjoy it. It is one of those game experiences that I find enjoyable only when I am playing with and against friends. When you put me out into the community as a whole, the toxic environment surrounding the non-ranked community is a massive turn off. I have heard that as you move up through the ranks the community starts to get better and more professional, but I lack the desire to play that game or any game for that matter “competitively”.

The big problem I had with League was the fact that it felt like I was not only competing against the players on the other team, but also competing against my own team mates for resources. The concept of last hitting feels so divisive that I am shocked it exists in any team based game. The fact that a team mate can either purposefully or accidentally snipe the last hit on a minion and gain all of the gold just seems like a horribly selfish tactic to introduce into a supposedly “team focused” game. While I feel like the higher tiers of competitive play more than likely focus on the team effort and winning games, the low tier players tend to focus entirely on making themselves look good. The best way to that end result is to feed heavily in lane and go on a murder spree, which means the other player in that lane is going to be starved out of resources and won’t be able to help the team later in the game. Essentially all I am saying is that I think the concept of the “last hit” breeds contention between team mates more than it ever supports positive play.

Item Build is Too Fiddly

While the first problem I have with the game I consider a fundamental design flaw, the second big problem I have with League of Legends is a “me” thing. I detest the item build system, in part because it asks me to care far more about that game than I actually want to. League is never going to be a game that I play on a serious level, but instead a game I play with my friends when they decide that they want to play it. I want to play just good enough not to shoot my team mates in the foot. The problem is doing the item build system well, requires you to have actually research your champion and what sorts of things they need. What I want is a more universal path to “this item adds more awesomeness” so I struggle to find items to build that make sense for whoever I am playing. Now on champions I have played a lot like Garen, WuKong or Darius I have finally figured out how I want to build each of them for my own play style. The problem being this was something that happened over lots of trial and error. Quite frankly I don’t want to have to devote the processing cycles to figure that out, I just want a sequence of choices that add some flavor but in which there is no real “wrong” choice.

Essentially the system I am describing is the system that Heroes of the Storm uses, and from the moment I saw it I immediately felt at home. I know that I can make small tweaks to the way my Hero performs, but at the end of the day no single choice is going to make or break the game for me. Essentially even if I just blind pick abilities to get back into the action there is nothing that I can do to screw it up. Someone described it as MOBAs with training wheels, and I am completely fine with that. Essentially the MOBA audience is already solidified around either League of Legends or DOTA 2, and there is nothing that will change the fact that those two audiences are extremely devoted to their chosen game. I see Heroes of the Storm being the game for the rest of us, the folks that are mildly interested in MOBAs but simply don’t want to have to memorize the amount of information needed to play either of the other games effectively. I still play League with friends but HotS is the only game I would consider solo-queuing in.

Champion Design

The big area where I have to crown League the king however is in the area of Champion design. They have managed to create this extremely malleable mythos that allows them to quite literally create a champion that can do ANYTHING and make it work thematically. The reason why I keep returning to the game is to keep playing these new and interesting champion designs. HotS I feel does a better job than most of the other competitors with making champions feel like fully fleshed out beings, but the key problem there lies in the fact that they can ONLY draw upon Blizzard characters. League of Legends can create brand new characters on the fly without having to worry too much about them not fitting into the lore of their world, because said world is ridiculously open ended. Right now every single champion in Heroes of the Storm has to fit into the Diablo, Warcraft or Starcraft universes. Given time I can see them also adding in Overwatch, but even then those are very specific genres that they can draw on, whereas League tends to take inspiration for designs from other pop culture iconography.

Lucian for example is a blending of Morpheus from The Matrix and a Grammaton Cleric from Equilibrium. Twisted Fate is absolutely Gambit from X-Men, and Draven is extremely influenced by Kraven the Hunter from Spiderman. Volibear is absolutely Iorek Byrnison from the HIs Dark Materials trilogy. League essentially has free reign for what they can adopt and adapt to fit into their world. Granted in each case they have absolutely made the champion into their own thing, but that initial inspiration still sits there oh so thinly veiled. Heroes of the Storm on the other hand is forced to eat its own, as it can only consume characters that are already in the existing Blizzard Intellectual Property Universe. I feel the end result is going to always mean that League feels far more fresh and interesting, and HotS to some extent will always need to rehash nostalgia to inspire its player base to keep playing. The positive is however that Blizzard players have proven time and time again to be deeply susceptible to fits of nostalgia. I am happy that both games exist, but the only one I actively want to play on my own is Heroes of the Storm.

eSports Needs Name Change

April 28, 2015 by Belghast

What is Sport

Yesterday I managed to get into a conversation that I never really intended to, but I thought it might make for interesting blog fodder. Over the weekend ESPN 2 hosted the Heroes of the Storm “Heroes of the Dorm” collegiate competition, with college teams competing for scholarship money. Now this is not the first time ESPN 2 has shown “eSports” because the 2014 International DOTA 2 Championships were shown on the channel as well. Both times now there has been a backlash from traditional sports fans calling the showing of video games on their precious sports channel all manner of expletives. That said in both cases ESPN 2 got seemingly plenty of viewers because in both cases they brought in an audience that would not have normally watched that channel. I personally have had trouble getting into either traditional sports or eSports, so as a result I am somewhat of a neutral observer to this phenomena. However after both events twitter has been set ablaze with back and forth between sports fans and gamers.

I made a few sideways comments yesterday and one of the spin off threads was about the definition of what exactly a sport was. One definition suggestion was presented as “I always took sport to feature/focus on physical exertion/athleticism”. The actual dictionary definition looks similar “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” The problem is I feel like the competitive gaming scene also fits this definition. “Physical exertion” is such a generic term and the reflexes and fine motor skills required to play competitively in League of Legends, StarCraft 2 or DOTA 2 surely would qualify as such I would think. “Sport” to me really has no meaning attached to it, because I do not hold it up to some higher standard than what the dictionary defines it as. There is no nostalgia towards sports, and they don’t serve any greater purpose in my mind other than to entertain people.

eSports Needs Name Change

One of the problems brought up yesterday was the fact that “eSports” in itself is a name that you can’t quite take seriously. To tack the “e” onto Sport immediately tells you it is something that is trying to be but not quite achieving the same quality as the “real” Sports. This to me sets up a false dichotomy between the two that really doesn’t exist. For me at least they are both just “sports” because as a neutral observer, I see absolutely no difference between the two. In both cases people are paid to play a game for the entertainment of others. In both cases they are spectator driven events, and in both cases they draw huge crowds of people. While they have not quite reached the level of the Super Bowl (114 million) or the World Cup (188 milion) as far as viewership, they are definitely juggernauts in their own right.

Last year the League of Legends World Championship had 32 million viewers, and “The International”DOTA 2 championship over 20 million viewers. This tells me this is a phenomena that is not going to go away, and will only continue to get bigger. I feel like the name somehow cheapens the experience by showing that it is trying to be something else. Sports itself is rife with all manner of problems and embedded social issues. Over the last several years we have been seeing these same issues playing out in the “eSports” arena as leagues attempt to emulate their traditional sports counter parts. I question if it is time to just sever the ties with the “Sports” concept entirely and go off and create something new. As it was pointed out yesterday, “eSports” shares some serious ties to the professional Poker or Pool circuits, so maybe all of these should just resurrect under the banner of “High Stakes Gaming” or something similar.

ESPN Needs eSports

I feel like at this point these two attempts for ESPN 2 to show competitive gaming are more a bid for continued relevance more than anything. ESPN is the juggernaut of traditional sports but I feel like there is an entire generation of people not being served by it. The network of channels does a great job at covering their core demographic, but I would guess that demographic is slipping in total viewership. If they did not see the need to branch out, they would keep doing the same thing they are doing. 32 Million and 20 Million are not small numbers, and the ESPN management understands this. I would be surprised if ANY game they show currently gets those kind of numbers, because we are living in this era when television viewership as a whole is on the decline. I think the calculus in the executives head is that there is a need to try and hook the generation that is simply not watching their programming, and when they look to what it is being replaced by… they see Youtube.com and Twitch.tv.

The problem is I think this is ultimately going to work backwards. I don’t see “eSports” hooking new viewers on traditional sports like ESPN might be hoping. What I do see is that for all of the bluster and banter… that more than likely some people stayed and watched the Heroes of the Storm tournament instead of flipping the channel. Those people are going to look into that game, and when it launches probably play it. I think the net positive is in the favor of gaming, and not necessarily sports. ESPN is very much the kingpin of the outdated cable television model, and I don’t really see “eSports” somehow changing that. I personally get frustrated every time I look at my cable bill and realize that I am essentially paying an “ESPN Tax” to help subsidize a channel I will never actually watch. Maybe just maybe if they do end up playing more competitive gaming coverage, especially something along the lines of EVO… I might actually watch it. In the mean time I will continued to be confounded as two side argue over doing essentially the exact same thing in my eyes.

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 3

April 2, 2015 by Belghast

Over the last several days I have been rattling off a series of studios and game teams that I appreciate. Today will mark my final day of this process, but I am hoping that it has inspired some of you out there to make your own posts about the developers you appreciate. The person I really appreciate is Scarybooster for getting this thing started back in I believe 2010? Scary has a way of coming up with these great ideas, like he is the person who decided the Alliance of Awesome needed to happen as well. Unfortunately he no longer updates his blogs, and has deleted more of them in the past than I can count. So if you know Scary tell him he needs to stop doing that shit and keep coming up with interesting and awesome ideas.

Blizzard – Heroes of the Storm Team

I talked about League of Legends yesterday, and there is no denying it’s market domination in the MOBA arena. The problem is League is far more complicated of a game than I care to play. I get frustrated trying to figure out what I should build when, and then Blizzard comes along and creates an MOBA for someone like me. This game does what Blizzard does best, boil a genre down to its most basic essence and polish it until it shines. This is precisely how I feel about HoTS and its impact on the MOBA genre. Through a series of quick this or that choices you can build out your character and get right back into the action without constantly being afraid that you built the wrong thing. While friends have pointed out that this greatly limits what you can do with any given champion… I am fine with this and in fact welcome it. As much as I enjoy a “Tanky Darius” I would rather just have some clear messaging on what the intent of every champion was, and Heroes of the Storm gives this to me. On top of this the map design is awesome, and each one feels equally enjoyable with its own specific mechanics. I think the entire world is tired of playing Summoner’s Rift.

SOE/Daybreak – Landmark Team

Every time I talk about the company formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment, I do so with a little bit of heartbreak. Daybreak is not the same company, but I feel like the people that are still there are trying their damnedest to make this situation work. There is a lot of negative press that I could be talking about on my blog, about the poor decisions of the company managing Daybreak but for the most part I have tried not to. I feel like there is plenty of negativity out there already on this subject, and that the people who are still there need our support now more than ever. With that said this post goes out to everyone who has ever been a part of the Landmark game. While I am not playing it right now, I still think it is an extremely cool concept and I keep meaning on jumping right back in. Landmark is essentially the ultimate building game in every possible way, and the amount of stuff that the community has been able to create because of the excellent toolset developed by this team is phenomenal. This game blew me away, and I am still constantly amazed by the sort of things I am seeing built. So bravo to the folks who are no longer with the team, and bravo to the folks still there fighting to keep the ship going forward.

Undead Labs – All of the Them

For most of these I have singled out an entire team to talk about, but this time I am breaking that trend and instead talking about an entire studio. I love Undead Labs. I love their spirit, and I love their dedication… and quite honestly I love the way they interact with the public. I remember when State of Decay was about to release on the XBox 360 I was completely pumped for it. I went home that night played the game for several hours and then wrote a pretty gushy blog post the very next day. Within moments of posting the blog I had it being retweeted by Annie Strain the wife of Undead Labs Founder Jeff Strain, who then proceeded to engage with me in a back and forth about my blog post and the game in general. That sort of genuine interaction is just so damned refreshing, and it seems to extend to every single team member. I was lucky enough to get to hang out and talk to several of them during Pax South, and they all had this infectious joy over the games they had created and were creating. While I still desperately want a multiplayer version of State of Decay, I have faith that sooner or later the team will give me something akin to that experience. In the meantime they just seem like a really damned cool studio, and I look forward to watching as their latest game Moonrise progresses to launch. Additionally I feel like I am probably buying yet another copy of State of Decay as the special Year One edition should be landing shortly.

Motiga – Gigantic Team

This is another tale of me just really liking a game studio. I went to Pax South knowing next to nothing about this game other than the fact that it existed, had a cartoony art style and used a teal and orange color scheme it all of its marketing. I walked away from Pax South being both a fan of the game and of the team behind it. I was lucky enough to participate in several plays of the game, and got some time to talk to several members of the development and community staff. They all seem just as amped about this game as the players did, and it was awesome to be coached by the folks who built the game… or have them marvel when I apparently found a bug that nobody had actually found yet. The game is just really damned fun, and that seems to be the focus on making sure the various champion interactions are enjoyable. I have no clue what the timeframe for this games launch is but I look forward to it anxiously. Playing it with two other members of the AggroChat crew against a minor YouTube celebrity, and defeating him… was pretty much the highlight of my Pax South experience. So keep up the awesome work and I look forward to playing this game with my friends when it releases.

Every Single Game Developer

While I have singled out a handful of individuals for specific games that I really love playing… I feel like for this final day of my #DAW2015 love fest… I want to change things up a bit. Basically this goes out to every single game developer out there, regardless of what you are working on or for what company. You guys are living the dream of so many of us who did not choose to chase it. While there are absolutely days I’m thankful I am not in that industry, especially as another studio decimates its staff to realign for this or that reason, there are other days where I pine over the path not taken. You folks are my rockstars, and even if you are making a game that no one will ever play… you are being awesome. Games bring me so much joy, and there is a cast of often nameless and faceless people who struggled through crunch time to get that product into my hands. As I talk about the games I talk about, I try my best to always be aware of the folks behind the scenes that made it happen. So to all the game developers out there… keep making awesome stuff and I will keep playing it. Thank you all.