moba Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Chasing a PVE MOBA

July 16, 2015 by Belghast

A Meaningless Term

Yesterday I witnessed a conversation unfold that I have had a dozen times myself with various folks. A friend of mine made the idle comment that they would really like to see a “PVE MOBA”, to which someone else predictably replied that you cannot have a “MOBA” without PVP. The problem is that there is absolutely no clear definition of what exactly a “MOBA” is. Additionally each player seems to refer to a slightly different set of mechanics when someone says “MOBA-like”. So for some people it is all about the match based pvp action, and others it is all about the interesting class design. If you simply dissect the term “MOBA” you get Multiplayer Online Battle Arena… which in itself is another absolutely meaningless term. Multiplayer Online is clear enough but the Battle Arena part is complete nonsense. What are you battling and what sort of arena are you battling in?

For me personally the key elements of what make a MOBA intriguing have nothing to do with player versus player combat. I like the different characters and their unique sets of abilities, and the way they interact with other characters and their abilities. In fact I would be happy spending my time in lane killing creeps because I honestly enjoy doing that way more than engaging with other players. When I play League of Legends I will almost always play against bots, and have long thought that it would make an interesting game to make it purely co-operative against interesting challenges. The problem is if you say this.. you get the reaction above that it cannot be done… because MOBAs are PVP games dammit! But what I am presenting is that folks are assigning a specific mindset to a term that is absolutely meaningless on its own merit. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can describe so many games and is likely why the term gets blurred so much to describe games that are absolutely nothing like the original Defense of the Ancients roots.

Keep the Interesting Bits

For me the interesting bits about what we generally refer to as a MOBA are the Character design that I have talked about before, and ultimately the payment model. I like this concept of purchasing individual champions, and having a rotation of free champions to play to consistently keep testing the waters and trying to branch out. The key part as well for me is the way that MOBA titles grow over time. If you look at the evolution of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, in both cases they are constantly releasing new content to satiate the appetites of players. I think this has been key to the success, that every few weeks there is something new being introduced to the game to shake up players expectations. League for example has over 120 different unique champions that they are doing a decent job of keeping balanced against each other, and Heroes is adding at least one champion a month it seems to catch up. So I feel like the big success of this genre has been constant incremental evolution of the product.

This variety helps deal with the “special snowflake” syndrome that happens in MMO design. Often times there is a demographic of players that wants to play a specific class in a manner that was not intended to be played. Granted this happens to some extent in build system MMOs like league, but it is always clear that this is not necessarily a “supported” play style. The champion system instead lets companies roll out lots of hyper focused characters that play to very specific niches. So in this case what would be a “special snowflake” like the “melee hunter” would simply just be another champion they could build to fill that desire. So instead the focus becomes on mastery of a specific set of abilities unique to that champion, rather than a much larger set of abilities as seen in most “talent tree” systems. I feel like this is crucial in allowing someone to adapt to a brand new champion quickly, but at the same time feeling confident enough to branch out into things they have yet to try before. There are game play modes like ARAM (All Random All Mid) that encourage this branching out because it forces players to play with a random champion.

Chasing a PVE MOBA

So the quandary I am in is that I love the League of Legends lore and champion design, but don’t love the game itself. I have long thought that it would be awesome to have a PVE centric version of League of Legends where you play the same champions with the same abilities in a Diablo like setting. Instead of fighting in Summoner’s Rift against five other players in a battle to destroy the opposing teams nexus, it would be a co-operative experience as five players venture into a procedurally generated dungeon with a treasure at the end. The idea is that each map would be harder than the previous until you reach a boss battle for the final treasure in the dungeon. You could even keep the build mechanic in the form of at the beginning of each map level you could have the same merchant that exists just outside of your teams Nexus in the Rift. After venturing a certain way into each map level he could travel to the next level, making it so that players could only buy new items at the beginning of each map.

For the hyper competitive players, you could still keep all manner of stats from number of monsters killed, their average difficulty rating, how fast it takes your team to clear a map, and of course how many times you have died during a specific encounter. Personally I would go with a counter strike approach where each player gets a single life per map, making it progressively harder the more players that you have lost. I would introduce the ability to purchase resurrection potions, but again that is an opportunity cost… since you have limited item inventory slots and limited gold to keep purchasing items with. Similarly I would introduce a “lives” mechanic in the number of times your team can retry during a specific dungeon crawl sequence. This would encourage the team to stick together and work on group tactics rather than going off on their own and risking getting overwhelmed. The thing is… I would absolutely pay to play a game like that, and would probably rope my friends into playing it to. The key impediment however is that folks seem to keep thinking that “MOBA” style mechanics cannot also apply to PVE game design. Someone make this game happen… I am looking at you Riot.

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.

Heroes of the Storm

March 17, 2014 by Belghast

Odd Weekend

With all the excitement of the weekend, yesterday I needed to just recharge a bit and do a bunch of stuff around the house… namely lots of laundry. My wife got up early yesterday morning, as she had planned a trip to Dallas for the day with friends, so this left me completely up to my own devices all day long. I ended up sleeping in until around 9:30 at which point I did my FTL Steampowered Sunday play, and the subsequent blog post. Then it was lots and lots of laundry for several hours. I feel like I might be coming down with something, so I really wasn’t much more useful than that.

On the Grandmother front, she is doing as well as could be expected. She woke up yesterday for a bit before they sedated her again. Her kidney functions have not returned, but she was severely dehydrated. They have a nephrologist coming into the hospital today that is going to look at her and see what they can do to stimulate activity. Once the kidneys start working again they will be much closer to “in the clear”. Mostly they think she just needs to rest and let the body do its natural recovery. She is a really tough woman, so I have faith that she is going to pull through this. Her vitals all look okayish and seem to be improving by the day. so here is hoping time is really all she needs.

As far as the sick cat, she seems to be doing much better. She was extremely needy of attention yesterday, and her appetite seems to have returned. For the majority of the week she had not eaten much of anything, so yesterday whenever she acted hungry I was opening a cat of food for her. I think she ended up eating five different times yesterday. She had lost quite a bit of weight over the course of this ordeal so while I will taper back her feeding eventually… for now I am just happy she is eating. She demanded attention, which is good… because while she was sick she was pretty scarce. Preferring to just lay down on the couch by herself instead of wherever we happened to be in the house.

Elder Scrolls Final Beta Weekend

Since this past weekend is the final beta weekend before launch in a few weeks, and since we had been given leave to stream whatever we wanted… I did as much playing and streaming as I could fit in. All told I think I streamed a little bit over four hours, split up between four different videos. Most of the time was spent faffing about on my Orsimer Dragon Knight in the Daggerfall covenant area. I closed the weekend sitting a little bit away from thirteen. However because of the absolutely illogical pattern I followed I know I missed a good number of the quests from the first area of Glenumbra. I would love to say that the beta weekend was completely smooth, but it seemed as though a lot of the systems were bugged out. Dark Anchors for example seemed to spawn, and then just stay active even after the forces had been defeated and a player got credit for destroying them.

One of the systems that was completely new to me, were the Dark Fissures. These are essentially mini versions of the Dark Anchors and can just spawn almost anywhere around the map. Think of these as “soloable” Rifts. I say soloable in quotes because really unless you are prepared to take on boss level monsters they will be pretty freakin hard. I defeated two of these and did so just barely. If you go into them make sure you have your health potions hotkeyed and ready to go. The awesome thing about the Dark Fissures is that they seem to drop really awesome stuff. The final one I closed out yesterday evening dropped a level 12 blue fire staff, which I am sure would have been awesome… had I used staves. If the beta weekend were going longer I would have tried to find that a good home.

Heroes of the Storm

I know I mentioned this the other day, but I am still pretty pumped that I am in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the really cool things about it is that it is completely sans-NDA. This means that I can stream the hell out of the game, and I intend to. I recorded a few videos over the weekend, the first of which was just me playing around in practice mode working on the weekly quests for getting victories with heroes from each of the franchises. The second video however I dipped my toes into cooperative mode fighting bots with other players. I have to say I found the jump in AI to be quite extremely between practice mode and cooperative. I earned enough gold through the various quests to purchase two of the cheaper heroes Muridan and Raynor. At some point I hope to pick up Falstad, because while he is in the free to play rotation currently… I am sure this will change similar to how it does in League of Legends.

Right now I am enjoying the game far more than I ever did League. Basically it has all of the aspects of league that I really enjoyed… namely fighting people with awesome champions, and none of the aspects that I didn’t like. League build path was always an enigma to me, and I tended to play champions that I could use the same build on over and over. League gameplay is far more nuanced, but Blizzard has done for League what they did for the MMO genre. Streamlined, simplified, polished and created something that the masses can latch onto. Instead of a huge list of items for you to purchase, you build your character by making a few simple choices. In the beginning at least all of these are either or choices like “survival” or “damage”. Over the course of the map this ends up building a semi-custom champion.

However once you reach level 8, they open up these choices significantly. While playing Muridan yesterday there was one of these levels where I had five different choices for how I wanted to proceed. Each choice causes you to give up other options with no real way of getting those back. For me… a player that found the item buying system of League completely unfathomable this works so much better. For a player who wants a deeply nuanced and unique approach to each match… they are probably still going to favor League. The champions as a whole feel more well rounded than League champions, in that they have a wider “kit” of abilities and the option to choose between two different “R” attacks really seems to help this.

The place where the game really shines is in their map creation. At their core, each of the maps is essentially “Summoner’s Rift”. That said each of the maps has a unique sub game to them, while League tries to do this with the various map types… it simply does not work as well as it does here. For example in the map shown above Blackheart’s Bay… you have a really awesome coastal city/pirate theme going on. When one team collects enough doubloons they can turn them in to call in a bombardment from the pirates on the enemy team. In one map the mini game is all about controlling two shrines which allow you to waken the Dragon Knight. When you do so the player transforms into this unstoppable juggernaut perfect for diving straight into towers and destroying the enemy resources. I have only played the game a little bit, but I have to say I am deeply hooked.

Gamer Hangout

Another odd happening this weekend is that I ended up participating in Beau Hindman’s Gamer Hangout show. I’ve been friends with the members for some time, and there was a week where they had asked me to join in the show… but I until recently I simply did not have a camera. Now you will be able to see the WHY I didn’t have a camera. I have always been pretty closed with separating the real me from the gamer me… so it took quite a bit of courage to appear on camera like this. I am always far more comfortable behind the scenes than being out front and animated. What was cool about the show is that in essence they based this week on one of my blog posts.

It just happened to be where I was available to join in and chat about it. While most of us only actually got through two different games on our list, we somehow managed to talk over an hour about them. They have apparently extended an open invitation for me to participate more in the future, so I guess that means I did not completely make an ass of myself. My office is a pit, and if I do this more often I think I would want to rearrange things some… however that involves me cleaning and moving and not sure how likely that is to happen. It was really enjoyable, and the other folks were great. Was very much an odd end to an odd weekend. I just wish that youtube would not have picked a thumbnail of me talking for the video.