Battlerite is a MOBA without mobs, leveling, or items – just straight pure team-fights. Matches are played either 2v2 or 3v3 in a small arena, and each round only lasts two minutes. The team that wins three rounds are crowned champions. In essence, it is a fun, bare-bones MOBA injection that you don’t have to plan your schedule around. Its also much more polished than most early-access games, with about 15 heroes already available. To make things even better, with the early access price, you get all heroes, now and in the future, permanently unlocked, which is great. I really want to play more of this game, unfortunately I have run into one problem…
Despite the multitude of servers available, I am getting serious lag during matches, even during the tutorial matches. Normally, I would seek out a refund in this situation, but in this case I have decided to wait a week or so and see if things get better.
The name of this thread should totally have been ‘Battlerite - you gotta fight for your rite to battle’ ;-)
My brother played loads of Bloodline Champions, Stunlock’s previous game. I dabbled with it and enjoyed what I played, but for some reason didn’t join him an awful lot.
I got a beta invite for Battlerite recently but didn’t get a chance to check it out. This looks to be a continuation of the same idea, albeit more polished and streamlined? I admire its purity from the sounds of things. Seems a damn sight truer to the term ‘MOBA’ than most MOBAs do, with their lanes and creeps and stuff.
The original thread didn’t garner much discussion but has anyone played this since October? I’m eyeing this in the current Steam sale but I’d hate to spend money on this if it’s going to be dead on arrival.
I’d love to but I’m a bit busy with other games at the moment. My brother adores it and I’m hearing all the right noises from most folk who’ve played it.
As someone who has frequently played games with less than 500 concurrent players (the joy of enjoying niche multiplayer experiences!), that 3000+ average a day looks fine to me, especially for 3v3. If the game’s good, great even – and by all accounts it is – and you’re interested at the current price and okay with early access, then I don’t see the point in avoiding it just because it’s shed some players since launch. You’re dooming it with that attitude. Buy it, enjoy it, support it.
I’ve had issues with the matchmaking when I did play it- the game will get an influx of players when it goes F2P in a few months. That’s another reason I say wait and try it then- the cosmetics aren’t overly appealing, so hero unlocks should be reasonable.
The game itself is solid, so if you really think you’ll love it- it’s worth picking up. I enjoyed it at times- I just have higher priorities for my competitive time.
Well, I’m glad I didn’t bite the bullet yet as they just announced a free weekend for the 1st-4th of December. Now I can try it before I buy it and if it’s good, the free weekend will hopefully bolster up the player numbers as well.
I gave this a quick whirl yesterday when the Free Weekend started and the first thing that struck is me how much greater the cognitive load is for having 9 abilities per character vs the 4 abilities in many standard MOBAs. Usually when I play games with character rosters I’m a generalist who tries to learn almost every character at least passably well. However, I feel that in Battlerite I really need to specialize in one or two characters in order to play even semi-decently.
Arguably, a lot of the characters share the same basic mechanics (basic attack on LMB, charged slow attack on RMB, often a movement ability on SPACE etc.) but there’s still a lot to keep track of when playing a character for the first few times.
The people I know who like this are the same folks who are heavily into the hardest fighting games. It’s not a game for people who don’t want to put severe effort into “getting good”
Battlerite is currently free until October 1. Early access is 50% off too before its full release in November when it’ll become F2P.
I think now is the time I’ll be dipping into it and perhaps picking up the legendary/loot pack for future champs. We’ll see how I fare but from my brother’s continued praise, and my impressions of Bloodline Champions ages ago, I think this should be a cracking arena brawler.
I’m horrible at games that require WASD for movement, which is one reason I enjoy Heroes of the Storm. I fear the movement control of Battlerite would frustrate me to no end. :-(
Does Heroes of the Storm have one of those control schemes where it’s like there’s a carrot on your pointer that your hero follows? Many a game has that control scheme turned me away from!
I hear Battlerite plays nicely on controller though if that’d be any better for you? Anyway, it’s free to try!
More like an RTS. Right-click to move your hero and Basic Attack, cursor to target the hero’s four Abilities (3 Basic and 1 Heroic via the QWER keys). For me, my left hand is on the QWER keys and my right hand is on my mouse. My mouse buttons are bound to D (Hero’s Trait), Z (Mount), H (Hearth), and 1234 (abilities gained via Talents).
It does? The Steam page doesn’t note controller support. Huh.
