It looks like the MMO rush of the last decade when everyone was chasing WoW. Problem is these games are like mmo’s with the gamers getting attached to one title. In this case its either DOTA2 or LoL that leaves very little for all the other games.
That sounds like something that could be based off one of Steven Peeler’s/Soldak titles with some tweaking.
The thing with MOBAs is they are such timesinks you really only play one. Never known anyone to seriously play two. I’d say it’s a toxic combination of MMO and Fighting Game addiction.
Oh well, bad games and bad business decisions are going to be punished by the marketplace, as they should be.
What’s interesting is that DOTA2 has a LUA scripting engine that people are already using to make mods - with some other classic Warcraft 3 custom maps already being worked on. It wouldn’t exactly surprise me if someone took the time to partially remake Warcraft 3 inside DOTA2.
When are they going to stop making bad FPS clones? I think the last FPS I played was Bioshock 1 and it wasn’t that good. I don’t know who these people that keep buying them are. GTA clones are even worse, though. I played Vice City for an hour and I never touched that stupid genre again.
Nobody knows*
It seems every new FPS is refreshing for the people tired of the old FPS. So every FPS have a combination of freshness in it, with a short shelf life. So people consume them, and have to return to the shop for more, …like you do with eggs.
With games like WoW or LoL, they get in the ride, and never ends.
Random images:
http://complex.upf.es/~josep/lorenzatt.jpeg
http://www.fimfiction-static.net/images/story_images/56016.jpg
- alternate for never
Great!.. It always push me the wrong way when a game based on a mod dont allow modding. It seems DOTA2 is better this way :D
I never got into MOBAs either, but according to WSJ, as of January LoL had 27 million players every day, with over 67 million playing a month. No one’s gonna look at those numbers and not want a slice of that pie. Heck, having just 1% of LoL’s player base is probably enough to make most games a success. And I’m guessing the dev costs for a MOBA is a lot lower than what a decent MMORPG costs: much less content creation, for one thing.
That said, Attack of the MOBA Clones has the same problem as all the pretenders to WoW’s throne: namely how does one compete with the 800-lb gorilla in the room? Simply putting minor spins on the existing LoL / DotA formula isn’t going to entice people away from their current addiction; OTOH, try something too radical or “hardcore” and you may fail to entice people to try your MOBA in the first place.
Exactly. That’s the same calculus that made people chase the WoW dragon: “If even get 10% of their player base!”
The problem is that players aren’t linearly distributed with quality. Being 10% worse nets you 99.99% less players, not 10% less.
Back in the mid/late 90s I was saying the same thing about FPSs and Quake.
I imagine back in the 70s someone was saying the same thing about Pong.
The thing is, multiplayer games like MOBAs live or die on playerbase. Extreme popularity has a reinforcing effect that makes it that much harder to unseat the current dominating players. We really see it in MMOs, we’re seeing it with MOBAs, even multiplayer FPSes. I don’t think any of these genres move to a new king of the hill unless the folks with the crown fumble it. And I think the only reason that FPSes have moved on as much as they have is that a) they mostly have singleplayer to drive sales of games that don’t hold the multiplayer crown and b) they don’t have (or haven’t) had a business model that supports constant internal iteration and improvement.
I get the sense from reading the League of Legends forums (where the developers are posting) that the hardware costs for games like league are pretty expensive. Lots of servers/databases/infrastructure to maintain. If you have 27M players a day, you have to have the hardware to keep that going, and it has to scale to host that many players. That’s probably a huge part of the cost of keeping the game running, compared to the teams of developers making new champions, doing balance, etc.
Back in the mid/late 90s, a handful of talented people could make an AAA-game in a year or two. Now the development and opportunity cost risks for contenders to the throne are much higher.
Call Of Duty has essentially had this business model (with great success) for the past 7 years, the iteration and improvement just comes in the form of yearly releases of a new(-ish) game and the complexity is managed by having two (now 3) giant teams working on alternating releases.
Not really. Releasing a new game every time is not at all the same thing, since it fragments playerbase, doesn’t backport improvements, and allows any given iteration to drop the ball and lose mindshare. And the releases from one team often notably fail to incorporate some or all of the improvements that another team brought to the table. And of course, the map pack DLC doesn’t help cohere things any. I think TF2 is a better example of that sort of business model, although it doesn’t seem like it’s been quite as massively domineering of its genre as games like WoW or LoL/DotA.
Witcher has a MOBA now too. Good grief.
It’s not a traditional MOBA. No lane defense. Just arena hero battles with a top-down perspective.
Also, it’s mobile-only.
This is also why MOBA is a shitty name.
Also, in no part of the description creeps are mentioned, so yeah, it seems a pvp battle arena game, in top down perspective.
Also, in no part of the description creeps are mentioned, so yeah, it seems a pvp battle arena game, in top down perspective.
Yup. No creeps. Just heroes.
But hey, rei, don’t fret! They promise that there won’t be a grind!
“It will be a free game. A genuinely free game. You know we are fair with gamers. We are known for giving away stuff for free. We believe free is fair. So we wanted to realise our philosophy also with the MOBA game.”
All items and heroes can be unlocked by playing the game, including what are considered vanity items (armour and weapons), but you can spend real money to speed up the process.
“You will mostly pay for saving time,” Zielinski added. "If you don’t want to farm for your hero you can buy him. And also there are vanity items you pay for. But there will be absolutely no pay to win elements in our game.
Dandelion confirmed to be excluded from the roster then. That’s too bad.
EA’s Dawngate is being shut down. Strike another WIP MOBA off the list!