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I thought that a MOBA topic would be a good idea. When my Evolve preorder got all messed up, I wound up buying into the Heroes of the Storm beta instead. I haven't had a chance to play a lot of it, but my snap reaction is that it's really good.

It streamlines a lot of the MOBA bullshit and the WoW art style makes it pretty clear for what is happening on screen.

It was also $40 to get into the beta. $40 got me 3 characters and unlocks a lot of the bullshit you would normally need to grind.

 

This will wind up being free to play at some point so I'm not sure I can quite recommend anyone ponying up the cash to play something that will be free to play somewhere down the line. If I ever get invites, I highly recommend you guys give it a good, earnest chance. I would even say the $40 may be worth getting past all of the unlocking stuff.

 

I played it on my laptop, which was an OK gaming laptop 4 or 5 years ago. Even on that, it played really, really, really well with the track pad and laptop keyboard. I would obviously prefer my gaming keyboard and mouse, but it worked surprising well on the laptop.

 

 

The one thing that really struck me was the speed of the matches. So, you know when you're playing DotA and like 15 minutes in, you know you're not going to win because of whatever reason? And then you play that shit out for another 30 minutes to the inevitable loss? This is not like that. I think the snowball gets rolling a little too quickly and that's a balancing issue that can easily be fixed, but I do like that if you're going to lose, you're going to lose very soon. There should be more of an opportunity for a comeback, which there is, but the window is very small. Now, the flipside of that is that you don't need to  fuck around in the early going. To me, DotA sometimes felt like it took awhile to get going, but the ramp up in HotS is a little shorter.

 

Anyway, I'm already itching to play this more. I'll probably start putting more time into DotA 2 as well.

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I've been dabbling in Infinite Crisis, so casually that I still don't feel like u have a handle on it. Keep swearing I will put more into it and actually learn, but u never do.

My MOBA-addicted friends who played Gigantic at PAX South are all crazy excited, so I guess it must be good?

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  • 3 months later...

I'm gonna try out Smite when it comes to X-Box One. Which I half-expect to happen at E3 in one of those "And it's gonna be available..... right now!" moments. It's in closed beta at the moment.

 

Lots of people are trying to crack the code of a good MOBA on consoles right now and Smite may be the one to do it. However, seeing as how it's only a timed exclusive to X-Bone and not a true exclusive, I heard some wild speculation on a podcast the other day that Microsolft should have their own MOBA ready to go once Smite hits PS4. And their's would feature characters from Halo, Gears of War, Perfect Dark, Banjo, Conker, etc. Seems like a good idea to me.

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I think a microsoft moba is asking for trouble. The genre as a whole plays more overseas than in the US, and Microsoft IP, well, doesn't. They'd be better off courting Riot about something story based with League than trying to make their own entrant.

Like, the pattern emerging here is the same one that emerged over World of Warcraft. There's are two giants in the market, and people want that kind of money, but it's just not going to happen. There will be hundreds of dead MOBAs before either game loses momentum.

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I am just getting into Heroes. (spaceweasel1599, iirc.) The fact that I am nearly blind and had never played a MOBA orther than Awesomenauts til February makes me less than an asset, but I'm getting slowly better. Had some people freak out on me Thu night, but after only 4 hrs of playing against humans (and let's face it, playing against bots is so easy that it teaches you nothing at all about strategy) I was fairly satisfied with my performance and said so.

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Well, playing against the bots learns you the timing of the extras on map, and your characters. And you should definitely run vs AI until your character is at level 4 and has all its abilities unlocked. Bad builds vs Players can be death.

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One game of Smite in: MOBAs are complicated....

 

Which is why they won't catch on for consoles, and developers should just stick to PC.  Also, the type of control scheme required for the genre is better suited for keyboard/mouse than the comparative limitations of a gamepad.

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MOBA's on a console are not a MOBA. It's then just a third-person, team-based competition with action RPG controls.

 

See: Monday Night Combat.

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I'm not familiar with Monday Night Combat, so I'll ask...

Is it the overhead perspective and RTS-style controls that makes it a MOBA? Or is it having lanes, jungles, towers, minions that spawn periodically, etc. that make it a MOBA?

For the record, Smite was on PC first and it seems nothing has changed except the controls.

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It's traditionally RTS style combat on maps with lanes (and sometimes jungles) with two teams fighting it out, each side with their own creeps that are typically used to harass the enemy team.

 

Dota, LoL and HotS have had their own little twists on the genre (greater map interactivity in HotS and...I think...the recent removal of jungles from LoL), but the core concepts remain the same, that being RTS style combat.

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I thought it was LoL that did away with jungles, so maybe it was something else. Unless I'm confusing that with what my friends told me about the latest Dota 2 update.

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League taking out jungles would be such an incredible and impossible change of gameplay that it would probably collapse their whole business. It'd be like the NFL banning running.

 

Don't worry, it's coming.

 

LoL taking out jungles, or the NFL banning running?

 

Both are possible.

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Infinite Crisis esta muerte, servers shutting down in August. Not super surprised as it was the least innovative game possible, pretty literally just "DOTA with superheroes." Glad now that I didn't invest any money in it, though it seems kind of nuts that they waited til April for their Steam launch and pulled the plug after 8 weeks of that. The cash shop sales must have been abysmal.

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