A new genre has become quite popular lately and I have been wanting to write my thoughts on it’s pro’s and con’s. The Genre is Massive Online Battle Arena or MOBA as the community has been calling it. It originates from a warcraft 3 mod called Defence of the Ancients or DotA.

It was first introduced a few years ago and quickly became the number 1 played game on battlenet even surpassing regular warcraft 3 games. Blizzard took notice of this and offered the 2 designers that created the mod an undisclosed ammount of money to buy the creative licence from them. The two designers refused which at the time seemed crazy, if your mod was being played competivily in professional gaming leagues and a company offered to hire you and pay for you to develop a full game why wouldn’t you take it?

3 years later I see why, they are creating a game called League of Legends or LoL that encorporates everything they have learned while making DotA and more. Before we get into LoL though I want to go over the rest of the games that reside in this fledgling genre…

Defence of the Ancients (DotA: Allstars)

Dota was the first it’s the messiah of the genre, and what a messiah it is. Spawning a whole new type of competitive gameplay a mix of RTS with it’s multiple spawning creeps and FPS with the class based capture the flag type mode and RPG elements with choosing weapons and leveling up abilities. It mixed great parts from different genres and created a new one entirely. It even spawned a Techno song…

Awesome huh? yeah… So DotA may have started small with around 12 characters to choose from but nowadays there are over 60+ heroes to bring into battle. After choosing your hero you begin the match with 4 other players on your team and facing off against another 5 players on the opposite team. The map is basically 3 lanes with four towers in each two are your teams and two are the enemies, the towers shoot anyone who gets too close to them. From your base as well as your enemies at set intergers a line of NPCs spawn these are called creeps, they try on their own to battle down the lanes and make their way to the oppositions base which is what your trying to do. Your hero helps your creeps kill the enemies creeps while trying not to be killed by enemy heroes as this gives the enemy extra money to buy gear and extra XP to level up and get new abilities. Killing an enemy hero or being killed will keep you out of the game for a certain ammount of time, the time is longer if you are higher level. Once your team is able to get into the enemy base and destroy its main “castle” you win the game, hurray! Sounds simple and probably not very exciting when I explain it, but it’s very strategic and twitchy when in the mix.

DotA is an amazing game that was noticed main stream, so much so that the second game on the list borrowed heavily from it, admitted to this fact and then proceeded to fail at creating a good representation of the genre.

Demi God:

DemiGod came into the picture about a year and a half ago, and with good intentions. Gas Powered Games wanted to take the genre into the new generation of graphics and add some great things to it as well. Lets talk about what they did right first…

The graphics were amazing. They had huge set peices and the maps were unique and fun to play. They also had a great core set of heros and a sort of talent tree style ability map that meant two players could play the same hero and have completely different builds. The other thing it had was a very solid camera system, you could zoom out and view the entire map or zoom in around just your hero and see the detail the modelers put into each character.

Now for the bad. There were only 12 heros on launch, which yes DotA only launched with close to the same ammount but with DotA already out (and free) Gas Powered Games needed to step up their shit if they wanted to compete. The other thing it lacked, real items. there were a few things you could buy but DotA has this voltron item system where this cape connects to this ring to make this new cape with an awesome passive ability. And DemiGod lacked that kind of depth. Also when it launched the multiplayer system was terrible. It wouldn’t connect sometimes and other times it would drop you in the middle of a game, it was bad. It’s since been fixed but too little too late.

Honestly I think it’s faults kept it from succeeding. If they had waited another year and launched now with, lets say 10 more heroes, and working multiplayer it would have done a ton better.

So now comes the games that are still in Beta and I guess legally I shouldn’t be talking about. However, only like 20 people read this site so I doubt ill be getting sued (*crosses fingers* I hope I don’t get sued)

Leage of Legends: (LoL)

Dispite it’s oddly purposful acronym LoL manages to bring some of the great things about DotA and mix it with some very unique and new things that expand the genre. Created by one of the two main designers of DotA, LoL has a familair art style. That resembles it wc3 herritage in a lot of ways. Lets talk about the good.

LoL has a great art style and copying Blizzards art direction is not a bad thing when you want to create a game that will age well. WC3 and even Starcraft can still be played without making you want to cut your eyes out. And LoL has the same potential. LoL also sits at around 28 heroes with 40 planned. Which is great, each hero feels unique and carries a personality with it. The item shop has been refined from DotA and no longer will newer players feel overwelmed when trying to buy a weapon as each item shows a tree of what it turns into and there are 6 items accross the top of the shop that are recommended for whatever hero you choose. There is also a meta game in the summoner system that lets you the player level up as you play more games and unlock new incrimental powerups for all the heroes you play. In the future Riot Games plans on making more advanced heroes unlock as you play more games and become more skilled a great approach to ease players into a very deep and sometimes intimidating game.

It’s not all sunshine however, the unfortunate result of being born on battlenet are what the internet has loving dubbed “battlenet kiddies” these are a mix of young teens to mid thirties players who have the unfortunate internet disease “anonymous douche” where the people your playing against call you a nigger and then immediatly call you a nazi fag in the next line. …yeah, the internet is full of amazing people. I hope that the folks at Riot add some sort of block for players so you can at least cut out the worst of them. I played with a kid the other day named SantaCock (not a joke) who before the match even started called all of us, mind you we’re on the same team, stupid bitches. Then preceeded to tell us how shitty we were when the other team happened to kill us and then also made excuses when he himself was killed. And that incident I’m afraid is not isolated, there are many other players just like him. The other crappy thing is the out of game interface. It needs a lot of work. The ingame interface is amazing I don’t know why they designed the one outside the game to be so cumbersome. It took me a while to figure out how to invite a friend to play a game with me and there is also no way for me to PM a friend who is already in a game to ask him if he wants to play the next one with me.

All and all I think LoL is a great game with great potential. I hope they continue to add heroes and that it becomes the 2.0 of the DotA fanbase.

Heroes of Newerth: (HoN)

Heroes of Newerth, created by S2 Games, is an almost exact duplicate of DotA but somehow manages to fail at retaining the balance. When you load the game there is a small paragraph that tells you they gained permission from the DotA folks to copy their characters and abilities, which is fine and I applaud S2 for going through that trouble. It also lets me know that S2 has enough respect for the genres creators to keep them in the loop. Lets talk about the good.

Because its a clone of DotA, HoN comes with 50 heroes out the gate with more on the way. It has a great art style and no hero looks bad, they all look like badasses. There are a lot more weapons and a few additions to the map.

The Bad is much worse. The heroes are quite imbalance on the scale of hero to environment. With a hero at level 15 being able to basically enter the enemy base and destroy it single handedly. There is also a terrible issue of players who die being left behind rapidly. So rapidly in fact that it’s not uncommon to see a level 9 hero surrounded by level 18s (the games level cap). There is also the item problem, there are dozens if not 100’s of items and no real ryme or reason to the way they are sorted. There is also no clear indication of what items really benifit your hero. Yet another problem is the camera, or lack there of. you are constantly moving your mouse to the edge of the screen to move the view and see your surroundings, which is fine if there were a simple button to realign the camera to your hero, which there is not. And finally the last thing wrong with the game is the interface. While very appealing visually functionally it is retarded and needs a lot of work.

I hope HoN can pull it together before it launches. A lot of the DotA community has latched onto the game and claims LoL is too easy. Personally I hope that the majority of the hardcore DotA fans do stay with HoN and leave the LoL community to grow on it’s own without so much douche.

There are plenty more games on the way for the MOBA genre, games like Bloodline Champions which has some unique aspects to it. And there is another one called Elite Champions on the way to get this, XBLA of all places. As well as a a DotA being updated still and I’m sure we will see a DotA version pop up on Starcraft 2 when it hits stores. I think the genre has a lot of potential and my opinion is that in the next few years it will be a common one with RTS, FPS, RPG platformer etc. etc. Lets just hope somewhere during this rise someone comes up with something other then MOBA cause for some reason it just sounds lame.

We went to Mawapa for the 4th this year. It was a decent size group of us. Myself, Geoff, John, Joe, Arnel, Stephie, Brandon and Hanna. We had planned to go up there a few weeks ago but found out that day there would be a show and food and stuff.

Pulling up we thought the show had already started. We were wrong, there were 100’s of people with campers and tents who had purchased fireworks and then in this huge dirt lot, had started lighting them off. I don’t know how many fireworks were launched that night but I can easily imagine it was worth 1000’s of dollars. The field looked like a battlescene and sounded like one too.

Theres a shot of Geoff, him and Joe bought two huge bricks of just firecrackers (like the ones Mccully Culkin uses to thwaft burglers) and were lighting them off in chunks.

What you see here is the culmination of me and Johns brilliance. What started as talks to get ourselves on Attack of the Show to meet Olivia Munn by shooting Roman Candles at each others junk, ended with us deciding to just light them from our Junk and shoot them off. The reasoning was that our penis’s were used to shooting things out so it would be more natural.

Can I just say that the candles had a kick that each time they shot a ball of flaming awesome, it felt like a small child had punched my no-no parts.

Fun night, next year I think we will plan for it better and bring a cooler, beer, chairs and pool our cash for bigger boom-booms.

Is it when I spend 3 hours in photoshop making a cool picture of myself? Could be. So the last 2 weeks of school have been interesting. We pitched our game concepts and voted (I lost) we had a student lash out at the rest of the team, which somehow galvanized us in opposition. And I had a teacher take a personal dislike in me. And now finals, sweet. I guess the good part in all this is that this is the last week of class and then we get a nice 3 week break. The bad part is that I am out of student loans and Sally May is no longer giving out loans, and chase declined me. Stupid economy, I swear every citizen of the US who was middle or still is middle class within the last 4 years should be able to punch Bush in the face.

I was pretty upset when my game wasn’t chosen, however after my initial pouting I got over it and made up my mind to put my all into Brendons project. Every good game designer has to learn somewhere, I figure if I can apply my design skills to helping create someone else’s idea, no matter how out of the norm it’s genre is for me (I have yet to design an Action-Platforming Game), then when I get back to my comfort genre (RPG) ill be all the better for it. The problem is making my design talents useful. I have a very specific idea when it comes to design, I feel player reward and character progression are huge elements and should be put into every game. The idea of the “Carrot on a Stick” is a core philosophy that I try to incorporate into all my designs. The math breaks down as follows…

Every 10 minutes the player should receive a minor reward, every 30-60 minutes the player should receive a medium reward and 2-4 times during a game the player should receive a major reward.

There is a flaw in this formula that I have found and it comes when the player is allowed to catch the carrot. As a designer I need to make sure that I allow the player to gain in power but never to the point where confrontation becomes inconsequential. Unless its the last level, I feel that in theory you can give the player that “ultimate power” on the last level of the game and let them reek havok before the boss, then you balance the boss accordingly.

…I got off topic there, I have deisgn tangents, get used to them. Anyway, Brendons game does not have these elements designed into the game. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that for me to help him design I have to abandon certain core ideals and learn his. And I hope that I will be able to do this quickly enough to have a meaningful contribution to his game.

So lets get this out of the way I can play Sims 3 and still be a man! …Ok so now that we’ve taken care of that…

This is the first installment that hasn’t had Will Wright at the helm. And while he was still an advisor and accredited as a designer it was mostly for sales in the market. A demographic I might add that has no idea who Will Wright is and doesn’t care if original creator of their franchise is no longer an active part in it. I mean lets face it the Sims demographic is 15-30 year old women and me. However, what a demographic it is. In its first 2 weeks out it has sold over 4.5 million copies?! And it is now the number 1 best selling app on the iPhone, and that’s not like, this month, that’s ever, it’s the best selling app the iPhone app store has ever had. Insane…

When I sat down with the game my intentions were simple. Find out if it still plays like the other Sims games, see what innovations EA packed into it and see where they fell flat.

Good: I only peed my pants once! In the other games I was Kim Jong-il I worked my Sims to death, I would hardly ever let them have bathroom breaks, why? Cause a bathroom break in the sims takes 45 fucking minutes! And that could be time they could be learning a new skill! Thankfully Sims 3 takes the potty breaks down a notch, they are still present but are much more manageable. I also liked that there is a whole city there now, some of it is fun and I think it’s a step in the right direction for the series.

BAD:Ok so, for the life of me I could not figure out how to model a patio on the second story of my house. I tried for like hours, at the beginning I thought “Oh, a patio upstairs would be sweet, I can put all my exercise stuff up there and the telescope.” (Again, not gay) But then I tried to build it and I couldn’t. Somewhere out there is a 15 year old girl who knows how to do this but for the life of me I could not figure it out, what the hell EA!

THOUGHTS:So I gave my sim “Jasn” the EVIL personality trait. And so everything I clicked on had an evil flair. I didn’t just clean-up, I took a very evilbubble bath, or washed my hands with evil soap. I smiled everytime I saw this little flavor text on things. My personal favorite was sometimes, for no reason, Jasn would stop and laugh maniacly before continuing to make his dinner. Awesome.

Edge of Twilight:

Seems like this game just appeared out of thin air. I remember hearing about it about a year ago but if I remember right, it looked like crap then. And this company Fuzzyeyes, I’ve never heard of them. So if this is their first release they have certainly shown that at least their trailers can keep up with the big boys.

There are a few things that stand out in this trailer. The first is that throughout the whole thing I didn’t once see an NPC that was an obvious copy of another. Each one had a great amount of detail and time put into it, and that is impressive.

The second thing is the combat. It looks visceral and fluid. And the animations on his coat are well done.

The last thing I wanna point out is the production value of the trailer. From the disembodied voice of an obvious villain to the music and scene timing the quality of this trailer shows on those levels. It borrows heavily from movie trailers and in this case works very well.

After reading Gizmodo and watching the Press conference I have decided two things. Apple has come to the realization that its developers are key to moving hardware and the second thing is that AT&T needs to go bankrupt and someone else needs to take over the iPhone. Lets go over the good first.

The mix of the 3.0 software and the new hardware in the 3Gs is awesome. Allowing peer-to-peer application developement means local multiplayer without the need for a dedicated server.

I also liked the “lost” feature that when your phone is lost you can set it to alam and even in silent mode it will call out to nearby people. My only wish with that feature would be that whoever finds it, no matter what, the only number they can call is the one you placed in there as your emergancy contact.

I was super impressed with Apple opening up the SDK to include functions built into their OS. When the iPhone launched as we developers got our hands on it there were many rules in place that stopped us from doing anything that might make Apple look bad. Such as MMS, or Video or a new Browser. They have since been tearing down those barriers and allowing developers to create whatever they can think of. Hell, they showed a Doctor with an app that let him check his patients EKG machines from anywhere, how awesome is that?

Now the bad, AT&T. WTF is up with them? The guy mentions MMS messaging coming June 17th world wide…except for AT&T which won’t be ready until later this year. Then he talks about Tethering your iPhone, which would allow you to use your phones 3G network on any laptop as its internet connection and he doesn’t even mention AT&T, like at all? Apple should have seriously jumped ship and taken their product to another company capable of handling thier hardwares functions.

I was pretty surprised this year by E3s sudden resurrection. After the last few years of the conventions steady decline into irrelevancy I was sure this years attempt at a rebirth would be met with failure. But it seems that the folks at the ESA hired a witch doctor to come down and cover the convention halls with chicken blood or something cause it was a great convention this year filled with awesome announcements and great trailers. Hell even some of the booth babes were back. Lets go over a few highlights.

PROJECT NATAL:

How amazing is it that there is a beer called The Devastator? Well ill tell you, it’s so amazing that we had to buy it for the Beer Pong Tournament last night. The tourney was sweet, each team registered a week before hand for a total of eight teams. There were a few ground rules for each entry as follows…

1) Teams must have a semi witty name!
2) Teams must provide own drinking fuel
3) Teams must have matching attire

So it ended up we had 8 total registered teams with a few last minute entries. Here are some of the teams…

Team Baby Shakers:

 Hatchet and Sherbs, both recent fathers made up team baby shakers with matching shirts and kacki shorts. The back of the shirts say “shaking Babies since 10000BC and has that picture of Bush holding a baby awkwardly.

Team Beer Doctors:

Disarray and Ryan made up Team Beer Doctors, this team usually brings nudity early and heavy in the game. But have yet to see a title match.

Team “Dont Taze Me Bro!”:

Tony and Mike we’re the member of the team, unfortunatly for them they played some skirmish matches before everyone else and were out in the first couple rounds.

Team Killer Bunnies From Space:

Holy and (I forget Ryans girls name so we’ll just call her cheater!) …Oh I was just informed it’s Susan. Well this is one of the only girls who are able to compete, though this night there were using wind up Bunny toys and unleashing them across the table.

Team God Mode:

Team God Mode was Sub and Tim, both dressed as Jesus complete with caines and crowns of thorns. Great team concept.

The Sin City Slingers:

And here we are, the team to beat The Sin City Slingers. Myself and John (just cause I know we match perfectly ill tell you, I’m the one in white). John had a shotgun and I had twin six shooters, both are cleverly hidden beneath our cloaks.

There were more teams but those cover the ones I got pictures of some of the other team name include, The Biggest Losers which was Drew and his friend from work as well as Team I.F.Y.M.L.N. (I fucked your mother last night) which was bubba and his friend.

Here are how the boards were set up.

Tournament Board

It came down to Sin City Slingers VS God Mode and only one would be champ.

 And once again Sin City Slingers took the win. It was a pretty epic finish, with one cup left on each side and each time getting the Salvation Rule twice before. It was a fun night we took the trophy home and will bring it (after we upgrade it) to the next tournie!

I watched an interesting video today from Stanford University about programming, they offer these free video courses that are basically the real course just recorded live and broadcast to everyone. Aparently businesses use them as training or just as a knowledge base.

So, the video series I started watching is called Programming Methodology and is an introductory for Java, but also goes over programming in general terms as well. The reason I started looking into it was because of the Team Production school thing and the Unity Engine. Which even if we don’t end up using for our project I think I might buy for BlindSeer Studios.

The begining lessons focus on a program created by a Professor at Stanford called Karel the Robot, and what Karel is is an introductory program that allows students to learn the basic commands of Java without the rest of the clutter of the language, think of it like a Playdoe to Sculpy.

Point being, It got me thinking, maybe after I get my bachelors from AILV ill head to Stanford and get another degree in Software Engineering. I’m sure it would be tons more work then the degree I’m going for now but I think having the (limited) art talent I have now and a fair understanding of programming would make for a good game designer. Of course I eventually want to get my masters as well but I’m pretty sure I’m going Sociology for that, when I figured out what I would get my masters in there was a little voice in my head that listed off the top things to Master in in order to round out a good game designers education and I have to say when the list started I was shocked, Anthropology was one of the first things that poped into my head. But I immediatly cut it from the list.

So, I’m starting to get nervous as time ticks down towards our pitches for the Team Production, senior project at school. My idea (logo pictured above) is simple but broad and hopefully accommodates all tastes, I know you run the risk of satisfying no one when you try to please everyone but I think I’ve struck a fine line with this game that can manage to sedate the hardcore violence addicts while allowing the artistic students to show off their creative side and still allowing myself and Brendon the ability to flex our design muscles a bit. We shall see…

Athena asked me the other day “If Brendon or you aren’t picked will you still have the picnic?” I’ve been planning to have this get together in order to strengthen the team, if you’re going to spend a year working with 15-20 on a single project its best if everyone has had a social experience with each other. It makes things go smoother when everyone’s had a chance to play games and socialize with each other. So, I planned this BBQ with a few games like Street Fighter 4 Tourney a Gamer Trivia challenge and the pinnacle of competition…a beer pong tourney as well. My answer to Athena’s question was “I’m going to say yes right now, but lets see how petty I become if my game isn’t picked.” And that’s my honest answer at this time. I think in the end I will still have the BBQ but in the back of my head is a little voice that whispers “If they pick some shitty game that is impossible to finish in a year, your going to be so angry that they all voted for it, when you designed success on a platter for them, that you will not only cancel the BBQ but sit with your arms folded across your chest in silence for most of the next year.”  …yeah I can be a real petty douche sometimes…but at least I’m aware of it right?