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Decline So apparently Gearbox is making an FPS-MOBA - Battleborn

chestburster

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Looks like shit. And Gearbox doesn't understand that FPS gameplay is inherently incompatible with MOBA gameplay, just like FPS gameplay is inherently at odds with loot driven RPG gameplay.

Also inb4 microtransaction for heroes in a full $60 game.
 

taxalot

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Codex 2013 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Interesting presentation full of so-called poetry, a puzzling choice for a game that is going to be populated by retarded 13 years old who apparently fucked your mother.
 

sbb

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M83 music in a trailer. When will it stop.

Why is FPS so "inherently" incompatible with MOBA? Not arguing, just wondering
 

chestburster

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M83 music in a trailer. When will it stop.

Why is FPS so "inherently" incompatible with MOBA? Not arguing, just wondering

"MOBA" is a very nebulous term. So I would like to define MOBA first:

My understanding of DOTA is that it consists three main elements: (1) RTS-like controls; (2) RPG-like within-round leveling system; (3) AI-controlled "creeps" in a PVP match.

If you put in FPS control AND take out the in-game leveling system at the same time, you end up with a PVP FPS with AI creeps, and that is called Titanfall which absolutely is NOT a MOBA in most-people's minds.

So you need to keep the RPG-like leveling system in order for it to be called a MOBA (and also sell new heroes as microtransactions). But this aspect does not mesh well with FPS, for two reasons:

(1) Balancing the game would be a fucking nightmare. You need to balance a large selection of different character classes (maybe more than 10) and you need to account for their leveling. We're not talking about the COD/BF3's "character progression" here because COD's leveling only unlocks different guns allowing HORIZONTAL branches. In a MOBA game, leveling up in a round gives you VERTICAL upgrade for your hero. So if player A is level 5 and B is level 3, A theoretically has an advantage over B, stat wise. But FPS is highly skill based. An FPS player does not feel good about losing to another with inferior shooting skills simply because the other dude has leveled up his HP.

So Gearbox needs to balance 10+ characters AND each characters' vertical progression levels. The combinations are just mind-numbing. The game is bound to be very unbalanced when it comes out.

(2) MOBA Heroes don't just shoot guns. MOBA Heroes use action skills. That's why they're hero characters not another grunt in COD. But first person action skill is very difficult to pull off. How do you design AOE skills when FPS player can't see who's behind them? How do you design teleportation skills when FPS player can't place his portals beyond his line-of-sight? How do you design CC skills when the most annoying and cheap death that FPS players HATE is some mechanism that takes away your maneuverability? And so on.


And finally, FPS PVP players don't like killing AI creeps. In Titanfall, the AI creeps are just background noise and cannon folder. No one actively hunts them. But in a MOBA, you're required to hunt the AI creeps in order to level up your character. --I heard in Monday Night Combat (TPS-MOBA), most players don't bother with creeps and go straight to other players. Then your MOBA hybrid just turns into a traditional TPS/FPS.
 

chestburster

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M83 music in a trailer. When will it stop.

Why is FPS so "inherently" incompatible with MOBA? Not arguing, just wondering

It is compatible, Smite is same thing but in a third person.

Smite's minute-to-minute gameplay is more like Wildstar than a third-person action game or TPS or FPS.

There is a reason that Wildstar/Smite is using the "target-zone" system instead of reticle-aiming.
 

Metro

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They abandoned the Borderlands franchise for something even worse?
 

sbb

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"MOBA" is a very nebulous term. So I would like to define MOBA first:

My understanding of DOTA is that it consists three main elements: (1) RTS-like controls; (2) RPG-like within-round leveling system; (3) AI-controlled "creeps" in a PVP match.

If you put in FPS control AND take out the in-game leveling system at the same time, you end up with a PVP FPS with AI creeps, and that is called Titanfall which absolutely is NOT a MOBA in most-people's minds.

So you need to keep the RPG-like leveling system in order for it to be called a MOBA (and also sell new heroes as microtransactions). But this aspect does not mesh well with FPS, for two reasons:

(1) Balancing the game would be a fucking nightmare. You need to balance a large selection of different character classes (maybe more than 10) and you need to account for their leveling. We're not talking about the COD/BF3's "character progression" here because COD's leveling only unlocks different guns allowing HORIZONTAL branches. In a MOBA game, leveling up in a round gives you VERTICAL upgrade for your hero. So if player A is level 5 and B is level 3, A theoretically has an advantage over B, stat wise. But FPS is highly skill based. An FPS player does not feel good about losing to another with inferior shooting skills simply because the other dude has leveled up his HP.

So Gearbox needs to balance 10+ characters AND each characters' vertical progression levels. The combinations are just mind-numbing. The game is bound to be very unbalanced when it comes out.

(2) MOBA Heroes don't just shoot guns. MOBA Heroes use action skills. That's why they're hero characters not another grunt in COD. But first person action skill is very difficult to pull off. How do you design AOE skills when FPS player can't see who's behind them? How do you design teleportation skills when FPS player can't place his portals beyond his line-of-sight? How do you design CC skills when the most annoying and cheap death that FPS players HATE is some mechanism that takes away your maneuverability? And so on.


And finally, FPS PVP players don't like killing AI creeps. In Titanfall, the AI creeps are just background noise and cannon folder. No one actively hunts them. But in a MOBA, you're required to hunt the AI creeps in order to level up your character. --I heard in Monday Night Combat (TPS-MOBA), most players don't bother with creeps and go straight to other players. Then your MOBA hybrid just turns into a traditional TPS/FPS.
Thank you for the detailed answer
 

chestburster

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They abandoned the Borderlands franchise for something even worse?

More like they looked at Destiny and realized that Boredlands now faces a competitor from a higher league and got spooked.

“Crazy” Borderlands 3 concept scared Gearbox Software
Wednesday, 9th July 2014 11:19 GMT By Dave Cook
Borderlands 3 has apparently triggered some big and crazy concepts over at developer Gearbox Software. CEO Randy Pitchford hasn’t confirmed that the game exists, but he has stated that thinking about that grand concept has left the studio feeling scared.

It follows the reveal of Gearbox’s very own MOBA. It seems like everyone is intent on boarding that train until it derails itself from the sheer weight bearing down on its crumpled axles.

Speaking within the pages of GameInformer, Pitchford said, “There’s a point where it’s like, ‘What should the next Borderlands be? Should there be another Borderlands, and what should it be?’

“We had that discussion and there was this weird mixed bag. On one level it’s like, ‘Woah’. If you’re going to do something that’s called Borderlands 3 and it’s going to be done in this next-generation environment, there’s a whole bunch of ideas that come around of what has to happen in order for that to live up to what that needs to be.”

Pitchford added that 2K Australia’s hand in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has coerced Gearbox into thinking differently about what Borderlands 3 might look like, and naturally Game Informer politely reminded its readers that these quotes in no way confirm development of Borderlands 3.

He said that if Borderlands 3 could eventually be a thing, “We imagine what that might be, and frankly it scared us. It’s like, ‘That’s so crazy and so big that I’m not sure we can succeed’.”
 

Metro

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Sounds like the guy is too lazy to make any significant improvements/innovations on the current stale Diablo/MMO formula he's used the last two times.
 

Dr Tomo

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M83 music in a trailer. When will it stop.

Why is FPS so "inherently" incompatible with MOBA? Not arguing, just wondering

It is compatible, Smite is same thing but in a third person.

Smite's minute-to-minute gameplay is more like Wildstar than a third-person action game or TPS or FPS.

There is a reason that Wildstar/Smite is using the "target-zone" system instead of reticle-aiming.

You are going to have to explain the difference between "target zone" system and "reticle aiming". As Smite you still aim with basic attacks using a recticle and you have 4 abilities like a moba game only difference is that helps them differentiate themselves is moba elements with 3rd perspective. But I agree that it is like mmo pvp arena like that is true hence why I like playing the game.

I honestly don't have any clue what this game can offer over the others, it is like Randy wanted to get into the moba genre and realized that you can't make one like lol and dota 2. So saw that the only one that is not in a isometric perspective is Smite and decided the big innovation is changing from third person perspective to first will help differentiate it from others. Also find it amusing that as soon as Gearbox announced that they are joining the band wagon this piece came out.

Everyone is making a MOBA. Matt Martin sees an MMO-style genre crash coming.
The thing PC gaming does really well is mastering a niche. MMORPGs, real-time strategy, card battling games. These are the sort of games that one or two PC developers create and drill down on until it’s as perfect as it can be. Once that’s done, the numbers of players go up and the amount of money they spend in the game climbs. Then a bunch of other developers think they see an opportunity and jump on it.

They don’t see an opportunity, they see a bandwagon that’s already leaving town. They go to investors and bankers who don’t really understand video games very well – but do claim to understand money – and they see World of Legend Warriors is making loads of money and their pupils turn to dollar signs and their jaws spring open like a cash register. Ker-ching!

So the project gets greenlit. What neither of those realise is they’re seeing something that happened in the past and they will inevitably be too late with their efforts. Online games take an age to make – two years at least – but they can take another two years being tweaked and redesigned and relaunched. This whole process is too slow. Any developer thinking they can jump on a PC gaming bandwagon has left it too late.

The current bandwagon is the MOBA game. The Multiplayer Online Battle Arena – and variations on that – is the genre de jour. There’s not a week goes by that a well-respected developer announces a new MOBA game. But look at one of the market leaders, League of Legends. It came out in 2009 and at the start of this year had around 67 million people playing it a month. 27 million people play it a day, 7.5 million concurrently.

When you have no previous experience in the genre – when you lack years of trying, failing, experimenting in a niche business – how are you honestly going to compete with that? MOBA is already an esport, it’s an industry on its own. And the companies that are leading the pack are not going to let down their guard when new challengers approach.

Yesterday Gearbox went and announced its MOBA game, Battleborn. Last week CD Projekt announced The Witcher Battle Arena. Last month Crytek revealed Arena of Fate. These will be competing against Heroes of the Storm, Sins of a Dark Age, Infinite Crisis, Dawngate, Dead Island: Epidemic, Adventure Time: Battle Party, Smite, Transformers Universe – all of which are currently in open or closed beta.

These new MOBAs that are being announced now insist they are doing something different. It’s for mobile formats, it’s free-to-play, it’s a first-person MOBA, it’s for consoles, it features a well-known brand. This is starting to sound really familiar.

It’s hard not to be cynical. Do Transformers, DC Comics’ superheroes and a surreal Cartoon Network show really lend themselves to an online action strategy game? Of course they don’t. It’s a square peg, round hole situation. Developers are asking, “what license have we currently got, what genre is hot and how can we force them together?” If it was five years ago these brands would be looking at the MMORPG market (Transformers Universe openly started out as an MMO remember, it’s just taken so long to make it’s changed directions completely).

Ah, the MMO. Remember when everyone started making massively multiplayer online role-playing games after the success of World of Warcraft? Even the most appropriate license in that genre struggled, with developers and publishers going bust or scrapping projects at the cost of millions. Good games sank, bad games limped on. Free-to-play hit shortly after and screwed games that had been built around subscription payments. It was a disaster and there was only one game that came through that unscathed: World of Warcraft.

It also had the knock-on effect of scaring off investors who saw their cash disappear. Those very same investors then helped fuel a jump to Facebook gaming, to casual games, to “console quality games on mobile”. Where are all of those now, eh? Dead in the gutter with only a handful of successful survivors.

Because the games business has these cycles of The Next Big Thing, where a successful formula hits the spot and others throw money around to grab its coat-tails. MOBA games are in a genre that many think is going to become hotter but in reality it’s already blazing away and if you touch it now you’ll only get burned.

Crytek, Gearbox, CD Projekt and friends are all coming into it too late. They want to make the next game to be accepted by esports but not only is the market crowded, the audience’s attention is already taken. MOBAs, like MMOs, are a time sink. New players will try them when they launch but they’ll go back to what they’re comfortable with once the novelty wears off.

There will be serious challenges to League of Legends over the next year or so – most likely from Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm or Hi-Rez’s Smite – but there will be plenty more casualties as companies throw cash blindly in the hope of hitting it big. For some, jumping on the MOBA bandwagon now is an act of desperation, a last roll of the dice from studios gasping for air in an increasingly tough market.

The champions of MOBA are already dominating the arena. A lot of challengers are only going to be left bleeding on the floor.

*source
 

chestburster

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You are going to have to explain the difference between "target zone" system and "reticle aiming". As Smite you still aim with basic attacks using a recticle and you have 4 abilities like a moba game only difference is that helps them differentiate themselves is moba elements with 3rd perspective. But I agree that it is like mmo pvp arena like that is true hence why I like playing the game.

On the spectrum spanning from auto-lock aiming to reticle aiming, target zone aiming sits right in the middle. A reticle is just a really tiny target zone.

FPS tasks players with a lot of precision aiming skills. A big part of an FPS player's skill is to headshot. Headshot is essentially critical hit. Whereas in WOW-style auto-lock aiming, critical hit is completely determined by the RNG god, in Counter Strike, you need to 100% manually land your headshotting critical hit.

I've not played Smite so I'm not sure whether Smite has precision aiming.
 

chestburster

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Everyone is making a MOBA. Matt Martin sees an MMO-style genre crash coming.

I don't think this genre is crashing. A lot of people play MOBAs because they want to play against other people in fast-paced PVP matches and they don't like FPS due to motion sickness and don't like RTS strategy-management.

DOTA through its top-down view and RTS point-click control system appeals to those people.

(I believe Smite is the furthest a MOBA's control scheme can deviate from that. Anything further it risks alienating both MOBA fans and TPS/FPS players.)

The MOBA genre basically describes a control scheme, similar to the "First-person shooter" genre. As such MOBA genre can accommodate many games that feature different themes, from fantasy to grimdark shoot-the-Muslims military theme.
 

Metro

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Crashing? No. Glutted? Yes.

Off the top of my head:

DOTA 2
LOL
Smite
HoN
Heroes of the Storm
Dead Island Epidemic
BattleBorn

And I'm sure a dozen more that I can't recall immediately.
 
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It's a type of game nobody wants to play more than one, makes even less sense than riding the MMOs bandwagon
 

Metro

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I wouldn't go that far: some of the MOBAs I mentioned are highly profitable and require a fraction of the work an MMO entails.
 

Mastermind

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
just like FPS gameplay is inherently at odds with loot driven RPG gameplay.

Not really. I can't remember the last time I played a normal FPS (the new Shadow Warrior was the last one and I spent most of the game cutting up motherfuckers with the sword) whereas I got dozens of hours' worth of entertainment out of Borderlands and Dead Island.
 

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