MAST

Right on! Well, if you want to add me I can show you the ropes. I'm not opposed to getting on skype or something and goofing around, telling you what I know, and losing a few games together. ;)

@sirfork: Stay away from Lost Vikings though. ;)

Actually, I forgot. The hard characters are labeled. Every character has a Easy-Hard label. Lost Vikings are kinda crazy though. It's like having to control 3 characters at a time. Kind of like Meepo in Dota 2, if you are familiar with that.

It's always possible with these types of games. Refer to my above post.

I think for the most part characters are easy to learn, and of course, you don't have to worry about items in this game. So there's that.

And there's always practice games, and coop with other people against AI in order to learn characters. Honestly though, there's so much less to lose in this game if your bad, or with bad players. It's 15-20 minute games, it's super easy to mute other people, and it has a great in-game pinging system that tells all other players everything they need to know.

@sirfork said:

I think it's the most accessible of all of them. From game 1 onward I just hit the "random" button and played whatever the game gave me. I didn't know any of the Heroes, or any of the maps, and I did just fine. That was quick matching against real people too. However, I've played these types of games before. This game has a coop vs. AI also, but I personally just went for it. I won't lie though, people still rage in this game just like Dota/LoL. This games community is not quite as bad, but people still rage. (This is another reason why games only lasting 20 minutes or so is great. Bad/Rude team? Oh well, it'll be over soon.)

I think these types of games will always have a toxic community, for whatever reason. Either you can rise above it, and mute people that are mean (which is easy to do), or you can't...

@veektarius:

Ahh, yeah. I understand that. They definitely try to keep things "tight" and snowballing controlled. But I think that's a good thing. In Dota/LoL you can see the snowballing, and skill gap within the first 10-15 minutes. While spectating, I regularly call matches within that time frame, and I'm almost always right. In my opinion, it sucks to play a 45-60 minute game in Dota/LoL when you know within the first 10-15 minutes who is going to win. There are rarely "big" comebacks in those games. Usually you know early on who is going to win, the rest of the game is just going through the motions. The rest of those games are usually arbitrary.

HotS kinda chucks all that to the side, and forces teams to suss out who the best players are throughout the length of the game up until the last seconds. Then it's over. If you are a better team, it will be proven in that you kept the objective advantage the entire game. Not because one guy was left alone, got a ton of farm, snowballed, and then carried the entire team.

Not 100% sure what you mean, exactly. I think they do counter snowballing, but it seems effective. I'm not sure that matches "drag on" seeing as how my longest match so far (out of 100 games) has been 25 minutes, and that's only because both teams were so evenly matched. Compare this to DotA/LoL, and you really start to see what "drag on" means.

Also, I already (even with just 100 games under my belt) have "come back" more times in this game than DotA/LoL combined. I can't put my finger on the "why" of it, but I've regularly been pushed back to my base, and come back. I assume because of a few smart plays and capturing of map objectives. This game is truly "not over till it's over." It can turn on a dime. Whereas games like DotA and LoL, I've kinda always felt like you can tell who is going to win within the first 10-15 minutes of their (potentially) hour long games. And 9 times out of 10, I'm right. HotS isn't that predictable at all.

I can understand this. HotS definitely cuts straight to the chase. It jumps to the "end game" of "DotA/LoL." You also have the potential to buy items to counter what the other team is doing in Dota/LoL. This means that, even if you are not the better player, you can potentially still "win" against the other team by smarter/more strategic item buying and character building. HotS cuts all that out. It jumps right to team fighting, and the "are you better at your character and playing as a team" part of MOBA's. Which I, personally, think is fantastic.

HotS really has carved out it's own little identity that sets it apart. Some people aren't going to like the things that make it different, but I'm willing to bet a lot are.

HotS is a lot more simple, but that doesn't make it worse. After all, League of Legends is more "simple" than Dota 2, yet it still has like 20 times the player base. Sometimes simple is better. If you can simplify things, but still have deep strategy, that's usually a good thing, and I think HotS largely succeeds in doing this.

There's no items, or last hitting. Two big staples of DotA. Some might think that kills all strategy, however HotS replaces that with a talent system that's pretty interesting and forces choices on the fly, and it compliments the fact that the game has several maps all with different objectives that force you into team fights at just about the first minute, and it's non-stop from that point on. As fast as this game goes (matches only last 15 minutes or so), and as frequently as map objectives are popping up, and team fights are happening; if this game also had you going back to base for items, it would break everything. Thus, removing items is a pretty smart move.

I've found the map objectives to be wildly fun. I don't know if they will hold up after 1000+ games, but I'm sure Blizzard will keep adding heroes and maps on a semi-regular basis. A couple of my favorite maps:

One is these Haunted Mines. Every so often the mines open up, and everyone dives into them, and it warps you into a completely different map layout. Inside is a bunch of undead, and whoever kills the most will spawn a larger golem that will head after your enemy teams towers. This means that players are constantly jumping into these mines and team fighting, trying to fight over these undead, and pick up the charms they drop. The second one is a pirate themed map. Every so often treasure chests spawn, and players rush to those to try and hit them and collect the coins they drop. Then, everyone has to go to the pirate in the middle of the map and turn those coins in. If they get killed, they drop the coins. Once one team turns in enough coins, the pirate ship in this middle of the map will start firing on the enemy turrets/structures and do tons of damage.

Again, with the map objectives causing team fights every minute or two, the matches only lasting 15-20 minutes, and the more fast-paced feel of this game. I really think there is something unique here. The action almost feels like a Diablo style game with how snappy the movement is, and how flashy the skills are. I went back to Dota/LoL after playing this, and things almost felt slow and plodding comparatively. This might actually be a detriment to new players, I don't know, but it also again explains why there is no going back to base to buy items. There's no time for it.

Things are simple, yes, but the fun factor and strategy is still there. An article I read said that this game is the "Super Smash Bros." of the MOBA world. And I think that's kinda true. It's nowhere near as deep as, say, a Street Fighter, but there still is a lot of strategy here, and it's way more accessible, and fun with friends. Either you will snort derisively at that comparison, or it will please you greatly.

Either way, I suggest checking this game out if/when you can. If you hate it, fine, but you haven't really lost anything by trying it out. As a player of LoL/Dota that dismissed this game from it's first announcement, I've been pleasantly surprised by it at every turn.

(10:40pm Edit: Was just thinking. This game might even be more of a Power Stone to the MOBA genre. Not sure how to explain it, but there is definitely some type of "thrust you into the middle of things and just go at it" aspect to this game.)

Maybe someone said this already, but I'm not surprised that some people think this game is hard. Consider most mainstream games out there today. You can play all the way through them, start to finish, and never die once. That trend got really bad last console generation. We've just now started seeing somewhat harder stuff in the past few years (Souls games, Super Meat Boy, rogue-likes, etc.), and most of those are still indie games, not mainstream/blockbuster games.

So yeah, any game where you can die period in this day and age, is automatically going to make some people say it's "hard." Game players like Jeff, me, and others here who have been playing video games for 20-30+ years aren't going to find these games all that challenging simply because we still remember back when games being hard was the norm.

I'll admit that maybe I was never very informed to begin with, but now I'm even more confused and lost. The last straw was this Tim Schafer at GDC stuff. Not that I think he did anything wrong. The reaction just left me even more baffled.

I really need people to explain this stuff to me in as succinct a way as possible. Maybe explain it as if I were a child.

It started out as something about journalistic integrity (bribes, etc.) right? Now, somehow women have taken over, and it's all about feminism? Then, suddenly, it's about race and minorities? Then it's about homosexuality and transexuality? The term SJW is thrown around like crazy, and apparently they have some sort of agenda? I really have no damn clue what's going on. What the hell is this stuff? Who am I supposed to be angry at again?

All of this just floods my news feeds. I'm trying to read about games, and this takes up everything, and I barely understand any of it anymore.

Honestly, the only thing this (and things like it) is doing is making me hate Twitter, and other social media. But maybe I'm missing something. Maybe what it's "really about" is going over my head?

... Help?