My Thoughts on Paragon and New MOBAs

Epic Games just announced their new MOBA named Paragon at PlayStation Experience. My initial reaction was one of total disinterest and judging by the audience's reaction, they weren't excited either. That got me wondering. Why does a new MOBA sound so boring? Surely there are worse ideas, but I'm having a hard time coming up with one. Is it fair to judge a game on one pre-rendered trailer and a carefully edited script spoken on stage? Probably not, but I'm going to do it anyway.

The obvious problem is over saturation. MOBAs are hot, the same way that MMOs were hot back when World of Warcraft was the thing that everyone chased after. Despite that, there are only a handful MOBAs feasting at the big boy's table and dozens others scrabbling at their feet for any crumbs that might shake loose. People are sick of hearing about MOBAs, it doesn't get them excited or grab their interest the way it used to. If you want to find a seat at the table, you need to differentiate yourself. You have to blow our socks off, so to speak. Paragon will look incredible, it might even be the best looking MOBA out there when it releases considering what the Unreal Engine is capable of. But that isn't enough to get people's attention anymore.

At the keynote they emphasized getting right down into the action, which to me sounds like Paragon will be played from the First or Third-Person perspective. Certainly not a new idea, but maybe they can do something interesting with it considering their history of making fun shooters in that perspective.

We've been seeing other games take inspiration from MOBAs without just straight up making another one and I think that's awesome. Games like Overwatch have very obvious ties to the the MOBA genre that make for fun, new experiences. I was lucky enough to get into the Overwatch stress test weekend and the multiple characters and the way their abilities interact adds a ton of depth and variety to a game that would otherwise be a generic FPS.

I do believe there's room for new MOBAs. There has to be if the genre is to survive on its own. MOBAs are damn good fun. I've played a few hundred hours spread across multiple games and they give you an experience you can't get anywhere else. I hope they continue to grow and evolve and not stagnate like we've seen with some other genres. In 10, 15, or 20 years people will probably still be playing DOTA 2, the same way they still play Counter-Strike 1.6. That's not a bad thing, but if you want people to be interested in new MOBAs, then you have to convince us that there is something actually new to see. The Paragon announcement failed to do that.

Anyways, thanks for reading if you got this far. I haven't written a blog about games, or anything really, in years and for some reason this whole thing got me interested enough to write one. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Edit:

There's some more information to be found in the Epic Games Launcher. Add this to the growing list of games that have card collection tacked onto them. Also, you do play from a third-person perspective as they hinted at.

Overwatch is more TF2 than a MOBA. People are throwing that term around a lot lately. Anyway, I think you're right on the money about the parallel to MMORPG's. Eventually devs/pubs will lose interest and chase whatever the new craze is, and the action-rts/DotA style market will settle down, with presumably LoL and DotA2 dominating in the same way that WoW dominated it's respective genre.

I really don't like the term MOBA. It's far too vague. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. DotA is a MOBA. Call of Duty is a MOBA. UNO IS A MOBA.

I don't think any MOBA that costs money to play will ever really take off. The reason DOTA and LoL are so big is because they are free, you can play them on a toaster, and they are still really polished well-made games. I don't like them very much, but I can recognize they are well-made products. Overwatch might do well (not DOTA or LoL well), since it's Blizzard, but anything without that kind of name recognition would have to be incredible to take off.

I think the MMO comparison is apt. Everyone and their dog tried to make an MMO after WoW was such a cash cow, and some of them made a lot of money. No one else made WoW money, but it was sometimes enough to keep the game going. For every MMO that made it, there were about three that burned out either before even coming out or shortly after release. We've already seen some of that in the MOBA space (Infinite Crisis leaps to mind), and I'm sure we'll see a lot more.

@relkin said:

Yeah, I agree with you there. I had to use "MOBA" so much in this blog that the term started to lose all meaning, but it's the term people associate with games like DOTA and League so there's no escaping it at this point.

I'll also agree that Overwatch takes more from TF2 than it does MOBAs, but they're definitely taking some ideas from those games. Right down to the inclusion of "ultimates". And the way those ultimates and abilities combine to make exciting "plays" is very reminiscent of MOBAs as well.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you brought up World of Warcraft. It's pretty much exactly the same responses and reactions to all of these MOBAs coming out of the woodwork. It happened just as fast as well. After a handful of major MMOs to come and go after WoW, people were just sick of hearing about them. We all read articles announcing MMOs and ultimately knew what was going to happen to them, some even commenting on their inevitable future as well as others expressing their complete disinterest in another MMO.

Hell, if you went back on some gaming site and read through the comments of articles of whatever MMO coming out post-WoW and comments of articles on MOBAs coming out post DotA/LoL/HoN, I bet you'd barely even be able to tell them apart.

While I appreciate that we've seen the birth of a new genre, it's just a shame that I completely dislike MOBAs. Yes, a MOBA that's more action-oriented is definitely more appealing to me, but... the MOBA trappings are never going to replace a fully dedicated shooter and its bevy of modes that have been time tested for decades along with the ability to change your gameplay style completely on the fly instead of every 30 minutes. I suppose the melee oriented action MOBAs are unique, though, but then again, I already played that sort of thing in Savage 1/2 and it wasn't the greatest. I think games like Age of Chivalry have kind of pushed the envelope forward on melee combat, though.

All that said, I did download HotS and will probably give it a chance at some point.

My immediate thought was that the game industry clearly has a problem with learning from the past. I see the MOBA space just like the MMO space of 10 years ago. There's little to no room for a new big successful MOBA, but they're gonna chase that pie in the sky all the same it seems.

Sorry, haven't read anything about it yet but do they explicitly call it a Moba? I thought developers wanted to steer away from that term these days since it comes with such weird baggage. Most people have already made up their mind if they like or dislike Mobas.

I guess we should start saying Mobalike or Mobalite instead to implement that the game is not Dota/LoL but borrows a few elements from the genre.

@christoffer: Yup, they say it several times. Here's a link to when they start talking about it.

The problem is that LoL got so big so fast that in order to stand a fighting chance you need to have the store presence of a Valve or devote fanbase of a Blizzard to even stand a chance. A few out liars do exist 'Smite' is a fairly big game and 'Awesomenauts' created its own niche, though I have a feeling that game will soon die as the last time I played that game (2014) the active community seemed way smaller (the thing that put me off of that particular game was that all new nauts got put behind an expansion pack) but otherwise how the hell are you meant to compete with the most played game in the world currently, the biggest pc game distributor and blizzard?!?!?! It just isn't going to happen.

It seems more of an impossible task than even taking on WoW, you have 3 Goliath's to take on, not to mention the steep learning curve these games often have. They take so long to get good at (even the more straight forward ones) that the time investment is unappealing to most (I've learnt LoL and the idea of learning Dota 2 is highly unappealing for example). Too much stacked against new MOBA's to even bother trying.

Maybe it's just my personal preferences, but I think there's a distinct difference between the MMO scenario and the MOBA one. If we look at "will this survive the market", it is one aspect that they share. However, if we look at the games themselves, I don't see as many MOBAs with potential as I did MMOs back in the day. WoW might have been the big dog, but there were plenty of decent alternatives to pick from, all of which had qualities of their own whether they were older or newer than WoW. I don't see that in the MOBA genre (though admittedly I don't actively seek out alternatives either, so I might be missing something notable under the radar).

i'm assuming Paragon will be a FPS. Which means maybe it could be popular? Smite is pretty popular so there is some wiggle room for moba's that aren't your typical Dota and LoL. But the market definitely is getting saturated.

While I think your comparison to the height of the WoW era has merit, I wouldn't go so far as to say it parallels that craze for a few reasons.

Back when WoW was nearing its peak (and the few years before) I feel like there were a lot of people who were just hardcore MMO players. They would try out all of the popular new MMO releases, but after a few months their interest would wane and they would return to WoW.

In the current climate, however, I feel like hardcore MOBA players have one MOBA they stick to, and that's it. I'm sure there are many who do hop between the MOBAs (dota, league, hots.. am I missing one? does hots even belong in that group? I digress), but I feel like the vast majority of hardcore players have one that they stick to and play far more than others, because there's almost a rivalry between them, like when brad playfully hates on league.

And then there are non-MOBA players like myself who have absolutely zero desire to try out any MOBA. So I don't really know what market segment these new MOBAs are targeting.