As Heroes of the Storm's
various promotional tests loom on the horizon, as DotA 2 uses seasonal promotions to engage its player base and kick
start its user-marketplace, as Heroes of Newerth
continues to slide into obscurity and League
of Legends remains comfortably seated as second-best, e-sports favorite, I
find myself thoroughly disengaged from all MOBAs spare one: Dawngate.
I've been playing a shitload of Dawngate, so much of it, in fact, that I managed to get a special
item skin as a kind of "thanks for playing this game so much." I've been playing it alone, been playing it
with friends, playing it in the morning, playing it in the evening, playing it
with Brazilian people. I've been playing
it all sorts of ways, and I've been loving it for the most part.
Dawngate has many
of the same frustrations that other MOBAs do: games are still long, a single
bad (or ill-mannered) teammate can still ruin a game for everyone, the skill
differential between new players, intermediate players and veterans is still extremely
high. But there's an intentionality to
its design, or more particularly the design of its heroes, that helps it avoid
one of the biggest pitfalls of the MOBA genre: the game-breaking hero.
Icefrog proudly touts the quality of game-breaking heroes in
interviews, proudly declaring that "balance happens through play" and
that "players will adjust as they need to." This translates to a dynamic whereby DotA 2 (and DotA before it), as well as HoN,
prominently feature heroes who, through either design or accident, have a combination
of skills that break the game. In the
early days of DotA, there was a
shifting rogue's gallery of heroes that simply should not be played in polite
company: when I first started playing, Traxex had the ability to instantly kill
creeps with a single attack from the get-go, did massive passive bonus damage
and had an inexhaustible slow/damage buff that made her nearly impossible to
beat in a stand up fight, or run away from.
Except if she was playing against the permanently invisible Shadow
Assassin, who, if appropriately leveled, could kill any hero in the game in a
few swipes, then run across the map, unseen, to kill some other poor
unsuspecting bastard, by summoning a death ward that did massive damage, a ward
he could channel to keep in place while remaining invisible, with no fear of
reprisal. Then there was N'aix, the
lifestealer, who could regain HP faster than he could be damaged as long as he
remained engaged in combat, with upwards of 70% lifesteal towards the end of
the game. There were the other
game-breakers too, some of them softer: the Night Stalker at night, the
Lycanthrope while his ult was active. As
these characters began to cycle out of their game-breaking position, others rose
to take their place: the Conjurer and the original design of Pudge used
summoned allies to avoid combat and, as a result, could do some incredibly
irritating shit that allowed them to dive-bomb the Tree of Life/Throne in a
fashion which simply could not be countered or perpetually harass heroes
without ever being near a fight. As
Traxex faded, Faceless Void rose to prominence with the ability to perpetually
stun enemy heroes. The Bounty Hunter,
with decent crit and evade bonuses, a solid nuke with a mini-stun, stealth
capacity, and the ability to mark enemy heroes for extra cash, in turn became a
furtive game-breaker. Axe, for a time,
was simply un-killable for melee heroes, dealing massive damage to nearby
attackers and killing enemy heroes in a single blow after they reached half
health. Each of these heroes had a
period, sometimes of just a few months, sometimes of a few years, where they
effectively made game-balance a fever dream, where their very presence could
pre-determine a game's outcome.
These units and their ability to break a game make for one
of the more frustrating aspects of DotA:
the knowing, inevitable slide towards loss that often presents itself in the
game, overwhelming any sort of pleasure or joy layers might derive from play. What's worse is that the way they emerge, not
as aspects of design, but as a sort of cursory nod to theme continuity within
heroes. "What if we made a hero
that stole life and slowed his foes with every hit, who also had an ability
that made him attack and move faster?"
Thus, N'aix is born, to rule over the game until his inevitable nerfing. "What if we made a hero who could
literally freeze time for other heroes while he slowly killed them?" Chronus. Thus did continuity of design
outweigh considerations of balance or effective game design, to the point that
heroes began to emerge in a standardized format with a "theme skin"
coloring their play. Consider how most
heroes in DotA work: they have a
passive, a damage dealing spell, and a stun.
There are single-point spells, and AOE spells, most of which do the same
amount of damage when capped out, all of which, by merit of the game, do flat
damage. Spellcasters thus exist at a
fundamental disadvantage to other character archetypes, especially later in
games, and game-breaking heroes often emerge accidentally, like Bounty Hunter
did, by mixing together a series of abilities that simply shouldn't be together
in service of some sort of theme.
Dawngate addresses
this through a philosophy of meticulous development, most prominently
represented through the assymetrical design ethos behind many of Dawngate's powers. To be less obtuse with my definition: Dawngate's heroes don't have a
"standard amount of damage" done by a given power. Rather, casters, and there are plenty of casters,
tend to have powers that either do interesting things when they're stacked
together, or powers that do interesting things if they hit that then allow
players to do damage to targets by attacking them normally after a successful
hit. The interaction between the various
abilities of each hero then make or break the game. King of Masks, for example, relies on
flourishing, then casting spells, then flourishing, then casting spells again. Used independently, his abilities can do some
damage, but used in conjunction with one another, they make him into a real
motherfucker, jumping around the battlefield, stunning enemies, then dumping
eggs on them for massive damage and an infuriating fear effect, with a few
massive damage crits/amped strikes thrown in there. All of this is amplified by a game mechanic
which allows the same stats that boost basic attack damage to boost the damage
of character abilities.
Each hero operates on their principle of confluence, which
makes for a strange sort of game structure, wherein the ability to use skills
in a way that compliments one another becomes absolutely key to play. Certain heroes have to make choices in this
matter: Moya, for example, whose abilities allow her to modify her basic
attacks and then unlock a special sort of "charge" ability that
either stuns foes or steals a large amount of health from them, simply cannot
be played effectively without stacking her abilities together, and playing her
effectively requires making choices about which buff to use when. Marah places trees that she can slingshot
between using her "hook" attack, but using them in this way requires
holding off on using her hook ability offensively. There are other examples, but they all
operate on the same principle: the game builds up a cascade of abilities, used
together, which then allow players to pull off "holy shit" moments. It's not like the "holy shit"
moment of a Juggernaut ult in DotA
(though Kindra's ult is quite similar to Juggernaut's). It's the "holy shit" moment of
watching something unexpected happen and wondering "how did that happen
just now?"
It's also worth noting that none of Dawngate's heroes really fit into the archetypes that DotA heroes occupy, archetypes which
largely dominate the various MOBAs that have sprung up over the last half
decade. I can point to most HoN heroes and say, definitively, who's
who from DotA, but in Dawngate, it's all fresh, which means
the design orients itself around creation, not re-creation. That means balance can be the primary goal of
a designer, over spectacle, and that the powers can exist to present a
particular sort of team-play experience, instead of existing to recreate a
previous kind of gameplay. That means
actual game design can happen, something almost entirely absent from HoN and DotA 2, titles that are effectively labors of copy-paste design
philosophy.
This isn't to give short shrift to the original scions of
the MOBA genre: there are some great games in there, and I've had a lot of fun
playing them. But design has never been
the strong suit of the MOBA genre, pre-Dawngate. And now that there's a title that actually
demonstrates strong game design while still utilizing the same set of feedback
responses that MOBAs have always relied upon.
The end result is a smooth, well crafted artifact that calls attention
to the best aspects of the genre while alloying some of the worst.
Of course, even with meticulously designed characters and a
strong orientation towards balance over billowing visual effects and the
recreation of past experiences there are still some serious problems with MOBAs
on the whole. The barrier to entry
remains quite high, and tutorials are almost impossible to create
effectively. The learning curve is
steep, and many players will cap out in the game without ever knowing it,
growing frustrated with a system that appears patently unfair by merit of
obfuscation. Games take a while to play,
making losing an incredibly unpleasant experience, and even the simplified item
system of Dawngate can be daunting to
slow-reading or less engaged players.
But there's something to all this, something wonderful,
something incredible, something that Dawngate
brings to light: the remarkable potential of the MOBA as a genre, not just for
cloning a particular kind of experience, but for crafting new takes on that
philosophy of play.
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