I started playing MOBAs half a decade before the genre had a
name, back when the genre entire was contained within DotA. Even so I was actually
kind of a late adopter by DotA
standards; I came aboard at version 5.36, amidst a sea of balance changes that
would rock the game before it began to stabilize and recognizably take shape as
the industry standard it is today with version 5.84c. I've been here for a while, is what I'm
saying. If there are kids on my lawn,
I'm going to ask them to get the fuck off it.
That's sort of where I sit in this community, which is why I feel compelled
to speak after I watch a movie like Free To
Play, or play a game like Dawngate.
Let's unpack these things one by one.
Free To Play is a
documentary film produced by Valve Software following three prominent DotA 2 tournament attendees during the
2011 DotA 2 International Tournament,
which featured an impressive $1.6 million purse. It takes three laudably human stories about
professional video game players and sets it against a high-stakes back-drop
while peppering it with enough information to help anyone's mom who's watching
sort out just what's going on during the film.
It exists in a bit of a strange place, since Valve, the film's producer
and distributor, is also the producer and publisher of DotA 2. While it would be
unfair to dismiss the entire film as a blatant ad-campaign aimed at injecting
enthusiasm for e-sports into a North American market, it's undeniable that the
film, with broadly constructed sympathetic portraits of a handful of gaming
underdogs and a lean running time of 73 minutes, feels a bit odd, as if it was
made by people who found the humanity of Indie
Game Movie compelling and wanted to capture the enthusiasm a community
expresses for a game along with that sly human aspect of the video game
world. The end result is a film that
constructs itself around a MOBA genre of one: League of Legends is a footnote in Free To Play's world, the original DotA present only in the memories of older players. Heroes of Newerth might as well not
exist (though to be fair, HoN might
as well not exist in the minds of most MOBA players outside of the film's scope). While there's tangential attention played to Starcraft 2, much of the film is given
over to puzzling explanations from "experts," including coaches for
teams that aren't featured in the film, professional game commentators who
explode with enthusiasm at the most basic of maneuvers, and, for some fucking
reason, Jeremy Lin, who I had genuinely forgotten about.
The end result is a film about MOBAs that constructs a world
where the history of the genre begins and ends with DotA 2. That's an
exaggeration, but it's what I've come away from the film feeling: that this
phenomena called DotA 2 has been
sweeping Asia, nearly approaching Starcraft-like
levels of attention, and that America really only has one good player in it,
fighting to keep the good old US of A in the running. There's little sense of the history of the
game, of its queer, plodding, dramatic rise to power, and really, why should
there be? Valve has a vested interest in
spending as little time as possible telling that story, the one of a massive
collaborative process which left possibly the most monstrous original developer
from the original Warcraft 3 mod in the most successful position of all his
preceding co-developers. Valve has
invested a great deal in young Icefrog, lead developer of DotA 2, whose
noteworthy qualities include a strong dedication to his own anonymity, a
penchant for peppering interviews with non-information and pseudo-philosophical
bullshit in place of answers, and an absolute abhorrence for community feedback
(Icefrog famously refused to include a
"concession vote" in DotA 2, marking it as the only MOBA to
develop post DotA without a mechanic
for verifying that the bulk of a team no longer wishes to play). The actual story of DotA, of a series of baton-passes as developers move on to
different, often directly competing projects, is ugly and dicey, and Valve's
film is clean and breezy. It's so clean
that it's one of the rare documentaries that manages to cast a clear villain,
and construe them as wholly unsympathetic without a hitch - just try to watch
the eHome players boast without wanting to punch them right in their pimply
little self-serious faces. I dare you.
In the end, it's a narrow portrayal of a game with one of
the more arrogant and vitriolic communities on the internet, a light attempt to
drum up interest in a topic that, frankly, most people who have access to the
film are already plenty interested in - using Steam as distribution model means the people who have
ready access to Free to Play also have ready access to the product Free to Play features so prominently,
and will often already be quite familiar with it. And while the film has some nice turns and
plenty of redeeming moments, and while it's nice to see human portrayals of
video game players that have the potential to infiltrate mainstream culture, it's
frustrating to see a game with such a complicated context portrayed as if it
was the next Starcraft instead of what it is: a serious competitor in a hotly
contested developing genre.
Abandoning the rich history of the MOBA genre while attempting
to generate a narrative wherein your not-so-singular game is one of the most
singular e-sporting games in the world feels a bit dirty pool, and it taps into
the rich tradition of ignoring history that DotA
2's design team has so effectively muted with attention paid to flashy
visuals and a commanding market share; DotA
2 is the only MOBA available to play on Steam, and takes advantage of
Steam's commanding audience reach and matchmaking prowess, two things that have
made games successes in the recent past.
Free to Play also endeavors to
minimize the accomplishments of other MOBAs, citing old data for League of Legends' tournament payouts,
which have since eclipsed the DotA 2
invitational's payoff by around $400,000, and ignoring LoL's status as a visa-worthy competitive activity in the eyes of
the American government, even as it laments DotA
2's lack of such recognition.
Dawngate, EA's
entry into the MOBA genre, stands firmly on the other side of the discussion. It's emerging from EA's new subsidiary,
Waystone Games, which has a bit of a confusing pedigree to it: some sources
link Waystone to Bioware, one of EA's most prominent and profitable recent acquisitions,
while others refer to it as a wholly new studio - games journalism being what
it is, it's difficult to unpack without credentials of my own, and there seems
to be little interest in investigating the history of the game itself, though
there's an ample share of enthusiasm for the project itself. And rightly so: Dawngate isn't just a MOBA, it's a MOBA devoted to learning from the
mistakes of other MOBAs. Where DotA 2 is simply a re-creation of a
successful free-to-play title, Dawngate
appears to be the product of an evolutionary process in the genre itself. Abstract notions, like "leveling
role," the idea of how a player plans to build up their hero's strength,
are made concrete in Dawngate. Items, an infamously complex and circuitous
element in most MOBAs, are simplified and categorized into categories. Things like hero selection and meta-layer
progress, which became absurdly complex and attention devouring in LoL and wholly cosmetic in HoN, blossomed into an evolving
framework that turned on a strong base-structure that permitted players to
ignore a "runestone" like system without destroying their capacity to
compete in the game, or participate in it without making the experience any
less worthwhile.
EA's multiplayer offerings have been pretty compelling of
late. Battlefield 4 and Titanfall
are both spectacular games, all the more noteworthy for being multiplayer
affairs first and foremost. But the MOBA
genre, and the manner in which developer pedigree has shaped it, make EA's success
a little surprising, product of such a raw, unattributed process as it is.
Perhaps they're so good at determining how to tweak the
systems behind MOBAs because they're relatively disconnected from the history
of the genre - Riot Games hired Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, the individual
responsible for DotA's initial rise
to popularity, to run development on League
of Legends, and the elusive Icefrog purportedly spent some time working
with Heroes of Newerth developer S2
before definitely moving on to Valve. Unlike
these titles, Dawngate represents an
unalloyed look at the systems that compose a MOBA, the weird, hostile
frameworks that new players are asked to learn.
It represents a recognition of the compelling things about these
systems, and their complexities, as well as the horrifying depth they present
to inexperienced players. No one wants
to memorize a spreadsheet in order to succeed at a game; the trick is that
MOBAs, as a genre, eventually make you do so anyway, and make you like it. Dawngate
makes this spreadsheet digestible. It
takes elements from RTSes as a genre, things like workers, notions of map and
territory control, and tower mechanics that discourage unchecked aggression,
and it loops them into a framework that feels enough like DotA to be familiar,
but also feels enough like its own creation to be new and refreshing.
And it does all of this with a real sense of history to it,
despite a total lack of DotA like
heroes. I couldn't tell you who is who from
DotA in Dawngate. In fact, most of
the heroes simply don't have mana pools, so comparisons to DotA heroes are largely irrelevant, and the ones that do have mana
pools have particular play mechanics associated with the regeneration of mana that
thoroughly divorce their spellcasting abilities from the flow-mechanics of DotA's mana based play. Instead, there's just frenetic action,
casting, give and take. The momentum is
still there, but the mechanics behind it, the manner in which the inertia
builds, that's what's new, and the way it builds, the way it structures and
restructures itself, is captivating in its apparent availability.
The relationship between Free
to Play, as a film, and Dawngate,
as a game, is perhaps a bit tenuous on its surface, but this notion of history,
or historiography, as a means of approach game design, and its evolution as an
art form, is more apparent. In ignoring
the history and context of its subject matter, Free to Play managed to make a movie that feels like an
advertisement (though, to its credit, a very well crafted advertisement that
tells a life affirming story about a relatively unknown competitive sport) Dawngate,
on the other hand, makes its consideration of the history of genre readily
apparent and, in doing so, has created a fearsome new creation, one that
recognizes what makes MOBAs great as well as what makes them awful. While its victory over the latter is far from
complete, there's something wonderfully compelling about the manner in which Dawngate attempts to capitalize on the
joy of playing a MOBA while minimizing the frustration which has, until
recently, simply come with the territory of the genre.
