First Look at Smashmuck Champions

Blizzard President Michael Morhaime once said in an interview when talking about the challenges of making World of Warcraft that if the game was down for just 24 hours…. the game would have been a massive failure.

And that’s just what happened here.  Upon launching on Steam as an early access beta the game was immediately taken down because of server flooding ruining the functionality of the game and connections.

I got to play around with the game for 26 minutes, which is seemingly more than what most people got.

One of the odd things about this game is the title screen and login screen music.  I know for a fact that I have heard this music somewhere… I’m just not entirely sure where  I’m tempted to say that it was used in Virtual Families at their selection screen or some game of that quality.  It could also be from Sonic Generations.  But it is most indefinitely been stolen or re-purposed for this game.  Truthfully if whoever is the owner of this music finds out it has been used… this game might go down very soon.

Regardless the game is a MOBA and like every single MOBA out there it is free to play.

The campaign takes about 10 minutes to complete and will reward you 1000 in game currency.

You realize very how non-beta-ey this game feels when you go to the store and everything has ridiculous prices and you can (and will have to) spend real world cash on almost everything in order to do well.

I think the success of MOBAs like DOTA 2 and League of Legends has been that the game and the heroes are balanced, the person levels up and gains  only slight benefits.

This game however more closely resembles MOBAs like Call of Duty where you have to level up your weapon and make upgrades to the weapon.

The only difference is that as you earn experience with a gun in COD you get the attachments and fulfill a certain number of perk slots with perks that become available as you unlock them.

The only difference is that with Call of Duty you have to pay up front $60 (plus DLC) and this game it’s free…. ish.

I say it’s kind free because it’s really not.  The amount of currency you gain from a victory is very small.  So you end up having empty “slots.”

You get “training” which gives each hero some sort of bonus like damage, health, or abilities.  These training slots are earned over time.  As well all gear pieces can be purchased in the shop and each has to be leveled up.

So basically what I’m trying to say (if anything at all) is that there can be no balance in a game like this in which success in the game is heavily monetized.

Having said that the game itself is actually fun to play.  They have a lot of game modes and they’re mostly different from the standard MOBA format.  If they can fix the “money” issue and the “server” issue this could be a high quality MOBA.

I played one game with bots that was some variant of football.  The level came with all sorts of powers use to use and could focus on team play or divide strategies very well.

The game has tones of potential but for now it is riddled with problems 😦

Get used to seeing this:

Every single person has to “Ready up” in order to start a game… including the spectators.

First Impressions of Infinite Crisis

Oh it’s that time again.

It’s superhero season!

So with Marvel Heroes not quite doing as well as what was hoped for from Gazillion it’s time for a DC themed MMO.

But wait it’s no an MMO it’s a MOBA.  And it’s called Infinite Crisis.

You see there is this game that DC and Marvel play in which they both put the exact same game in production simultaneously for release simultaneously.  Historically Marvel gets their’s out first and then DC gets one out after.

Marvel goes for a X-Men themed fighter in 94′

DC goes for a Superman themed fight em up in 94′

Marvel releases Ultimate Alliance.

DC releases Justice League Heroes.

Marvel does a crossover game with Street Fighter.

DC does a crossover game with Mortal Kombat.

DC makes DC Universe Online.

Marvel makes…. Teen Force.

Seemingly Marvel has always won in terms of movies and cartoons, somewhere that DC has always lagged behind.

But for the better part of three decades DC as consistently produced better games.

Most Marvel games that come out have had limited replay value and the one playthrough was kind of just a standard of the time.

DC games on the other hand have had deep mechanics and have always tried to distinguish themselves from what is on the market.  Games like Batman Arkham City and Injustice: Gods Among Us are just two great games from the popular DC franchise that are just REALLY good.

Infinite Crisis as stated is a MOBA.  That’s multi-online battle arena…. if that means anything anymore.

In it you can play as the more popular DC heroes and villains, mainly the Justice League, Doomsday and some Batman villains.

One thing that is initially really cool about the game is the choice in heroes.  Batman for example has three variants, The Dark Knight, Nightmare (Vampire) Batman, and Gaslight (steampunk) Batman.

Because the game is a MOBA and hence has no real need for story they’re able to include these characters into the game.

Compare that to a game like Injustice in which Superman is the villain… they’re forced to invent stupid stories to make it all make sense.

Obviously the game designers will be adding in more heroes over time.  However the first offering of heroes is pretty great with roughly 20 heroes to choose and a screen that tells us another 40 are in development.

The game is really good in many regards and I’d like to start off with positive before I go into negative.

The first positive is shorter matches.  Nothing drove me bonkers in DOTA 2 and League of Legends than having to sit down to these 45 minute matches which you knew you had won after 12 minutes because of ludicrous designs.

In Infinite Crisis the cannons are holographic.  So if there is an enemy unit on the point, the cannon will fire.  If there is no one there, they just get captured.

Another thing that speeds up this game is the money/XP trickle.  Most MOBAs just do the money trickle.  By trickling in XP it means it is much easier for people who “fall behind” to catch up in the game and matter again.  This can be compared to something like DOTA 2 in which after you feed twice you are mostly useless for another 35 minutes.

Because killing things only gives slight XP advantages it has a gradual progression in which you always have to play skillful.

A final thing that really helps speed up this game is that there are no stalemate scenarios.  In the DOTA 2 stalemate scenario you start off for the first 15 minutes killing creeps until you have enough power to kill a hero…. you are stalemated for 15 full minutes.

In this game the “creeps” are not actually that powerful and can be easily killed and tanked.  The canon is as said, holographic.  The levels are not designed linear meaning you can hunt and gank people at any time.  Because of this if there is ever a time you feel like “no one” can win a battle…. well you don’t have to fight that battle.

An average game will go from 15-30 minutes in length, far more pleasurable than that of DOTA 2 or League of Legends in which games can go on for hours.  On top of that it gives it more eSports cred as people’s viewership tends to go down after 30 minuetes.

As far as gameplay goes all of the moves are on rather short cooldowns compared to most MOBAs.  This allows for “skillful spamming” in which you have to be able to dodge enemy attacks but get all of yours off on cooldown simultaneously.  Mana pools are high.  Compared to DOTA2 and League of Legends which is far more slow paced, this is a welcome change.  Truthfully I’ll never be able to start a MOBA at Level 1 again.

As far as weaknesses go, this game has many.

One of the first major weaknesses that sticks out is their version of a Shop.  It recommends what you ought to buy and only puts on display the items that are appropriate for that hero.

In one way it makes sense as it makes it very accessible.  On the downside it means everyone gets the same stuff.

Similarly they have “recommended abilities” that most people seem to use.  At some point I figured out that if you put one point into the three Green Lantern abilities you get more damage than any other setup.  The game recommends putting 2 points into one ability and 1 point into another.

So I meet a Green Lantern and he has gone with the recommended build, I kill him… and then he accuses me of cheating since because we’re “mirrored” we should have the exact same damage.

To me a “recommended” should be a true min/max list…. not just a bunch of random crap in random order.

The final major weakness for me is the profit model.  They’re taking League of Legends’ in which you can spend a month grinding out a single hero (8 hours a day) or you can buy it for $10.

Review: Warhammer Online Wrath of Heroes

Before continuing I should make this distinction.  This is Wrath of Heroes which is a MOBA (multi online battle arena) game produced by Bioware-Mythic to give an MMO PvP environment without having to do any real leveling.  Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning is an MMO that EA-Mythic dropped support for.

Moving on.

History of Mythic Studios

In 2001 Mythic appeared on the MMO scene producing a title called “Dark Age of Camelot.”  By today’s standards the graphics were pretty terrible, but back then they were a huge change.  Everquest was the ‘standard’ in MMOs.

Everquest proved that MMOs were not only profitable, but popular.  Everquest had constant full servers and did not need a lot of content development.  Players were fine just doing their own thing.

Dark Age of Camelot was to be the Everquest Killer.  However Funcom was also making an Everquest killer called Anarchy Online.

The two debuted in 2001 and had a very split audience.  Dark Age of Camelot was considered a great success with a little under 300,000 subscribers.

In 2004 World of Warcraft is released and finally an Everquest killer is found.

Mythic at this time could not compete with Blizzard, a subsidiary of Vivendi games, as an independent studio.  So the decision was made to sell the studio to Electronic Arts.  It was decided that they would have to make a new game, a WoW killer.

In 2006 Warhammer Online debuted at E3.  It debuted around the same time as Aion (NCSoft) and Age of Conan (Funcom).  It was the season of MMOs.  Today very few MMOs are debuting at big gaming conventions.  Last year the only MMO to be released was Rift.  Just a sign of the times.

Warhammer was in competition with its arch enemy again, Funcom.  Funcom released a massive flop.  Warhammer Online came a year later… and was a massive flop.

Warhammer Online and Age of Conan both sent a message to the industry, stop making MMOs.  Unfortunately MMOs were no longer a cash cow.  Over the years fewer and fewer MMOs have been coming out and the production of new ones was getting cancelled.  Moreover the trend in MMOs has shifted to social free games with microtransactions.

In this spirit Mythic began work on two projects, Star Wars: The Old Republic (with Bioware-Austin) and Wrath of Heroes.

SWTOR was to be an MMO that played largely like a co-op single player game.  The goal here was to appeal to casuals, give them tones of single player content you might find in any other Bioware game and charge a subscription.  This ended up being the most successful day-1 MMO launch with over 2M sales.

The second project Wrath of Heroes was an attempt to resurrect Warhammer Online by emphasizing the main point of the game…. PvP.

Synopsis

Wrath of Heroes is a multi-online battle arena.  The game emphasizes on PvP combat from Warhammer Online with pre-made characters.

Unlike most MOBAs this game is 6v6v6… yes three sides.  The idea here is that one team will not able to just all out crush another team and will be forced to use tactics to deal with that third wheel.

The game offers three different play modes, Destruction, Capture and Hold, and Collection.

In Destruction the goal is simple, you kill other enemies.  First person to a set number of points wins.

In Capture and Hold you capture points by sitting on them.  After this your kill points are multiplied by the number of points you hold.  So if I hold two points each kill will be worth 8 (2x2x2).  There are four points on the map, one near each team’s spawn point and one in the middle in an enclosed building.

Collection is similar in that how much your kills are worth is multiplied by how many coins you have collected.  Each team gets one coin to start.  After this each team will try and collect all of the coins.  There is one other coin in the middle.

The game comes with pre-made characters.  Each one has a type and gains five abilities.  One ability is an autoattack.  After that the attacks vary from controlling, debuffing, healing, tanking and heavy damage.  All of the characters are intended to represent archetypes in MMOs.

Much like League of Legends you will get two free characters to play.  After you accumulate so  much “Gold” from playing matches you can buy a new character.  You get a random amount from each game but averages around 100gold per game and 300-400 gold per win.  So you will need to play about 400-500 games to purchase new characters.

Alternatively a person can buy a new character for about $30 per character.  There are also a few characters who are only available purely based on cash.

Also purchasable are new skins.

Each character has a leveling bar.  This means that you will need to play them to get added benefits from the talent tree.  From the talent tree you can slot in three abilities or bonuses.  These have only a moderate effect on the game.  The main effect are Perks which are unlocked quite late into leveling.

A perk is activated after getting a large number of kills in a row.  As an example your team might gain 10 seconds of all dodge if you can get 10 kills in a row.  These perks can play a huge role in winning battles.

This means you will need to have a strong mixture of players that work well together.

Strengths

• Team Play
• Neat Unlocks
• MMO-Familiar

I think one of the big complaints about MOBAs is often that higher leveled players just stomp lower level players.  This ends up being a problem in team games, one team stomps the other with no real tactics.  Wrath of Heroes fixes this by creating three different sides.  This means strategy will not involve a linear all out attack but will often require you to defend points against multiple sides.

The talent tree system is very neat and will keep you playing.  You will get three unlocks socketed and which ones you will choose will honestly have more to do with playstyle preference.  You might choose to play a character a little more tankier or you may want your character to do insanely high burst damage.  It all depends on your team.

The game also represents the very familiar MMORPG game format.  League of Legends might be a little less friendly to noobies who are not all that familiar with the DoTa class breakdowns. I mean a lot of times it just does not seem that evident how a “Jungler” can help your team.

Wrath of Heroes has pretty classical class break downs including tank, healer, controller, and DPS.  The characters look like what they are.  A small rat for example is more of a skirmisher, going in for some quick damage and then stealthing out when he gets focused.  A hot looking elf is your battle princess, running in and stomping kids down with a staff.  A small wizard looking goblin is your healer.

Weaknesses

• No Clutch Moves
• Expensive
• Imbalanced
• Graphically Weak

When you play an MMO you have about 20-30 abilities per class.  In ability poor games you will have 10-12.  This leaves roughly 4-5 main attacks and then some timed attacks or abilities.  For example in World of Warcraft a warrior might use a burst combination involving recklessness and high damage movies.  He may want to pin down enemies with hamstring but when he wants to be on the defensive he will want heroic leap or intervene available to run away and an area of effect fear for either surviving or bursting.

Because you have so many abilities you get a sense that timing is important.  Similarly League of Legends has a similar approach where you will want to save certain abilities so that you can “clutch” kill someone with it.

Wrath of Heroes just really does not appear to have that.  All of the moves are high DPS and few of them can really give you that clutch feeling of getting a kill.  If you spam 1-5 you will almost always do better than if you were to just hit them timed.  The problem is that since there are so many players in the battle arena (18) you are just as likely to kill someone as to have your kills get stolen because you’re not using all of your abilities at once.

The game is showcased as free to play, but outside of the free to play element the game is quite expensive.  You will get two free characters to play and level up.  But honestly you will want to play one character a lot to level it up.  Then next week when they change up the characters you are back down to Level 0 because you don’t have access to those characters anymore.

With 400-500 games and 15 minutes per game you are looking at 125 hours of play to unlock any hero.  People who play these games do not have that kind of time and will be forced to purchase heroes.  Each hero is going to cost $30 and you are looking at $400-450 for everything.  Holy smokes.  That’s almost as bad as Train Simulator 2012’s DLC.

There is absolutely nothing balanced about the game.  Certain heroes are insanely better than others.  There is also no real reason to play a healer as healers get no bonuses at the end of a match.  On top of that it appears the money purchase only heroes are just really really good.  This makes it largely pay to win.

As a final complaint the game is VERY graphically weak.  They are running the game off of the same engine as Warhammer Online, which was unfortunately a game that was released five-six years ago.  This makes the game far less attractive to play.

Conclusion

This feels like it was a game designed for people who played Warhammer Online instead of for a new community of gamers.  There is not a lot here to attract the vast majority of people to this game other than its familiar format.  In the end the game is average.  If I had to choose between League of Legends and this game, I’d go with League of Legends.

It unfortunately does not give the end game MMO experience it promises.