The thread title and feedback from the thread regarding the game has me very interested.
My question is... What's oosiks? >_>
Oosiks is the name for the MechWarrior:Online PA group, some other PA groups playing online use the name as well.
It's a bit classier than the more traditional wang or other blatant dick joke. It's a bit less likely to get noticed and banned by game mods or to offend the more offendable players.
That said, it's still a dick joke.
@A Flock of Walrus got into the MWO closed beta/alpha. He broke the NDA to post pics and videos for us here at Penny Arcade, and got banned for it. We were looking for a unit name, and a lot of us actually really dislike having Dick or Wang in everything PA related, because it's past 2010 on the internet and linking up RL and Online life isn't exactly all that hard anymore. So in honor of Walrus, and to keep with the dick theme that wouldn't necessarily immediately be NSFW, we went with Oosiks.
Ahhhhhh... now I see all the signatures. Just glossed over a lot of them, really. And googled.... hah!
Really happy with how the movement/speed seems to flow smoothly.
(Edit: With regards to the 'Guardian' aspect, it reminds me vaguely of Minimum's game mode which has a guardian/titan that activates every x minutes and you defend it. The game mode wasn't as dynamic looking (map control, etc) as Gigantic though, so that definitely bodes well for Gigantic)
Honestly it might not be a MOBA but it really looks like a game that's a bunch of guys going 'well MOBA's could be cool if they were just more like an arena shooter'. Which is really fucking great anyway.
I find myself hoping against hope that the devs recorded all the games that happened this weekend and will post them on youtube at a later date.
I know they didnt... but hope being a weed and all...
I find myself hoping against hope that the devs recorded all the games that happened this weekend and will post them on youtube at a later date.
I know they didnt... but hope being a weed and all...
I'm going to hope a step further that the folks who actually got to be there will be able to get some alpha keys to distribute NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK.
Though I seriously have no expectations of that, so I won't be too disappointed when it doesn't happen.
I find myself hoping against hope that the devs recorded all the games that happened this weekend and will post them on youtube at a later date.
I know they didnt... but hope being a weed and all...
I'm going to hope a step further that the folks who actually got to be there will be able to get some alpha keys to distribute NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK.
Though I seriously have no expectations of that, so I won't be too disappointed when it doesn't happen.
From what was said, the Alpha is literally only about 150 people right now. And even if we managed to talk our way into it somehow, due to the NDA, we would not be able to tell you what an awesome sales team we were.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Yeah, hopefully that means they're looking to expand the alpha stuff here pretty quick. Already signed up to get into the thing, just a matter of waiting to see what happens.
I find myself hoping against hope that the devs recorded all the games that happened this weekend and will post them on youtube at a later date.
I know they didnt... but hope being a weed and all...
Check out the gogigantic twitch stream, they did a bunch of livestreams of stuff, including supposedly one of the devs showing off a future map. Might have had some gameplay shown.
Ok, so I'm going to talk about Voden a bit. He's this guy:
He is part fox, part gazelle, and part Robin Hood.
His abilities are as follows:
Left Mouse Button: Arrowed!
This is your basic attack. You click and hold to charge it up to do more damage. The upgrades to the ability allow it to shoot two arrows at max charge, increase the damage when hitting the side or back of a target, and knock enemies around when they are hit by your arrows.
Right Mouse Button: Poison Spores
This ability drops a short lasting poison cloud at your feet. When you stand in the cloud, your arrows will poison your target, putting a fairly strong DOT on them. The upgrades to this ability include dazing enemies in the cloud when you place it, and allowing poisoned enemies to spread the DOT to allies that get too close (Very good when they are tightly clustered around a point or in a hallway). I don't remember what the third upgrade was, I don't think I ever picked it.
Q Key: Green Man
This spawns a decoy of yourself at the targeted location. The Decoy has your name, fires arrows, and has a health pool. I am not 100% sure if the decoy deals damage or not, but I don't believe so. For the build we played, Voden only had a single upgrade for this ability, by pressing Q again, it allowed you to swap places with your decoy, effectively giving you a short range teleport and adding some confusion to enemies attacking you.
E Key: Hidden Spring
This ability places a pool of water at your feet. This pool does two things: It heals allies for 50 HPS (does not scale in any way that I saw), and allows allies to jump about 3x as high as normal. I honestly don't remember most of the upgrades for this, I don't think I took any of them. The only one I remember is an upgrade that allowed it to knock back enemies when you placed it.
F Key: Root ability (I forget the name)
Looking at older game play and images, this used to be an extra speed boost, but the build at PAX had it as a 6 second root. It had no upgrades.
Game Play:
So, while Voden is listed as a high mobility character (possibly as a result of his old F key skill), early on in a match, he is anything but. He is slightly faster than some of the tankier characters, and has a bigger stamina bar, which is good, because you will be doing a lot of jump sniping with him (Jumps take stamina). I took the double arrow right away, the poison infection second, flanking on Arrowed third, and then loaded up on my 3 damage talents (+10% damage, +25% crit chance, +50% crit damage), before moving onto Stamina talents for the late game. There are probably some interesting things you could do if you went right for stamina, but for the two games I played I didn't experiment around with it.
Using your decoy to draw characters out of position and then flank them is a pretty good damage boost. Pop your decoy just peeking out of some cover, then sit a couple dozen yards off and use your pool to pop-tart flanking shots into the enemies. You can also provide some decent support holding a point by placing your healing pool in good locations for allies. It's not nearly as strong as say, Vidasi's healing, but it can turn the tide in a battle if used well. Your shots can reach a ridiculously long range, though you don't have the zoom ability that Imani does, and when you pick up the double arrow, they are split horizontally, so you have to account for that spread when you aim at distant targets.
Ultimately, Voden feels like a strong mid range character, that can deal solid damage with his upgrades, while still providing some useful support.
This is the other guy I played a lot at PAX. Lord Charnok.
You see a burning bush. If your immediate thought was that you wish to feed this flame the world and not to free a group of people from slavery, Charnok is right up your alley.
Charnok is the Burninator. Everything about him is about that hypnotic yellow-red flickering light.
His main attack is a fireball that can charge up three times for quite the blast.
Do you have a stupid agile character getting into your business? FUCK. THEM. Breathe Fire on those punks and incinerate them.
People still in your grill, or you need to get up and get an angle? Use Slam. Which is a directional super jump. Using an aug'd version sets enemies on fire. (I'd like to try this with Voden's or Sven's jumps, and see if it stacks...)
You see all them fools clustered together? FUCK. THEM. Rain fire and meteors on them with your AOE. Augment it with a slow down and squishy types will be unable to get away without 4th degree burns.
Charnok's ultimate? If you didn't ask for more fire you are doing this wrong and should be burned at the stake. Its an AOE centered on Charnok and he gives zero effs to the plight of his enemies.
Seriously, this guy is about as straightforward of a caster as you can get. And I was *MEAN* with him at PAX. I had a game where I went 26kills/2deaths/16assists. Anyone that came near me, I AOE'd my feet and Breathed on them. If they somehow had life, I jumped away and hit them with the finishing normal attack of Fireball.
@Kusmeroglu took him a bit further and found good sniping spots on the map and when she saw enemies hiding behind cover, she lit them up with the AOE *from across the map*.
It is Alpha right now, but putting ranges on a lot of these AOEs and regular attacks is a thing that the devs are working on.
Until then, "Soon my pet, soon... Soon I will feed you the world...
@NotoriousBen Great writeup! Charnok was my favorite (though I only played one other character once).
I actually had some problems with the ultimate. One time it worked and did amazing damage, but other times it didn't seem to do anything. The dev that was coaching me with Charnok seemed to think there was a bug going on with that. Everything else is spot on. The AOE attack is super strategic and can be thrown about halfway across the map, when you get the slowdown augment it just becomes extra brutal. The fireball attack has super long range, and though it's a little slow, so you have to do some leading, I've been able to hit 2 or 3 enemies at once with it. One of the augments for it is an interrupt, which is silly good as denial when you are supporting a brawl, though the very first augment you should get allows you to charge the fireball without slowing down. Charnok is solidly a midrange support character. If there's a pitched battle, you can drop the AOE, get in there and breath fire on stuff and be relatively safe, but I wasn't able to go toe to toe with any other character by myself without healer support. Fortunately, that super jump really makes the character mobile. Several times I've waded into a brawl to wreak some havoc and jumped away when the tide turned.
This game looks really rad, I'm glad I didn't immediately tune it out when I saw the word MOBA mentioned. Is there an ETA on the game, or mention of how much it will cost or if it'll be f2p?
This game looks really rad, I'm glad I didn't immediately tune it out when I saw the word MOBA mentioned. Is there an ETA on the game, or mention of how much it will cost or if it'll be f2p?
It is most likely F2P, but they haven't nailed down a model yet for certain. From what was said, it wouldn't be surprising to see a Smite like model, where you can pay a base price to get all of the Heroes but have to still buy skins/colors.
Which I would be completely down for.
Spend 45$ to 60$ like you would for any other game and be given all current and future heroes for that level of a purchase.
Free to play peeps get a rotating line up of heroes to play, and only spend so much for one or two heroes they really enjoy playing.
On another tangent, I'm of mixed feelings with what Motiga talked about with progression. That is something I've always found distasteful in games anymore where the people who play it 24/7 get all the widgets and powerful combos while those just starting out only have the basics to put together and are forced to compete against those people. If it is only a guild progression thing with the guardian, I could get behind that. Guild vs Guild fights and having certain abilities for your Guardian and the creatures you summon for control points, but keep guilds separate from the non-guild play.
At the dev party they also talked about a stat like ELO, *but* implementing brackets (not that horrible fucking mess PGI has with MWO).
New or weak players would be 0-1000
Intermediate players would be 1001 to 2000
Expert players would be 2001 to 3000
and Masters would be 3000+ or something like this, but more brackets for a smoother gradient of skill.
So if you were rated at 1900, you would be playing with the top end Intermediate players, and if it took a long time to get additional players in the game, the brackets would open to the bottom end of Expert players and low end intermediate players and try to keep the Weak players in their own games.
Of course all of this is hearsay from what we picked up at the dev party. I was talking with one of the web guys about it and that is certainly their intent, but we'll see how its implemented by the guys from programming. I am willing to believe they can pull it off, because like Mvrck said, they have the manpower, time, and resources to throw at these problems.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited September 2014
Being able to get all the heroes as one purchase and all the extra shinies as something else would make me so happy after the enormous grind MWO has become. Just buy a base package for assloads of great fun? Yeah, I would get behind that.
But I really don't like the idea of there being progression-based upgrades to characters. Systems like that just invite aggravating imbalances and force people to learn yet another inane upgrade system so they can min-max and stay competitive. I wouldn't mind something like Evolve's system, though, where you can pick a single character upgrade at the start of a match. Could do some unlocking on that route without being silly and make the same upgrades available to everybody, and then the upgrade system becomes something that's a matter of people matching their upgrade to their playstyle. Things like somewhat higher jumps, faster run speeds, reduced melee damage, etc, wouldn't be bad, if everybody can get them for just playing a bit.
And beating MWO's ELO system wouldn't be hard; a damp cheese sandwich could do that. Still, good that these guys are thinking about this right now, instead of scrambling to figure out what they'll do only after months of things being terrible.
But I really don't like the idea of there being progression-based upgrades to characters. Systems like that just invite aggravating imbalances and force people to learn yet another inane upgrade system so they can min-max and stay competitive. I wouldn't mind something like Evolve's system, though, where you can pick a single character upgrade at the start of a match. Could do some unlocking on that route without being silly and make the same upgrades available to everybody, and then the upgrade system becomes something that's a matter of people matching their upgrade to their playstyle. Things like somewhat higher jumps, faster run speeds, reduced melee damage, etc, wouldn't be bad, if everybody can get them for just playing a bit.
Where did you get this from? You get talent points as you level in game, but everyone does. The only other per character progression, is unlocking what minions you can spawn. There will be 25 or so, and each player gets to bring one into the game.
But I really don't like the idea of there being progression-based upgrades to characters. Systems like that just invite aggravating imbalances and force people to learn yet another inane upgrade system so they can min-max and stay competitive. I wouldn't mind something like Evolve's system, though, where you can pick a single character upgrade at the start of a match. Could do some unlocking on that route without being silly and make the same upgrades available to everybody, and then the upgrade system becomes something that's a matter of people matching their upgrade to their playstyle. Things like somewhat higher jumps, faster run speeds, reduced melee damage, etc, wouldn't be bad, if everybody can get them for just playing a bit.
Where did you get this from? You get talent points as you level in game, but everyone does. The only other per character progression, is unlocking what minions you can spawn. There will be 25 or so, and each player gets to bring one into the game.
I was thinking of something very different for long-term progression, then, from Ben's post; the minion things sounds pretty much exactly like the Evolve approach I wanted anyway, except it has minions instead of a trait to choose. I'm A-OK with that approach, since it means even semi-regular players will have the same toolset as people who play all the time, with the difference being how good people are with what's available and not whether or not they've been around for ages to get the bestest stuff.
May I just point out how excited I am about this game after hearing accounts from people at pax? And I don't even like mobas
Then good news! The thread title takes note of your worry! :P
But seriously, having seen footage of the game now, the game is pretty clearly a lot more like, say, TF2 pseudo-Payload with heroes than a MOBA. The whole "skill up as the match progresses" was hardly invented by MOBAs, and that's about the strongest similarity I can see between Gigantic and the MOBA genre.
At 0:33 you can see @Kusmeroglu, @NotoriusBEN, @altmann and friends react to losing our epic 39 minute match. I think we were all too amped-up to give post-match commentary they could put on the video.
Kaboodles_The_Assassin on
+4
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
So what is it that ends up driving the matches in terms of time? Is it simply getting your monster to attack X number of times by getting enough caps to build up their fury meter, and then the big finale happens?
The game starts and then there are two conditions for the Final Clash.
The Game elapses 15 minutes -or- one Guardian is brought down to 1/3 of it's health.
In the 15minutes of the main game, you do the whole summon monsters on control points and kill each other bit. You *do* want to try to have a couple monsters left standing for the Clash, because they get teleported to special areas within the Clash Arena. I am not sure if they continue to generate rage for your guardian. My guess is no, because we were able to rally pretty well for our 40 minute game. The monsters *do* still provide you with their benefits.
If I can remember, what happened was that my team couldn't quite string together the control or kills early in the match. We were kind of playing exceptional, but solo for a while. The timer did expire at 15minutes, and at that point, we were down to *just* above 1/3 of our Guardian HP, which means they'd need two Rages to kill ours. They had 2/3 HP on their Guardian. We had a couple of monsters, and they had 2 healing trees and a couple other monsters.
The thing about the monsters is that they kind of help with map control and provide a bonus fighter in they area they reside in, almost making them an extra .5 of a hero, and that can mean victory in a 1v1 fight.
As the Clash continued we made raiding attacks against each others monsters until they were no more, then it kind of turned rather cautious. We knew that to force a win, we needed kills, but we didn't want to push and be caught out. Which is basically how that went. Ranged characters creeping just a little bit more forward to plink some hp from someone, melee characters moving around trying to catch them out of position, fall back to the Guardian ASAP if you smelled an ambush. At that point, if you had 1/2 health, you just went back to the Guardian and hid until your hp regen'd because you don't want to be killed.
We played it out rather long, because the other team had to get 3 Rages to finally kill us. Once, to drop our Guardian to 1/3 hp, Twice because we literally stopped them from getting the last .01% hp, we made a good rally in getting a couple Total Party Kills, got the enemy Guardian to 1/3 hp and killed all of their summoned monsters. The Third time was we were literally neck and neck, the next kill would be who raged and attacked the other Guardian. Even then, the main server had to decide which Guardian raged because it was a double KO that registered our kill first on our screens, but I guess someone's computer was *just* that much faster to talk to the server. Which is why you see Altman's friends raise their hands up like wtf?! in that PAX vid at 0:33
Man that game was cray. I sat down, and then 40min went by like nothing.
I played the robot dude, and I TOTALLY FORGOT I HAD A RIGHT CLICK ATTACK.
After I remembered, i started to wreck even more face. I did fairly well once I learned some basic spots to turret up and I became annoying as fuck. It was fun.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Did anybody spend any time with the Uncle Sven character? I've got a fairly hefty chemistry background, so the notion of fighting using glass bottles of unstable pretty colors interests me. Also, he looks nutso, which interests me. Based on what little I've seen of him, the guy looks like a AoE-focused caster, chucking bottles of stuff around to make clouds of whatever.
I actually thought I blew it on my last death as I overextended on that last fight, but the ninja lady on our team managed to kill someone just before I died.
Man that game was cray. I sat down, and then 40min went by like nothing.
I played the robot dude, and I TOTALLY FORGOT I HAD A RIGHT CLICK ATTACK.
After I remembered, i started to wreck even more face. I did fairly well once I learned some basic spots to turret up and I became annoying as fuck. It was fun.
Pssh, I didn't know you could hold shift to run until the middle of that match. But yeah.. fastest 40 minutes ever, that was so much fun.
I signed up for the alpha on this, looks like a lot of fun!
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I'm hoping these guys get info rolling out here in the near future (not necessarily about the alpha, though that would be nice). The PAX stuff seems to have gone pretty well, and I'd love to have a notion of their general timeframe and directions for the game.
If anybody is wondering about this, just try to register your email again. The system will tell you if you already on the list or not, so you don't have to wonder about it.
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Oosiks is the name for the MechWarrior:Online PA group, some other PA groups playing online use the name as well.
It's a bit classier than the more traditional wang or other blatant dick joke. It's a bit less likely to get noticed and banned by game mods or to offend the more offendable players.
That said, it's still a dick joke.
@A Flock of Walrus got into the MWO closed beta/alpha. He broke the NDA to post pics and videos for us here at Penny Arcade, and got banned for it. We were looking for a unit name, and a lot of us actually really dislike having Dick or Wang in everything PA related, because it's past 2010 on the internet and linking up RL and Online life isn't exactly all that hard anymore. So in honor of Walrus, and to keep with the dick theme that wouldn't necessarily immediately be NSFW, we went with Oosiks.
And then @TOGSolid and @Kaboodles_The_Assassin made the awesome logo.
Really happy with how the movement/speed seems to flow smoothly.
(Edit: With regards to the 'Guardian' aspect, it reminds me vaguely of Minimum's game mode which has a guardian/titan that activates every x minutes and you defend it. The game mode wasn't as dynamic looking (map control, etc) as Gigantic though, so that definitely bodes well for Gigantic)
Should probably complete that.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I know they didnt... but hope being a weed and all...
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I'm going to hope a step further that the folks who actually got to be there will be able to get some alpha keys to distribute NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK.
Though I seriously have no expectations of that, so I won't be too disappointed when it doesn't happen.
From what was said, the Alpha is literally only about 150 people right now. And even if we managed to talk our way into it somehow, due to the NDA, we would not be able to tell you what an awesome sales team we were.
Basically that is what happened at PAX. You play the game, it ends with a text box asking for your email
Streaming 8PST on weeknights
Check out the gogigantic twitch stream, they did a bunch of livestreams of stuff, including supposedly one of the devs showing off a future map. Might have had some gameplay shown.
And it's the exact same webpage everyone else was signing up on before PAX so going to PAX and playing the game doesn't give you any advantages.
He is part fox, part gazelle, and part Robin Hood.
His abilities are as follows:
Left Mouse Button: Arrowed!
This is your basic attack. You click and hold to charge it up to do more damage. The upgrades to the ability allow it to shoot two arrows at max charge, increase the damage when hitting the side or back of a target, and knock enemies around when they are hit by your arrows.
Right Mouse Button: Poison Spores
This ability drops a short lasting poison cloud at your feet. When you stand in the cloud, your arrows will poison your target, putting a fairly strong DOT on them. The upgrades to this ability include dazing enemies in the cloud when you place it, and allowing poisoned enemies to spread the DOT to allies that get too close (Very good when they are tightly clustered around a point or in a hallway). I don't remember what the third upgrade was, I don't think I ever picked it.
Q Key: Green Man
This spawns a decoy of yourself at the targeted location. The Decoy has your name, fires arrows, and has a health pool. I am not 100% sure if the decoy deals damage or not, but I don't believe so. For the build we played, Voden only had a single upgrade for this ability, by pressing Q again, it allowed you to swap places with your decoy, effectively giving you a short range teleport and adding some confusion to enemies attacking you.
E Key: Hidden Spring
This ability places a pool of water at your feet. This pool does two things: It heals allies for 50 HPS (does not scale in any way that I saw), and allows allies to jump about 3x as high as normal. I honestly don't remember most of the upgrades for this, I don't think I took any of them. The only one I remember is an upgrade that allowed it to knock back enemies when you placed it.
F Key: Root ability (I forget the name)
Looking at older game play and images, this used to be an extra speed boost, but the build at PAX had it as a 6 second root. It had no upgrades.
Game Play:
So, while Voden is listed as a high mobility character (possibly as a result of his old F key skill), early on in a match, he is anything but. He is slightly faster than some of the tankier characters, and has a bigger stamina bar, which is good, because you will be doing a lot of jump sniping with him (Jumps take stamina). I took the double arrow right away, the poison infection second, flanking on Arrowed third, and then loaded up on my 3 damage talents (+10% damage, +25% crit chance, +50% crit damage), before moving onto Stamina talents for the late game. There are probably some interesting things you could do if you went right for stamina, but for the two games I played I didn't experiment around with it.
Using your decoy to draw characters out of position and then flank them is a pretty good damage boost. Pop your decoy just peeking out of some cover, then sit a couple dozen yards off and use your pool to pop-tart flanking shots into the enemies. You can also provide some decent support holding a point by placing your healing pool in good locations for allies. It's not nearly as strong as say, Vidasi's healing, but it can turn the tide in a battle if used well. Your shots can reach a ridiculously long range, though you don't have the zoom ability that Imani does, and when you pick up the double arrow, they are split horizontally, so you have to account for that spread when you aim at distant targets.
Ultimately, Voden feels like a strong mid range character, that can deal solid damage with his upgrades, while still providing some useful support.
This is the other guy I played a lot at PAX. Lord Charnok.
You see a burning bush. If your immediate thought was that you wish to feed this flame the world and not to free a group of people from slavery, Charnok is right up your alley.
Charnok is the Burninator. Everything about him is about that hypnotic yellow-red flickering light.
His main attack is a fireball that can charge up three times for quite the blast.
Do you have a stupid agile character getting into your business? FUCK. THEM. Breathe Fire on those punks and incinerate them.
People still in your grill, or you need to get up and get an angle? Use Slam. Which is a directional super jump. Using an aug'd version sets enemies on fire. (I'd like to try this with Voden's or Sven's jumps, and see if it stacks...)
You see all them fools clustered together? FUCK. THEM. Rain fire and meteors on them with your AOE. Augment it with a slow down and squishy types will be unable to get away without 4th degree burns.
Charnok's ultimate? If you didn't ask for more fire you are doing this wrong and should be burned at the stake. Its an AOE centered on Charnok and he gives zero effs to the plight of his enemies.
Seriously, this guy is about as straightforward of a caster as you can get. And I was *MEAN* with him at PAX. I had a game where I went 26kills/2deaths/16assists. Anyone that came near me, I AOE'd my feet and Breathed on them. If they somehow had life, I jumped away and hit them with the finishing normal attack of Fireball.
@Kusmeroglu took him a bit further and found good sniping spots on the map and when she saw enemies hiding behind cover, she lit them up with the AOE *from across the map*.
It is Alpha right now, but putting ranges on a lot of these AOEs and regular attacks is a thing that the devs are working on.
Until then, "Soon my pet, soon... Soon I will feed you the world...
I'm sure @TOGSolid has a good line up for HK-206 and I know @Kaboodles_The_Assassin was a beast with Roland.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I actually had some problems with the ultimate. One time it worked and did amazing damage, but other times it didn't seem to do anything. The dev that was coaching me with Charnok seemed to think there was a bug going on with that. Everything else is spot on. The AOE attack is super strategic and can be thrown about halfway across the map, when you get the slowdown augment it just becomes extra brutal. The fireball attack has super long range, and though it's a little slow, so you have to do some leading, I've been able to hit 2 or 3 enemies at once with it. One of the augments for it is an interrupt, which is silly good as denial when you are supporting a brawl, though the very first augment you should get allows you to charge the fireball without slowing down. Charnok is solidly a midrange support character. If there's a pitched battle, you can drop the AOE, get in there and breath fire on stuff and be relatively safe, but I wasn't able to go toe to toe with any other character by myself without healer support. Fortunately, that super jump really makes the character mobile. Several times I've waded into a brawl to wreak some havoc and jumped away when the tide turned.
Super fun
It is most likely F2P, but they haven't nailed down a model yet for certain. From what was said, it wouldn't be surprising to see a Smite like model, where you can pay a base price to get all of the Heroes but have to still buy skins/colors.
Spend 45$ to 60$ like you would for any other game and be given all current and future heroes for that level of a purchase.
Free to play peeps get a rotating line up of heroes to play, and only spend so much for one or two heroes they really enjoy playing.
On another tangent, I'm of mixed feelings with what Motiga talked about with progression. That is something I've always found distasteful in games anymore where the people who play it 24/7 get all the widgets and powerful combos while those just starting out only have the basics to put together and are forced to compete against those people. If it is only a guild progression thing with the guardian, I could get behind that. Guild vs Guild fights and having certain abilities for your Guardian and the creatures you summon for control points, but keep guilds separate from the non-guild play.
At the dev party they also talked about a stat like ELO, *but* implementing brackets (not that horrible fucking mess PGI has with MWO).
New or weak players would be 0-1000
Intermediate players would be 1001 to 2000
Expert players would be 2001 to 3000
and Masters would be 3000+ or something like this, but more brackets for a smoother gradient of skill.
So if you were rated at 1900, you would be playing with the top end Intermediate players, and if it took a long time to get additional players in the game, the brackets would open to the bottom end of Expert players and low end intermediate players and try to keep the Weak players in their own games.
Of course all of this is hearsay from what we picked up at the dev party. I was talking with one of the web guys about it and that is certainly their intent, but we'll see how its implemented by the guys from programming. I am willing to believe they can pull it off, because like Mvrck said, they have the manpower, time, and resources to throw at these problems.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
But I really don't like the idea of there being progression-based upgrades to characters. Systems like that just invite aggravating imbalances and force people to learn yet another inane upgrade system so they can min-max and stay competitive. I wouldn't mind something like Evolve's system, though, where you can pick a single character upgrade at the start of a match. Could do some unlocking on that route without being silly and make the same upgrades available to everybody, and then the upgrade system becomes something that's a matter of people matching their upgrade to their playstyle. Things like somewhat higher jumps, faster run speeds, reduced melee damage, etc, wouldn't be bad, if everybody can get them for just playing a bit.
And beating MWO's ELO system wouldn't be hard; a damp cheese sandwich could do that. Still, good that these guys are thinking about this right now, instead of scrambling to figure out what they'll do only after months of things being terrible.
Where did you get this from? You get talent points as you level in game, but everyone does. The only other per character progression, is unlocking what minions you can spawn. There will be 25 or so, and each player gets to bring one into the game.
But seriously, having seen footage of the game now, the game is pretty clearly a lot more like, say, TF2 pseudo-Payload with heroes than a MOBA. The whole "skill up as the match progresses" was hardly invented by MOBAs, and that's about the strongest similarity I can see between Gigantic and the MOBA genre.
At 0:33 you can see @Kusmeroglu, @NotoriusBEN, @altmann and friends react to losing our epic 39 minute match. I think we were all too amped-up to give post-match commentary they could put on the video.
The Game elapses 15 minutes -or- one Guardian is brought down to 1/3 of it's health.
In the 15minutes of the main game, you do the whole summon monsters on control points and kill each other bit. You *do* want to try to have a couple monsters left standing for the Clash, because they get teleported to special areas within the Clash Arena. I am not sure if they continue to generate rage for your guardian. My guess is no, because we were able to rally pretty well for our 40 minute game. The monsters *do* still provide you with their benefits.
If I can remember, what happened was that my team couldn't quite string together the control or kills early in the match. We were kind of playing exceptional, but solo for a while. The timer did expire at 15minutes, and at that point, we were down to *just* above 1/3 of our Guardian HP, which means they'd need two Rages to kill ours. They had 2/3 HP on their Guardian. We had a couple of monsters, and they had 2 healing trees and a couple other monsters.
The thing about the monsters is that they kind of help with map control and provide a bonus fighter in they area they reside in, almost making them an extra .5 of a hero, and that can mean victory in a 1v1 fight.
As the Clash continued we made raiding attacks against each others monsters until they were no more, then it kind of turned rather cautious. We knew that to force a win, we needed kills, but we didn't want to push and be caught out. Which is basically how that went. Ranged characters creeping just a little bit more forward to plink some hp from someone, melee characters moving around trying to catch them out of position, fall back to the Guardian ASAP if you smelled an ambush. At that point, if you had 1/2 health, you just went back to the Guardian and hid until your hp regen'd because you don't want to be killed.
We played it out rather long, because the other team had to get 3 Rages to finally kill us. Once, to drop our Guardian to 1/3 hp, Twice because we literally stopped them from getting the last .01% hp, we made a good rally in getting a couple Total Party Kills, got the enemy Guardian to 1/3 hp and killed all of their summoned monsters. The Third time was we were literally neck and neck, the next kill would be who raged and attacked the other Guardian. Even then, the main server had to decide which Guardian raged because it was a double KO that registered our kill first on our screens, but I guess someone's computer was *just* that much faster to talk to the server. Which is why you see Altman's friends raise their hands up like wtf?! in that PAX vid at 0:33
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I played the robot dude, and I TOTALLY FORGOT I HAD A RIGHT CLICK ATTACK.
After I remembered, i started to wreck even more face. I did fairly well once I learned some basic spots to turret up and I became annoying as fuck. It was fun.
"Oh what a day, what a LOVELY DAY!"
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I actually thought I blew it on my last death as I overextended on that last fight, but the ninja lady on our team managed to kill someone just before I died.
Pssh, I didn't know you could hold shift to run until the middle of that match. But yeah.. fastest 40 minutes ever, that was so much fun.
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