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Blizzard, to its credit, has anticipated most of the problems that arise in the game, and does its best to forestall them. But the fourth or fifth time you play with a team of five strangers called things like DeathLord666, all picking Reaper (a skull-masked offensive hero with twin shotguns and an edgy attitude), and then proceed to lose handily, you may – if you’re like me – remember why team-based multiplayer shooters aren’t your life.Įngineering a community is hard. Of course, that’s fine if you’re the player playing as the tank.
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While a team of six is advised loosely to have at least one hero of each category, the difference between filling your tank slot with Winston (an uplifted gorilla with a short range, aim-aiming lightning gun, the ability to leap a huge distance, and a portable shield generator) and with Reinhardt (a huge German man with a hammer that can create a portable wall behind which teammates can follow safely) can easily be the difference between victory and defeat. Looking at the hero choice through simple categories can obscure the huge variation within. Gearbox’s entry into the genre turned out to be a confusing mess, with too many systems layered on top of each other leading to overlong, grindy matches. Sadly, a swift glance at Battleborn shows that Blizzard were right to stick to the simplicity suggested by Team Fortress 2. Those games borrow more than just the hero structure, though, also incorporating some of the in-game experience, computer controlled minions, and tower-defence aspects of mobas alongside. A whole rash of games bringing lessons from the Moba scene to first-person shooters are hitting the shelves at the moment, from Gearbox’s Battleborn to Epic’s Paragon. The concept is loosely drawn from the hugely popular genre of Mobas: multiplayer online battle arenas, spearheaded by Dota 2 and League of Legends (as well as Blizzard’s own Heroes of the Storm). And support characters heal others, some better than others. With mostly short-range weapons, a lot of health, and the ability to protect themselves and others, they lumber slowly toward the objective, providing cover and drawing fire. Tanks, a concept borrow from World of Warcraft and other MMOs, are distinguished largely by being incredibly hard to kill. Defensive heroes defend: they’re best if they can sit in one place and wait for the enemies to come to them.
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Offensive heroes are mobile scouts, with the role of sprinting into the objective and harassing the opposition: they’re usually too weak to survive in the fray, but in a one-on-one fight they can be hard to hit and deadly. Those heroes are loosely divided into four categories: offence, defence, tank and support. Being first doesn’t interest it: what it wants is to be the slickest, the most accessible, the most mainstream and the best.Īt launch – and this being an exclusively online game in 2016, Blizzard has already confirmed a regular schedule of updates including new heroes and maps, although pleasingly, the company says it won’t charge for them – the game has 21 heroes and 12 maps. In many ways, Blizzard is the Apple of gaming. Those games are, almost without exception, really, really good. Hearthstone draws directly from the World of Warcraft card game, and indirectly from Magic: The Gathering.īut here’s the thing. World of Warcraft is Everquest done right. Starcraft borrowed from Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 universe. The company made its name with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, an RTS that was mechanically reminiscent of seminal RTS Dune II, and thematically similar to Games Workshop’s Warhammer fantasy world. Blizzard, the game’s developer, is no stranger to skirting the fine line between drawing inspiration and being derivative.