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Have I already mentioned how much I enjoy this trend of dead games being brought back? The latest one I've encountered is Master X Master. It was one of the few MOBAs I enjoyed playing, largely because it's a massive step away from standard MOBA design. Half of the game modes are co-op PvE, and even the 'standard' MOBA mode has every player controlling two characters. That's only scratching the surface of MXM's uniqueness.
Unfortunately, the pitch of "NCSoft's take on Heroes of the Storm" wasn't exactly a winning message. Gamers in the western world either barely know about NCSoft, or they were City of Heroes players and have a permanent grudge against the company. However, MXM was a good example of "Don't blame the dev studio for what publisher they were stuck with." The entire reason I gave MXM a try was because the dev team were huge CoH fans, who made Statesman and Ghost Widow playable characters, and included a Paragon City PvE stage. How damn good the game turned out to be was a complete surprise.
It being shut down was not a surprise, because I was one of those aforementioned City of Heroes players, so whenever I try an NCSoft game, I have to assume it could have the plug pulled tomorrow.
Master X Master only lived for 7 months. Its fans have spent years documenting its existence.
yoo! i wrote a story on Master X Master, a MOBA that lasted 7 months, and the fans who have been actively archiving it for two years since it closed down.
check it out on Waypoint / Vice Games !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So for many people that has been around the moba community in the last weeks you’ll know it hasn’t been a very good time due to 2 of the mobas that, at least for me, had a great potential, closing in the following months: Paragon and Gigantic.
I wasn’t very invested in Paragon to be honest, but I really really liked Gigantic. The thing is I wanted to be a person that supported games that I felt had potential and, in part my idea of making youtube videos would be to do reviews of these lesser known mobas to raise awareness since these games were closed because their respective publishers pulled the plug due to a lack of a player base. I know, I know that I’m a new blog and barely anyone knows of my existence but everybody starts somewhere.
Anyway, I’m giving up on the youtube idea, after seeing so many games with potential, that I like, and feel like they deserve the effort not being able to make it to full release or being closed 4-6 months after their release. I don’t think I should put the effort into learning how to make videos, recording and editing things that are going to become irrelevant in less than a year.
In fact, I’m getting burned out of the moba genre lately, I don’t feel like playing the mainstream ones and I don’t feel like investing time in the small ones due to these previous reasons so that’s why I’m thinking of jumping straight into streaming. I have been running some tests lately, in fact, but more on that later on a new post.
For now, I want to write a memorial and pay respects (F) to these mobas that could have been great but publishers didn’t give them a chance
Dawngate
First we have Dawngate, a game developed by Waystone Games and published by EA, I mean, just seeing the publisher’s name already doomed them.
I remember finding this game by pure chance and seeing that the character design was interesting, and that they even had an artist support!
So I went to download it only to find that the servers were closing on that same day. Okaaay...
I went onto learn more about the game and everybody looked so crushed about it closing and they had so much praise for the game that made me feel sad that I couldn’t try it, but hey! I guess EA wanted to make a LoL killer and since this game couldn’t pull millions of players during beta they decided it wasn’t even worth trying. However, there seems to be some people trying to revive it so it’s something. We’ll see if EA allows it once they manage to release their own version.
Master x Master
Developed and published by NCSoft, Master x Master (MXM) was their attempt at doing a moba like Blizzard did with Heroes of the Storm, by grabbing characters from their other games along with some new ones.
While it’s true that I had some nostalgia feelings, especially with Kat the Cat as I was a human warlock back when I played Lineage 2, they can’t compare with characters created by Blizzard, characters that have been part of most gamers’ life while they grew up and that they’re even still relevant now.
Now the game itself had some interesting features. To start with, it was a mix of pve mmo and pvp and its main feature was that you chose 2 characters and could switch between them strategically to keep yourself alive. Pair a DPS assassin with a tank, for example, and you could deal damage to others then switch to tank if things went rough.
But of course, NCSoft had to get greedy, for a game that needed not one but 2 characters to play the game, and even more if you wanted to stay competitive, the price of them was very high. If you didn’t want to spend real money the only ways to obtain SOL (the ingame currency to buy characters) were: To level up your account, which gave 1 SOL per level, that being more and more difficult as your level was higher. Pve missions on the highest difficulty that had a chance of giving 1 SOL as a reward (but cost 1 SOL to go in) and login events. With most characters costing 7 or more SOL, along with the unstability of the servers and lag, led the community to complain and eventually start leaving the game. NCSoft didn’t do anything to fix their problems and 4 months after launch they decided to shut down the game and invest large quantities of money into paying Twitch streamers to promote their new Lineage 2 version for phones.
Paragon
As I said I don’t know much about Paragon. I played a bit against bots and that’s it, but I did read a bit on what happened to it and how it ended up dying.
Paragon, developed and published by Epic Games and released in 2016 was a take on a 3rd person moba, similar to Smite but with amazing realistic graphics. The map, designed to take advance of verticality made up for interesting gameplay compared to Smite, but also, said map design made for very long games (40 minutes average). In a time where people wanted to spend less time playing a match, and mobas like Heroes of the Storm were doing very well with their 20 minute average matches, Epic tried very hard to reduce the time of their matches, which led to a change of the map that the more hardcore part of the gamer base, that came from other long time match mobas such as LoL or Dota, didn’t like.
New players found the game very difficult to get into, especially its card system, and getting matched with and against a player base of hardcore gamers was very rough. At the same time, the attempts of Epic to make the game more casual for these new players angered the hardcore player base as it led the game to become more of a brawl than an strategic moba with, for example, towers not being a threat at all and becoming totally pointless. In short, Epic was trying to appease to a small amount of new players that weren’t staying, while not hearing the complains from their loyal veteran ones.
Eventually, Epic released Fortnite, a pve tower defense game that didn’t do very well until they decided to turn it into a battle royale and make it free, unlike Player Unknown Battlegrounds, another battle royale that was one of the most successful games at the moment. The incredible success of Fortnite made Epic start to shift the team of Paragon towards Fortnite, as Paragon wasn’t getting any revenue while Fortnite was getting plenty.
Epic, unable to keep changing a game in attempts to make everyone happy and the fact that their new game was making them rich, decided it was time to let the “old” Paragon game rest in peace and focus all the efforts on Fortnite. Only time will tell if betting everything on Fortnite is a good idea or if it will die once the battle royale trend ends.
Gigantic
To me, Gigantic is the saddest story of them all, and it hurts me deeply to see it go. The art style, the character design, the tiny bits of lore, the gameplay, the smoothnes and funny animations were amazing. As someone that can’t get into Overwatch, since I don’t like the first person view in competitive games, Gigantic was perfect. So what went wrong with a game that had so many good things? Everything.
Gigantic was developed by Motiga, a small indie studio. Wanting to make the game something big they looked for investors and made a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft just released Windows 10 and took Gigantic as one of their exclusive release games. Most gamers interested during that time forgot about Gigantic since they didn’t own an Xbox or didn’t want to change to Windows 10 (myself included) which reduced the potential player base by a lot.
Eventually, they could drop the Microsoft deal and got Perfect World Entertainment (PWE) as their new publisher, which opened the game for all PC gamers and not only those with Windows 10, even though the 6 GB minimum of RAM required made a lot of interested players unable to play.
The game had almost no advertisement during launch, most of the people that could have been interested didn’t get into the game thinking it still was a Microsoft and Windows 10 exclusive. There was also bugs and features that Motiga’s developers, still a relatively small studio, couldn’t solve, as well as not being able to reduce the RAM requirements to 4 GB to open accessibility to more players. Motiga started becoming smaller and smaller until they sold the game completely to PWE. PWE did nothing to promote, advertise or support their newly acquired game and only kept a handful of developers to sustain it. 2 months after acquiring Gigantic they announced they were closing it.
A game with truly a lot of potential, dying because of a greedy publisher that did nothing to advertise it and a small studio that couldn’t solve the technical issues and bugs that the game had.
While there are many mobas around I don’t find anything close to what Gigantic was. It makes me sad just to think I won’t be able to play anymore characters like Pakko, a cute and playful giant,
or Aisling, a little girl that summoned the ghost of her father to fight along her, to name a couple favourites of mine.
Also the fact that, unlike most mobas, where you defend a nexus or core that is just a structure, on Gigantic you defended a guardian that was either a giant griffon or a serpent, and seeing them flying over the battleground during the match and attack each other during rampage mode always gave me the chills.
Goodbye Gigantic...I wish you would have lasted long enough for me to be able to play with my boyfriend that couldn’t play because of the RAM requirements...
Special mention: Hyper Universe
This game is not dead yet but after all these disappointments I can see the signs leading into it.
Hyper Universe is being published by Nexon, a company with a very bad reputation and known for dropping other games, so to start with, that’s not good.
The game was released as a paid early access on autumn 2017. The player base was very small, as not many people wanted to pay for early access on a really not well known game. Sure, that access included a pack of heroes and their respective equipment but people were hesitant to spend money on a moba that’s going to be free to play in the future and with lots of negative reviews due to the censorship.
Ah...the censorship, that alone would make for pages of discussion but I’m going to keep it simple. Hyper Universe has a very sexualized female design on most of their characters so the Korean branch, worried about how the western audience would take it, they censored the splash art of most females and got rid of the jiggle physics in game. As for how bad the censorship is? Judge yourselves:
Yeah...The thing is that no one didn’t even notice the censorship until someone pointed it out and then a storm of complaints started with people demanding to go back to the original art, thing that Nexon didn’t want to and in fact, “censored” the Korean version of the game as well so no one could say that there was differences between both versions.
What I think about all this? An awful PR move, the censorship is so meaningless they might as well have kept the original art in and avoided all the negative reviews and players leaving because “the company doesn’t listen to what the community wants”, and if someone was offended by the non-censored version they were still going to be offended by the censored one. Personally, I like the censored version better as it seems slightly more realistic but that’s personal preference. What I really look for in a game is its gameplay even though character design, as someone that likes art, matters a lot. It’s true that a game that is centered on making all women sexy doesn’t tell me much but I can say that the art itself, as in technique and beauty appeal is great. Anyway enough of that, let’s move into the gameplay.
The gameplay is a 2D side scrolling moba, even though they want to call it “action brawler” where you have a base, several towers, minions, and a jungle. Its defining factor is that the map is vertical and you move through lanes and the jungle by using ladders. The controls are very similar to a fighting game and can be played by using a controller as well.
Overall, innovative gameplay and ideas in a game that’s going to die because the publisher is going to shut it down due to a lack of player base. With an average of 20 people online during early access, 2 thousand people when it became free to play on January 17th 2018 and less than 1 thousand nowadays, it’s going to be a matter of time when Nexon decides it’s not profitable anymore. I wish I was wrong, but I’ve seen this pattern too many times, and the fact that they’ve started firing a lot of employees that were in charge of the community isn’t a good sign either.
So here you go, my opinion of all these dead (almost dead) games, and how I’m more and more disappointed about the videogame, or online videogame industry in general. Maybe I got some facts wrong or not entirely right, if you want to discuss about it you can do so with replies, or send messages to my inbox which, if I’m not mistaken, should be opened to everybody.
