As an avid MOBA player I've tried just about every MOBA game I can get my hands on, literally I don't think there is a MOBA current in beta I haven't played. But honestly, the majority of them just aren't fun, the controls and gameplay just don't feel tactile, Dawngate is different.
When I first heard that Dawngate was being developed by a small EA team my initial thoughts were "Oh great they're going to milk it", but much to my surprise one of the developers of the small passion project passed me a beta key so I could try it and then tell him what I thought, so I did. The game is a ton of fun to play, it plays much the same as other MOBA games, but the four gold shrines on the map bring back a bit more of Warcraft and add another objective to the map.
What it always comes down to for me is the attitude of the developer towards the game and its community, and I'm happy to report that Waystone games are very passionate about this. The developers do a livestream on TwitchTV (which was an instant success) and give away beta keys en mass to viewers. They even hired an ex-League of Legends pro-player to help them with game balance.
The Free Agent: Episode 10 - PAX Prime Edition
The Free Agent returns from PAX Prime with his top 3 F2P picks from the show floor
Second Place: Infinite Crisis
MOBAs lend themselves to free-to-play models better than most games and so it's no big surprise that the majority of free-to-play games I saw at PAX Prime were MOBAs. I thought about trying to spread my top three picks among three different genres but Infinite Crisis made that impossible.
Not only did Turbine put together a fantastic roster of playable champions for its closed beta, pulling from some of our long time favorite DC Comic book characters, they've also set themselves up for a near infinite number of possible champions for the future.
On the show floor Infinite Crisis was in good form, with shout casters on hand to call out the exhibition games played by both fans and media. But it's not so much the fanfare that impressed me as it was the developers on hand to coach you through your match.
As my team took to the field on the dual lane Coast City map, I was thankful to have Digital Communications Manager Leo Tan giving me pointers on how best to tank for my team as classic Wonder Woman. He also explained some of the finer points of their map mechanics, which in Coast City involve some less than conventional tactics such as carrying the doomsday device to enemy turrets to make them go boom.
After my match I caught up with Creative Director Cardell Kerr to chat some more about the coast city map and he explained to me that one of Turbine's goals is to create maps that don't feel like anything else out there. Certainly Coast City felt fresh and unique and left me wanting more.
It will be interesting to see how far that philosophy reaches with Kerr indicating that Turbine will be focusing on a tri-lane map before heading into open beta. The emphasis on having a tri-lane map leaves me with the impression that in some respects Infinite Crisis won't diverge quite as much from the traditional MOBA model.
That said, there are certainly those who believe that there is plenty of room for others to compete with the traditional model, injecting new life into it. And with a well known and much beloved IP, Infinite Crisis might just pull it off.
The Free Agent certainly hopes that's the case and I'm watching with keen interest to see what Turbine has in store for us. Be sure to keep your browser tuned to ZAM.com as we'll be covering more Infinite Crisis content as it develops and undoubtedly featuring this exciting comic book MOBA in a future episode of the Free Agent.