Review: Master X Master

Posted on January 20, 2018 by Softmints

MXM_Preview Jack of all trades and master of few, Master X Master (NCSoft, 2016-2018) is a playfully presented game with lots of modes, features, and character customisation options to tinker with.

Among its many modes is a 5v5 lane-pushing battle called Titan Ruins, which will be the main focus of this review. The game has been announced to close for the last time on 31st January 2018, so if you haven’t taken it for a spin yet, head on over to the official site and give it a spin. It looks like there’ll be a closing tournament to see the game off as well.

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Heroes

The most distinctive trait of Master X Master is that players select two masters at the start of the game. These are played as a tag-team pair: only one will be active on the battlefield at any time. One of your masters is visible to the enemy team when you pick, and the other is concealed until picking heroes has concluded.

Masters have the following abilities:

A basic attack, which is always aimed.
A passive, offering some twist on how the hero should optimally attack or cast. Typical examples are “every third cast you get a shield”, or “incoming crowd control is reduced by 25%”.
An escape, which can be a dash, stasis, speed boost, and sometimes will have offensive potential.
A spell, which is picked pre-game from a small selection. Both your masters will share one spell.
Four traits, stats which can be upgraded gradually during a match.
Four basic skills, of which a player can bring any two into a match.
An ultimate, which requires ultimate meter to cast.

The traits for a player’s masters.

This game uses WASD movement, so basic attacks are always aimed towards your cursor. They come in lots of varieties, including cleaving, double-attack, optional charge up, attacks which heal allies, split on impact, long-ranged missiles, goops of acid that stay on the ground, and ranged attacks which deal less damage at short range. Most weapons will overheat after a few seconds of continuous use.

Cagnazzo swings his ball in an arc, damaging everything it hits.

Masters can move and strafe constantly without penalty, so that is exactly what they do at all times. It can be difficult to keep bullets trained on a target if you’re not used to it!

It’s possible to walk up ramps, jump, and shoot down from cliffs, which is fun but the game stays firmly 2.5D.

Basic skills are unusual in that players must choose pre-game for both of their heroes, which skills they will bring into a match. There is also total freedom to decide which will be your Q or your E for each master. That’s important, because masters get skill points as they level up, and the Q on both heroes will take points simultaneously.

Skill points offer a different sort of value to most lane-pushing games. They apply to basic skills and ultimates only. They don’t linearly increase certain values of the skill; instead they offer a different flat bonus at each level. Usually levels 3 and 6 offer something juicy, and it’s allowed to sink six consecutive points into the same skill so that seems like the strictly optimal choice.

The available Spells are:

Heal will restore health to nearby allies and buildings over 5 seconds.
Shield a friendly tower or Titan for a short duration.
Sprint to move faster for a few seconds.
Ward grants vision in an area for several minutes.
Teleport to a friendly tower or Watch Tower.

I appreciate that all of these are useful and a team might encounter difficulty deciding which to prioritise.

Affinities and Tagging

Every master belongs to one of the three Damage Affinities. These are Argent, Helix, and Kinetic.

It is a simple rock-paper-scissors system, where each affinity deals +15% and takes -15% damage from one of the others. That is a 30% relative dps advantage for an affinity advantage in an engagement! Damage from the same affinity has no modifier.

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It would be pretty awful to arrive at a lane matchup and be at a natural disadvantage like this. Thankfully, that’s what the tag-team system is for! As long as a player pick two masters with different affinities, any 1v1 is guaranteed at least an even match.

Each of your masters has a separate health and mana pool, as well as its own ability cooldowns. Ultimate meter is shared, as is the cooldown of the spell. The Tag ability is used to instantly switch which master is active. This has a 14-second cooldown.

There are two things in the above paragraph that I strongly disagree with. In perSonas (the game which first introduced tag-team to mobas in 2006), health and mana pools were shared, and the switch cooldown was 6 seconds. That worked. You switched often because you could, it was offensively good to unload more spells, and there was nothing to lose defensively.

MXM’s numbers mean that switching to unload more spells gives up access to your precious extra health pool for 14 seconds. That’s a really bad idea, and players know it. You really shouldn’t switch unless your current health pool is not going to be useful to you: either because it took too much damage already, or you won’t see combat for 10+ seconds.

I don’t see why MXM went its own way here. perSonas already got this right.

Lanes and Titans

Following some familiar patterns, there are three lanes and a couple of towers protecting them. Only the mid lane has outer towers, and there are no barracks or similar objectives inside the bases.

During gameplay, teams collect Points through almost everything they do: with last hits awarding 1 point each, and clearing the jungle, hero kills, and so on more. Points are an important factor towards winning, and will directly grant victory if you reach 1000, or the game lasts 25 minutes without a core being destroyed. (The team with higher points in that scenario wins.)

Every 100 points collected by a team will cause a friendly Titan to spawn and march down the mid lane. These powerful troops are tanky and good at hurting everything, particularly enemy towers and their core.

There are three types of Titan that can spawn: one for each damage affinity. They have separate strengths and abilities, and of course are resistant or vulnerable to masters based on how the affinities match up.

Here’s the breakdown:

Argent:
- Globally, allied masters gain 20% lifesteal and increased stamina regeneration.
- Each nearby friendly master increases its damage by 20%.
- It will sometimes fire a damaging shockwave at enemies.
- On death, it explodes to hurt nearby enemies.
Helix:
- Globally, allied masters gain armour, magic armour, and increased health regeneration.
- Blocks incoming projectiles from its facing direction with its massive shield.
- It can heal all allies in a large area.
- On death, any nearby allies are shielded.
Kinetic:
- Globally, allied masters gain cooldown reduction and increased mana regeneration.
- Leaves behind a trail that boosts the speed of friendly units and slows enemies.
- It will sometimes pull all nearby enemies to itself.
- The same will happen when it dies, with the addition of a heavy slow.

Warning: this is not a drill.

Titans are worth less experience to the enemy team the more they have travelled. Also, when one Titan kills another, it recovers about a third of its health. This avoids stalemate situations where Titans keep cancelling each other out.

The first Titan to spawn each game has two properties:

Its type will be random. All Titans thereafter will follow the sequence Argent, Helix, Kinetic, Argent…
It will appear with a substantial amount of shields, as a perk for the team being the first to 100 points.

I’m not a fan of the random/uncontrollable Titan types. If this system allowed player interaction, then maybe players could think about which Titan they wanted and the differences between Titans would be something to celebrate. In their current state, there is not much to be done other than get points and Titans as quick as you can.

Monolith and Shards

Among the various ‘unfriendlies’ to be found off-lane is the Titan Monolith, a strange turret device that can only be attacked from short range. Like all the unfriendlies, it uses pattern attacks which are usually marked with red areas to allow a moment to dodge.

When the Monolith or a Titan dies, they drop a Titan Shard. These behave a little like a “capture the flag” objective. Walking over a Shard will pick it up, revealing that master to both teams for a brief moment. It slows the master carrying it, and bringing it back to the safety of the main base will secure it for your team.

Once five Shards have been assembled, anyone on the team can temporarily transform their master into a Titan Incarnate. This is a better version of the Titans above: packing tons of health and damage, and having the advantages of being deployable anywhere, and being able to focus enemy masters or buildings as the situation requires.

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In fact, Titan Incarnate has two forms: a “brawling” one (active by default) which has huge line damage and can leap, and a “hammer” form which excels at hurting buildings and can shield all nearby allies and itself.

The Incarnate’s basic attack has a pattern: its third attack sends out a shockwave, while in hammer form it uses a fast weaker swing followed by a strong heavy one. It takes a bit of practice to learn to use these special forms.

The transformation takes a couple of seconds, during which any two players can veto it, or any two players can okay it (in which case the transformation completes instantly). This feels like a sensible way to let the team contribute on when precious shards get used, and allowing ‘yes’ votes to accelerate the transformation means voting yes has tangible value: encouraging players to do it whenever appropriate.

An important note is that the Incarnate will adopt the affinity of whichever master did the transformation. That is really important when you’re outputting the kind of damage that an Incarnate does (or taking the kind of focus-fire as well!)

Buffs and Bosses

Four Watch Towers are placed on hills around the map. They take a short channel to claim, and grant vision for 5 straight minutes thereafter (during which the enemy team can’t contest them). Since matches last at most 25 minutes, taking a watch tower secures its vision and value as a Teleport target (for the Spell that all players can take) for at least 20% of the game.

The jungle contains some buff camps: two red, two blue. Both colours provide identical bonuses (reduced tag cooldown, and health/mana/stamina regeneration), which would be redundant except that the blue and red buffs stack with each other. Together they’re a considerable powerup. (Getting two blues would simply refresh the duration.)

The weak boss on the map is King Tanian, who grants 30 points and some experience when defeated.

The King’s Cross. One of many delights he has to throw at us.

Opposite him on the map is Rozark, the biggest objective. He lives inside an underground chamber. To enter, masters must briefly channel without taking damage to enter. Leaving a hero on lookout seems like a handy way to take him with minimal interruption, especially if the nearby Watch Tower has been claimed.

Rozark awards an immediate 100 points, and places a curse on enemy towers when defeated.

Busy being a pattern boss and whatnot.

In the corners of the map are two Fallen Altars, which are protected by a pair of guardians. It’s possible to defeat the guardians without taking any damage since they signal their dashes and swipes with enough time to dodge. As previously mentioned: this is true for all the unfriendlies, but it matters more for an on-lane objective where having to tank damage would be unfavourable for laning. Instead, we have a situation where the objective is tricky only when enemy players show up.

Once slain, a modest channel will capture the Altar, freeing a Fallen Hero to push that lane for your team. Usually the enemy will try to interrupt with an attack or two, so finishing the channel isn’t always easy. Especially not late-game, when its duration reaches 15+ seconds…

The Fallen Hero is a great pushing companion, who will pick a nearby ally to link with, steadily healing them and granting damage reduction. Very handy! Occasionally it will also try to hook enemy masters to itself, use cone attacks and so on.

Fallen, but won’t allow others to fall so easily!

Even towers get in on the “action” style of the game: they will occasionally release a burst that knocks enemies away from them if they take enough damage. It keeps pushing interesting I guess, if the various super troops weren’t enough to do most of the job.

In the middle of the map, there are two bodies of water each housing a River King. This little fishey is available to hunt from the start of the match, and grants some healing and ultimate meter when killed. It is almost harmless to fight, unlike everything else.

Client and Atmosphere

It’s worth noting that MXM is not just a lane-pushing game. It has lots of short co-op stages which can be cleared, many of which are nicely decorated and have fun enemies. It has a 3v3 arena mode, and a 4v4 capture-points mode as well. You use the same masters and swapping mechanic for all of these.

The client itself is themed as the hull of a spaceship, and your character actually stands there and can walk around/emote/chat with other users while you wait between games. There’s even a jukebox where you can put on music for everyone else to listen to. Pro tip: always choose this track.

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Hanging around: in space! This used to be packed in early alpha.

The music is upbeat and fun, and the heroes are a mixture of everything: stone beasts that look like they’d fit right in with the Titans, blobs of orange goop, baseball players and boxers, idol singers… there’s something (or a skin) for everyone.

Frankly, a lot of effort went into this game (certainly for the western market), and it’s not entirely clear why it’s closing down. My suspicion is that something went awry in NCSoft’s home market of South Korea, and resources were moved elsewhere. If so, that sucks because MXM is an entertaining game.

Stat Padding

Among the many, many things you can spend your time collecting or crafting in the client, are Nodes, which are functionally similar to League’s former masteries. There are six nodes to a page, and you bring one page into any match that you play in, to be shared by both your masters.

The nodes are split between offensive/defensive/utility, and offer effects like +10% crit chance, +3% movespeed, +27% tagged-out regeneration, +5% weapon damage, +8.7% cooldown reduction, and so on.

Combined, a node page could offer +30% weapon damage(!) if you had six of the good ones. However, this is slightly dampened because each master has a “preference” for which node types it wants. Vonak wants three offensive, one defensive, and two utility (3/1/2). Lilu wants (1/1/4). If you use more of a colour than the master’s preference, nodes of that colour will have reduced efficiency.

Here, my extra offensive and defensive nodes are at reduced efficiency. The large number displays overall efficiency.

For further customisation goodness, every master’s basic attack has three upgrade paths which can be pursued as well (requiring assorted junk to actually do the upgrades). The paths include bonus range, damage, splash angle, projectile speed, charge time (for masters with a charged up attack), healing, reducing heat buildup, and more.

Closing Thoughts

I enjoyed messing around in MXM, but three things made it hard to enjoy the game.

Firstly, WASD movement is a nice change of pace, but I still have some reservations about how MXM handles it. Masters suffer no movement penalty when they attack, so kiting around is automatic behaviour for everyone all of the time. It feels very thoughtless.

Secondly, the game has a min-maxer attitude underlying it. The combination of nodes, attack upgrades, the unusual skill point stats, traits, and damage affinities means there is always a percent or two to be improved upon somewhere if you put your mind to it.

There is a point where adding more knobs and whistles to the definition of a hero is too much. MXM sails right past that. If all the passive complications weren’t enough, masters don’t even consistently have the same skills: their basics and their attack could be different depending on what was picked.

This is while there are five pairs of enemy heroes on the enemy team to keep track of in each match. There are too many little things adding up, and not enough big things that mean something.

Finally, if we consider the “hook” of MXM to be playing as two heroes and switching back and forth between them, two critical design choices (separate health pools and Tag’s lengthy cooldown) are poisonous. They encourage playing like a single-hero moba as much as possible, where sometimes you have a free health refill.

I expected that the promise of MXM would be the same as the promise of perSonas: that I would get to be swapping back and forth mid-combat doing clever things. This iteration of MXM seems to be for someone different: someone who doesn’t really know what they want but it definitely involves practising lots of small tweaks and procedures.

Differences in culture, or target audience, perhaps? I don’t know, but more could have been done with these ideas. Maybe someday under a new Master.

Review: Keys of Sealing

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Softmints

Keys of Sealing (RazorclawX, 2004) is a rare example of an AoS whose gameplay is formally divided into stages: imposing a structured path to victory rather than the blurred lines of “early-game”, “mid-game”, and “late-game”. It also has a special victory condition that is more teamfight-oriented than the familiar “destroy the main base”.

In this review I’m going to cover features from both early and later versions together, as there aren’t too many differences.

We don’t see an air lane very often! It activates later into the game.

The Book of Sealing:

Keys of Sealing‘s most distinctive feature is it’s unusual victory condition. Instead of a main base that needs to be destroyed, the game gives a cinematic introduction to the Book of Sealing which is located near the center of the battlefield. This Book is protected behind a layer of barriers, and three keys must be used to remove the barriers. Once exposed, having a hero channel for 2 minutes in front of the book (without dying) bestows victory.

The Book of Sealing, currently behind barriers.

Thus, the game is divided into three stages, of no fixed length:

Securing the keys needed to control when the book will be exposed
Securing an advantage to expose the book at a favourable time
Fighting to control the area around the book for 2 minutes

The First Stage

Each team starts with one key in their base’s vault. This is a ‘sanctuary’ space: protected on all sides and barred by a gate. It’s not impenetrable, but at least one lane of barracks needs to fall before swiping a key becomes practical.

Outside the vault and occupying a central position in the base is the team’s goalie hero, an NPC tasked with guarding the entrance to the vault. It spawns at the start of the game, and levels up over time to acquire spells and stats. If it dies, it will revive after a short delay at the nearby Altar, ready to fight some more.

The goalie hero at his altar, with a few stationary troops to defend.

That’s two keys accounted for. The third is held by a boss called the Spirit of Destruction; located near the center of the map, and who must be slain before his key can be claimed. The Spirit is quite powerful and has an army of lackeys with him, though neither those nor the Spirit will respawn after death: so whittling his forces down over time is an option. Accompanying the Spirit are two Magic Vaults which contain loot, but take time to break open (and are only vulnerable after his death). This means that a team who gets the key can still be denied of the accompanying loot if the area is actively contested.

In earlier versions, the Spirit enjoyed a private chamber underground; teleporter access only.

The keys are individual items which must be brought to the Book of Sealing to dismantle its barrier. Once presented, a key’s purpose is fulfilled and it vanishes. This can be done one-by-one, but the barrier won’t drop until all three have been consumed. Until then, they are items whose location is known to both teams at all times. They will drop if the hero carrying them dies, and each key also provides a passive bonus to the hero who holds it: splash damage, frost attack, or purging attacks depending on the key.

Thus, a hero can remove the key from their own vault right away and use it for a combat advantage… though generally this isn’t a good idea until later in the game, or at the point where the vault is no longer secure.

An NPC called the Keyseeker roams randomly across the map, and actively snatches up any keys that are left unattended for too long outside a team’s vault. If this happens, he must be hunted down and killed to reclaim the stolen keys, though he respawns immediately to continue his task.

Even when none of the three keys are in his possession, the Keyseeker still has a purpose: he drops a special item called Heart of the Obelisk which guides the bearer to an otherwise inaccessible secret shop. It strikes me as thoughtful to have integrated the Keyseeker mechanic with some other parts of the map: it would have been so easy not to. Even though secret shops are no longer in vogue, this is great flavour for a map of KoS‘s era.

To wrap up: the first stage of the game has a good rhythm. There’s incentives to push down lanes, to grow stronger as quickly as possible, and as vaults become less safe: lots of encouragement to hunt enemy heroes and try sneak the boss.

The Second Stage

Once a team is in a controlling position with keys, they have the option to try and build an advantage before dropping the barrier, at which point either team will have an equal shot at contesting the Book of Sealing. There’s lots of ways to build an advantage that can be converted to a (hopefully) decisive victory… though no promises on anything going smoothly! Of course, building an advantage can happen during the first stage as well. Let’s examine some of the options.

Towns:

There are two capturable towns on the map, which will spawn extra troops for whichever team owns them. A town is captured by destroying a modestly durable building in the center of the town; the other buildings are invulnerable and simply produce troops. Any 2-3 heroes who show up and focus the building are sure to succeed in taking it.

Once captured, the building will respawn for its new owners at about 20% maxlife, so it’s still very contestable if the capturing team isn’t committed. The ‘town’ building has regeneration (it will heal to full in 100 seconds), so it can endure unfocused fire, and returns to being a bit harder to contest if a recapture isn’t attempted immediately.

The towns differ in value; the ‘strong’ town to the west produces good troops and will hold itself indefinitely; the ‘weak’ town in the east will hold, but can sometimes flip back and forth without hero intervention. Having both towns under your control is a great springboard for victory.

The strong town’s Supply Depot is… a throne packing a flamethrower. Who knew?

Bases:

Of course, the best thing about capturing towns is they make pushing easier, and in Keys of Sealing losing a barracks means losing troop production on that lane. Thus, it’s possible for the second stage to extend for a while if a team feels they can force the enemy into a permanent lane disadvantage, before dropping the barriers. Once that happens, the game will be focused around the Book of Sealing, and allocating time for counter-pushing becomes more difficult.

There are still options though: players can hire mercenary units, including siege specialists that can quickly recapture a town and provide a foothold on that lane. The other mercenaries are a building-repair unit, basic ranged attackers, a caster, and a big tanky unit. Their restock time is quite long, so building up an army would have to start early.

Another option for getting a troop advantage is paying for some of the troop upgrades available in the Altar, which follow the usual trend of +damage/+armour with high cost, and long cooldowns on each upgrade. I’ve written about this implementation for troop upgrades before, and I’m not a fan (though they’re less impactful in KoS than other maps).

Gold Income:

Close to each team’s base is their gold mine; sporting a long line of busy workers running back and forth harvesting. Despite appearances, they have no impact on player income at all, but can still be raided to pick up some last-hit gold (if you have AoE damage; otherwise they’re cumbersome to clear out).

Clearing out the enemy worms, for a profit.

What does have an impact on a player’s income is their wages! Every in-game day, heroes are paid by their faction based on their performance so far. The formula gives more gold to higher level heroes, more again for total player/unit kills, and subtracts for each death. (For this reason, gold mine workers can be used as a slightly more efficient way to inflate unit kills and increase a player’s wages.)

The idea’s cute, though this system hugely rewards early kills with both experience (that leads to levelling and higher wages faster) and a kill which will pay dividends for the rest of the game. Similarly, each death causes a small but permanent reduction in wages.

In games where losing gold on death is a mechanic, wages (or generally, deferring rewards) can help balance situations where two heroes kill each-other, but one hero benefits more because they died first (losing little to no gold) and then got a kill (awarding bounty), while the other gets a kill first but then loses that bounty with their death. Generally, “dying first” isn’t supposed to be a good thing, and waiting before paying out means that the death/kill is what counts, not the order in which it happened.

While they’re nice for flavour, neither of these gold mechanics contributes to overall gameplay. Numerically, neither system offers anything better than the gold for last-hitting troops and heroes, so their existence is largely a flavourful one.

Quests:

Keys of Sealing has many quests around the map, taking the form “fetch this item for me to get a reward”. They often involve fighting hostile monsters. Most quests can only be completed once, so players might end up racing or interrupting each-other’s quests if they know the map well and feel the rewards are worthwhile.

Much of the game is framed in terms of quests: collecting the keys is technically the main quest. The second most important quest, which these days would be called a map objective, is killing the enemy’s reserve hero. This is a max-level NPC hero camped outside each team’s base, usually stacked with strong items and auras. The hero will sit in place, waiting patiently for two possible outcomes:

To be killed once by the enemy players, and laid to rest for all time.
For the barrier on the Book of Sealing to fall, at which point reserve heroes gain the ability to revive when killed. As we’ll soon see, this turns out to be a big deal.

Sitting in reserve for now, but those auras will make a difference later.

Finally, I’ll mention that there’s creep camps scattered all over the map so farming these is also an option for building an advantage (en-route to quests or otherwise). However, their returns aren’t great.

The Third Stage

The keys are assembled, the barrier falls, and the victory condition of “a hero channels in front of the book for 2 minutes without dying” becomes open to all takers. But as the stakes get higher, the factions up their game as well:

A new lane opens up: air units will start flying directly to the Book of Sealing at the center of the map to contest it.
The goalie hero and reserve hero will leave their posts, and fight their way to the book to channel on behalf of their team.

This definitely raises the level of excitement! The air lane has some spawning rules: the troops stand guard at the book instead of continuing to the enemy base, and troops won’t spawn if there’s already a wave on guard. (This seems fair.)

Trying to channel, but the enemy air superiority won’t let that succeed.

The second point, about NPC heroes being willing to channel, is a critical saving grace for the game. If a human player was forced to sit and channel, I would be very unhappy about it. Instead, NPC heroes can do it (but they have to be escorted to the book along the mid lane, as they’ll try to pick fights along the way). Players can still volunteer to channel themselves, and that might be strategically the right choice in some cases.

With this in mind, the reserve heroes are clearly a big deal. The extra max-level hero with all those auras; and willing to channel the book even when your goalie hero is occupied fighting off the west lane? Very helpful. If you have key control in stage two, taking out the enemy reserve hero is a top priority. That said, teams still have their goalie hero no matter what.

The air units can get distracted by enemy troops in their base, so if the mid or left lanes have lost their barracks and no-one’s holding them off, that can impact how many fliers make it to the center. Thus, even though taking barracks doesn’t lead to taking a main base, it still contributes an advantage in the third stage.

I think this works out as a pretty exciting victory condition in cases where there’s an even fight. In an uneven fight where one team has complete map control (two towns, reserve hero advantage, upgrades, possibly up a barracks…), it may be too hard to contest and turn things around. Well, put those wages to use and don’t fall behind!

Heroes and the Safe Zone

It’s not so clear from the map, but the team bases in Keys of Sealing don’t have any fountains for friendly heroes to heal at. This is because heroes revive, heal, and shop in a separate dimension from the main battlefield, which I’ll call the safe zone.

To leave the safe zone, players step onto a teleport pad matching their preferred lane (or the base), and are instantly teleported to the appropriate exit point. There are separate exit points for each team. All exit points can be used by either team as re-entry points, and re-entry requires a short channel.

The safe zone, with pads for each lane and a separate one for the base.

It’s nice to be able to revive and immediately jump back to your lane of choice, and once the game reaches the third stage, having a reliable central access point is great. (Revive times are For general get-around purposes, there are also waygates in the corners of the map which connect opposite corners.

There are 30 heroes available for each team. They’re customised for flavour, and later versions have a couple of triggered spells. The items for sale are weak compared to other games, though the numbers all-round are low enough that +6 to a stat feels like it makes a difference. In general, heroes will be leaning on their abilities more than their item builds.

Overview:

One of the things I like about Keys of Sealing is that it recycles mechanics from the first two stages (the goalie heroes, taking barracks, and the keyseeker) and keeps them relevant during the third stage. That aspect of the design feels really clean to me.

I also like that the lanes have a clear hierarchy: the strong town is the most important and will push the fastest, the weak town is useful and contestable, and the mid lane is hardest to push with, but gains importance over time as the boss becomes viable to fight, and controlling it allows NPC heroes to reach the book. The addition of a fourth lane in the final stages is a nice touch.

If the economic system were tightened up in a few areas (consolidate last-hits and such into wages, drop exploration quests for a central shop, give gold mines a clearer purpose), I think the game would have felt really sharp and been suitable for competitive play and development.

The lesson from KoS is that alternative victory conditions are a rich space to explore, and having the ‘form’ of the game evolve with new lanes and objectives is an area with lots of potential.

Download: Here

Review: Ultimate War, Part 2

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Softmints

Continuing from Ultimate War, Part 1…

Objectives:

Scattered around the map are a number of objectives which may be captured by either team to enjoy certain benefits. They are all initially controlled by the neutral faction Chaos, and guarded by a reasonably strong defender unit. Upon dealing the finishing blow to the objective (all of which are structures), it will be restored to full life under its new owner’s control, along with a fresh defender.

Among the objectives are five Spawn Buildings: the team which controls them will periodically spawn a certain unit type from that location, to march along the nearest lane. Ownership of a Spawn Building will periodically grant the human players with Magical Runes, and importantly: increases the number of friendly units that will spawn during a Great War. This can be the difference between taking or losing towers on the mid-lane each time a Great War takes place.

The remaining map objectives are the three Obelisks, each of which grants a different global aura to the owner’s team. This is a familiar mechanic which appears in many an AoS, but Ultimate War adds a twist: each Obelisk controlled by the human team also enables an extra Team Spell for their main base. The Obelisks are:

Obelisk of Power: Passively increases attack damage, its team spell grants a further +100% attack damage to all units for 20 seconds.
Obelisk of Magic: Passively increases life regeneration, its team spell is a global-range nuke that deals 30% of maximum life to enemies in an area (this is crazy-strong late-game).
Obelisk of Protection: Passively increases armour, its team spell grants a ton of bonuses to friendly towers for 35 seconds (including a huge amount of regeneration).

The Obelisk of Magic, recently captured.

Even if it’s not possible to hold an Obelisk long-term, grabbing one for just a moment is enough to activate a spell to swing the battle (the spells have high cooldowns anyway). While in control of all three Obelisks, an “ultimate” team spell becomes enabled, which summons extra-powerful reinforcements on all three lanes.

I’m slightly disappointed the Obelisk team spells are locked behind one of the higher-tier Glyphs of Knowledge, essentially meaning that the humans need sink a lot of money into “tech” first, and can’t use the spells early-game in a weaker form. They’re among the more interesting perks for controlling a map objective that I’ve encountered, and properly-implemented would create a more meaningful distinction between the utility offered from controlling each lane. After all, it’s possible to get very creative with spells compared to auras, and there’s more opportunity for utility spells which don’t directly snowball in the way that aura implementations tend to.

Deities

Obelisks have another important role: they generate Divine Power for their team. At the start of a match, both teams have 0 Divine Power, which will gradually increase over time. Once it reaches 7500, that team’s Deity will be summoned to march down the mid lane, where it will either eventually destroy the enemy main base, or die trying (losing the game for that team; you can’t let your Deity die). This process takes approximately 90 minutes, depending on Obelisk control.

In this genre it’s important to put a clock on the match, so that victory isn’t secured the moment heroes have grown strong enough to “not lose”: they need to be kept under pressure to actually win. (Aeon of Strife does this too, using a 2-hour countdown timer.) Here we see the value of having a large quantity of towers in each base: distributing the defences over many units gives players better feedback about whether they’re taking the enemy base fast enough to win.

The enemy Deity, surrounded by the usual late-game chaos.

If the humans can’t stop the enemy Deity from appearing, they can still race to summon their own, or try for a direct kill (that global nuke from the Obelisk of Magic is one way to do it). Maintaining control of Obelisks is usually the deciding factor (since they affect Divine Power), but the enemy often sends squads of Elites specifically to contest them.

Finally, it’s worth noting that all the map objectives are on side lanes: there’s none on or directly accessible from the mid lane (where most of the enemy units will be pushing). A pair of Waygates allow units to bypass the mid lane entirely if they want to focus on objectives without getting caught in the crossfire, which some squads of enemy Elites will take advantage of.

Heroes:

The cast of Ultimate War features familiar pop-culture characters, ranging from superheroes and plumbers to vampires and sith lords. There are 33 in total, and many of the enemy Elites are also based on well-known villains.

There are three things to note about heroes. The first is that quite a few of them are classified as Divine Beings, which means they gain experience at a much slower rate, have substantially longer revive times, and are forbidden from carrying Unique items (the strongest type). It’s an option for players who want to spend their resources on team assets rather than personal equipment, or just want a fancier hero model.

The second is that while hero abilities are mostly standard issue, they typically gain increased range/cast range as they’re levelled up. This turns out to be crucially important on a large battlefield where you’re trying to cover a lot of ground or need to hit critical targets on the back lines.

A Divine Firelord throwing a long-range burning disc at enemy Elites.

The third is that each hero starts with a Spellbook: a sub-menu of additional abilities they can use. At the start of a match, this has only the essentials (usually True Sight, Dispel Magic, and a few others), but as more Glyphs of Knowledge are obtained it can reach up to 21 passives and abilities, depending on the hero. This is a lot of abilities, considering that heroes also have items and hero skills to manage.

The enemy Elites are designed around the fact that all heroes have True Sight and Dispel. I don’t think that’s a bad baseline: it makes it easy to create an Elite which requires “the presence of any hero” to defeat, or “the presence of 2 heroes” if it can cast a strong buff twice (Dispel Magic has a cooldown). It also allows some heroes to be special because they possess a second dispel, or can provide True Sight remotely. This implementation relies a bit too much on specific use of Warcraft mechanics, but I think it shows confidence in understanding of the genre to tweak the baseline of what a hero is, to better suit a particular game.

Overview:

Ultimate War packs plenty of ideas, and does a reasonably good job of delivering a co-op “humans versus Elites” experience. Unfortunately, it has its issues: namely poor compartmentalisation of its features, and too much addition when implementing content. We’ve described already some of the issues with Elites and the lack of simple clarity when dealing with them; the game’s strategic options (the ways in which resources/gold can be allocated) suffer in a similar way.

It’s not problem that every building in the base offers some answer to “how do I improve the base’s defences”, but it is a problem that their solutions overlap so heavily, particularly for repairing towers or summoning more units. The minutes-long cooldowns on many of these means that often it’s not even a matter of which is better, but rather, which option is still available. The solution to this is getting rid of overlap: if the Palace can summon units globally, then I shouldn’t be able to hire a unit which has a global blink. If I can hire units at all, there shouldn’t be a consumable item that creates summons.

Another option for making things tidier would be having buildings correspond to the problems players are addressing (repairing and towers, capturing objectives, pushing lanes) rather than game mechanics like items or spells. However: we can see that the Palace having solutions for a lot of things is “untidy”, but that being able to execute only one order at a time adds depth. Unless we’re in an ideal world where all mechanics correspond to solutions (all items repair towers, all units capture objectives), there’s always going to be compromises when defining categories for players to navigate.

I think it’s healthy to examine the “humans versus Elites” format of lane-pushing games. PvP has plenty to learn from the what makes a good co-op experience, and having good co-op is a great way to ease players into a game if both modes are designed with congruency in mind. As an exercise for the reader: what would Ultimate War‘s PvP mode look like?

Download: Here

Review: Ultimate War, Part 1

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Softmints

In a return to the roots of the genre, Ultimate War (Plasma Boy, 2013-2014) presents a co-op AoS scenario, in which six players must demonstrate how their team of heroes can not only survive against a computer opponent with superior numbers and forces, but eventually grow strong enough to conquer it.

While many games pit human players against an AI, Ultimate War follows in the steps of Aeon of Strife: giving both teams the same basic composition of forces and buildings, and using “Elite” troops to create varied tactical complications. To avoid confusion with playing against bots in a regular AoS, I’m going to refer to this sub-genre as “humans versus Elites”.

50+ towers apiece. Even that won’t be enough to save you.

To better mimic a battlefield, troop waves in Ultimate War spawn less frequently than in other maps, but in larger numbers. That gives time for front lines to form, and once one team punches through, time to attack the enemy towers before a fresh wave of troops can draw fire. There’s never so few units on the map that it feels empty; the armies’ ebb and flow has a good rhythm.

The mid lane is comfortably twice as wide as the other two. It consistently has the most troop traffic, but every 20 minutes that’s taken to an extreme in the form of a “Great War“: an event in which both factions will spawn extra-large waves on the mid lane. The ensuing fights are chaotic but a nice change of pace, and whichever team wins will enjoy a stronger push than usual.

A “Great War” in action.

Elites:

Much like Aeon of Strife, the enemy team’s lack of heroes is made up for by its Elite units. These specialist soldiers are a tougher breed, guaranteed to cause problems for the human players unless they respond quickly with the appropriate counter at the ready.

Some Elites are an issue because they have defences that the regular army can’t deal with, and simply won’t die until a hero addresses them. This can include physical immunity, invisibility, hyper-regeneration, or long range that towers can’t respond to. Other Elites have dangerous offensive tools, such as channelled AoE damage spells that will slowly annihilate a base. And some rare specimens are a mixture of both: simply too powerful to allow their devastation to run its natural course.

I like that Hydralisks got to be Elites in this game too.

There is some remuneration for heroes that spend their time chasing down Elites, in the form of occasional consumable item drops, and awarding a bounty of Magical Runes: the game’s secondary player resource which is used alongside gold for most purchases. This is awarded for the finishing blow, so securing last hits on Elites is quite important.

Ultimate War makes an effort to help players assess and respond to threats, using an alerts system, giving Elites a unique colour on the minimap, and even providing a reference book with some of the different types. However, this doesn’t resolve the underlying problem that are over 150 different types of Elite, each of which can have up to 16 different abilities and passives.

Many of these abilities are unlisted, have no accompanying visuals, and completely overrule the benchmarks that players normally use to assess a unit’s strengths and weaknesses. Maximum life, armour, and damage type are meaningless when so many units have hidden passives like ‘Demolish’ granting up to ×18 damage against buildings, or Hardened Skin reducing all incoming attack damage by massive amounts. Even if we ignore issues with hidden information, there are far too many different ‘quirks’ in the game, and furthermore, too many on each unit.

I believe the correct way to implement Elites is to give each unit type minimal special properties, and send varying combinations/quantities to form different challenges. All the better if the Elites have auras, buffs, or other abilities which let them synergise with each-other to create memorable pairings. Aeon of Strife was a successful game with exactly two types of Elite, and while that definitely leaves room for expansion, Ultimate War went too far with its additions.

Scripted Events:

Throughout a match, a number of random events will occur. The most common is the appearance of enemy Elites, which might march down a lane, focus on contesting objectives, or have some special behaviours. Some types of Elite will show up and remain at a fixed location; applying global pressure (through auras or spawning more units) until the humans manually eliminate them.

There is a third faction in the game called Chaos: hostile to both armies, and with unit types and scripted events of its own. Its typical behaviour is to randomly spawn units in the middle of the lanes, which either lash out at the nearest thing they find, or try to capture an objective and return it to neutral status.

A swarm of aliens showed up! Thankfully, disrupting an enemy push.

To add to the commotion, there are also a bunch of tornadoes which roam around the map, randomly tossing units into the air, and occasional meteor showers which can wipe out even some of the stronger Elites. I’d rather that Chaos and the weather effects weren’t in the game, but statistically they favour the underdog (who has less units), so they do serve a purpose.

Towers:

Each team’s base in Ultimate War is protected by over 50 towers, in a variety of shapes and sizes. The enemy definitely enjoys most of the variety, with fire, frost, poison, and even invisible towers peppered along the cliffs. The human towers have aesthetic variety, but they all do the same thing; varying primarily in attack damage.

The sheer number of towers gives a granular measure of progress, first to measure how much ground is lost each time the enemy forces come knocking (and it’s hard to avoid them knocking), and later to gauge how quickly progress is being made when assaulting the enemy base.

Ultimate War has a special mechanic paired with towers, called Generators. These small glittering buildings, presumably inspired by Tower Defence games, grant an aura to nearby buildings and wards in a small radius. They can be seen in the image below, where they’re amping select towers in the enemy base with double damage, regeneration, or huge amounts of armour. They don’t have much life, and cannot be repaired, but their aura bonuses are highly valuable.

The red circle shows the approximate radius of a Generator.

For human players, the interaction with Generators is pretty simple: kill them first! Simple, but it does require that heroes be present when pushing, since the friendly army won’t focus the Generators on its own: it will prioritise towers which are outputting damage.

The subtler side of Generators is that humans start with almost none, but can purchase and place them near towers to shore up their defences. The catch is that they’re very limited in supply, and certain enemy Elites have a tendency to destroy them (with bouncing attacks or other spells) if they’re not carefully guarded. Furthermore, all the Generators in the world won’t be enough if an Elite with the right immunities shows up…

A Siege Behemoth cuts through towers like butter, leaving some now-useless generators behind.

I really like Generators as a feature for this kind of map. All three (damage, regen, armour) are practical against different threats, their small radius puts them at risk, and they force players to be picky about which towers they augment. Towers on their own are just the right amount of underwhelming, so there’s pressure to use Generators wisely. This mechanic probably wouldn’t work so well in a PvP scenario, where as we saw above, human players simply know to attack the generators first, no matter where they’re placed.

The Swiss Army Base:

Other than defensive instalments, the human base has a large number of buildings with tools to assist the players in their endeavours. The most familiar will be a line of item shops, which sell RPG-categorised items (heroes are limited to: 1 Weapon, 1 Armour, 2 Accessories, 1 Unique item each). Also available are consumables, including Serpent Ward (permanent once placed), a repair kit to instantly heal towers, a global blink, a single-target debuff for enemy towers, a rocket launcher needed to kill certain enemy Elites, and of course the Generators themselves.

Next up, there is a Mercenary Camp where players can spend gold to hire extra units (up to a relatively low food limit for each player). They are varied in purpose: some are cannon fodder, some are specialised to destroy buildings/generators, another is a flying unit that effectively is a mobile generator! However, the restock time on each unit type is typically over 10 minutes, so they are not a disposable investment as they tend to be in other maps.

This ‘Magic Sentry’ owl applies Generator auras in the same small radius, but at half-power.

The Reinforcements building allows players to spend gold to buy additional waves of troops for the team. Options include sending a squad of either regular or siege troops to a chosen lane, sending Elite troops to all lanes, or sending an Elite squad to each of the map objectives. Furthermore, for a massive financial investment, an Emerald Dragon can be summoned to provide the backbone of a push along the mid lane. Here, players may also buy up to five permanent Reinforcements Upgrades, which improve any future reinforcements that are purchased.

At the Statue of Divinity, players can buy some special items that are either recommended or explicitly required for dealing with certain Elites. That is to say, there is at least one Elite in the game who is impervious unless a named item from this shop is in the hero’s inventory. Also on sale are Glyphs of Knowledge, of which there are five, each more expensive than the last, and incrementally unlocking new abilities for all the human heroes, and for the human main base, which is called the Palace.

The Palace has a number of spells, which may be cast by any player. The (quite long) cooldowns are tied to the base itself, and hence these spells are a shared asset for use by the entire team. The stronger ones are locked behind Glyphs of Knowledge, but some are available innately as well. These “Team Spells” include:

Repair: a channelled ability which will gradually spend the friendly AI’s gold to repair the target building over time.
- The friendly AI gets gold from any last hits that it takes, meaning it will accumulate quite a substantial sum over the course of a match. (Mechanically, this occurs in a lot of AoS maps, but the gold is never used for anything.) Here, that gold can be used exclusively for Repair.
- Despite it seeming like an entire army’s war chest would fund a lot of repairs, it proves to be quite expensive, and with so many exposed towers, repair gold will routinely run dry.
- While Repair has enough range to work on any building inside the base, I was disappointed that it can’t reach the buildings held as objectives. I think it would have been great to let players spend their precious repair money to buy time for heroes to arrive and contest capture attempts.
Cloud and Earthquake: These two are channelled abilities which last for up to 40 seconds, and may be cast at global range. The first disables towers in an area (helping units push), while the second damages towers in an area while also slowing enemy units. Both are useful, but it is worth noting that the main base is only able to perform one action at a time: it can’t repair while using these skills, nor can it use them both at once.

Using Cloud on one of the stronger, Generator-buffed towers at the back.
Gun Bots and Serpent Ward: Another pair of global abilities, these can place permanent units anywhere on the map. Serpent Wards can’t move, but are strong and benefit from Generators, which makes them efficient to place beside existing towers.
Magic Meteor and Rain of Fire: These are a single-target and AoE nuke, respectively. Sometimes you just gotta call in the artillery! Note that some Elites have Spell Shield, which can render the 13,000 damage Magic Meteor nuke completely harmless.

Continued in Part 2.

Review: Overdrive

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Softmints

Overdrive (Pzygho, 2008) is one of those AoS maps which delivers a surprising amount of emergent gameplay by introducing a single twist. The twist in question is using the Overdrive mechanic from Final Fantasy X to give heroes their ultimates, rather than the usual method of granting them at level 6 and having lengthy cooldowns.

In this map’s implementation, a hero’s ultimate becomes available once they have taken a certain threshold of damage. Once cast, the ultimate vanishes and the hero must again take damage up to the threshold to re-enable it. A hero with their ultimate available displays a clear graphic to all players.

Ultimates level up exclusively through usage, with the damage threshold increasing at higher ranks. Hence, any hero aiming to have a maxed-out ultimate is going to need to tank damage and use their ultimate many times to get there. One of the best ways to achieve this is using neutral camps, from which any hero can absorb damage while staying out of enemy sight. This interaction elevates neutral camps to being an important game element, for every hero.

The two lanes are very close, and are easy to move between.

Creep Camps:

It’s not strange to see a two-lane map, given that Overdrive is a 4v4 game with a considerable emphasis on jungling. The lanes are close and it’s easy to hop from one to the other. The jungle entrances are mostly covered by towers, which makes ganking a bit more difficult early in the game.

Inside the jungle itself, creep camps are haphazardly scattered around. There are 8 camps on the south side, 6 on the north, and given their loose placement it seems fair to assume that there wasn’t any particular intent behind this. Committing to this idea by having a “hotly contested” jungle in the south with a “quieter jungle” in the north could have worked well: it would add some much needed asymmetry to the map’s layout, and make jungling (and tanking for ultimates) a more nuanced decision.

The “corner camps” located just outside each team’s base are perhaps the most useful ones in the game. They’re furthest from the possibility of enemy ganks, have the shortest escape route, and are also closest to friendly healing: making them ideal for working towards ultimates. They are so good that I’d rather see them removed, since they trivialize the overdrive mechanic.

The short walk from corner camp to the north base entrance.

The logic behind how neutral creeps spawn is a bit unconventional. Each camp houses a fixed number of creeps, with unit types randomly chosen from the camp’s encounter table. When a creep dies, its respawn timer begins immediately (instead of waiting for the rest of the camp to die), and it is guaranteed to be a different unit type upon revival.

Also unusual is that in Overdrive, it’s possible to find a lowly Sea Giant (level 3) and a burly Revenant with chaos damage (level 8) in the same encounter table. So the corner camp a player might be relying on could randomly be too weak to provide good dps for tanking, or too strong to kill for experience. The lack of consistency isn’t to my taste.

The game explains that there’s a chance for neutral creeps to drop a random tome on death, permanently granting +1 to a stat for whoever picks it up. However, the chance is abysmally low, and since the jungle already gives heroes a reason to visit, this feature doesn’t make much difference.

Bosses:

There are two bosses on opposing corners of the map. They are about equal in terms of power, but each has their own name, and set of abilities (both single-target and area-of-effect) which they will use whenever the opportunity presents itself. Unusually for boss creeps, these abilities cost mana, of which the bosses have a large (but exhaustible) supply. In practice, the regeneration is too high for “bleeding” a boss’s mana before attacking it to be a viable tactic, but that’s a pretty neat direction that some other game could experiment with.

Each boss inhabits an enclosure, which initially looks decorative, but actually serves a purpose: heroes can’t attack a boss unless they’re inside. This seems to be a solution to ranged heroes kiting a boss to death, and to an extent it works (though the boss can still be affected by spells from any distance).

Murkius in his lair.

Bosses are a great way to take lots of damage quickly at low risk due to their location (there is still some risk, as the bosses have single-target disables). However, bosses are a one-time objective: they don’t respawn, and hence killing a boss means it can’t be tanked in the future. For this reason, it’s slightly disadvantageous to lose the boss closest to your own base.

The only reward for defeating a boss is experience for heroes who are nearby, and a special permanent item which grants flat bonuses (and hence will be more valuable earlier in the game). However, with Overdrive being a fast paced game on a small battlefield, it’s easy to see when players are missing from the map, so early boss attempts are hard to slip under the radar.

Favour:

Players acquire a secondary resource in Overdrive called Favour. It’s awarded for participation in hero kills, tower kills, and map objectives, and is required (along with gold) to buy just about anything that can be bought.

One of the nice things about Favour is that players start the match with a modest amount of it: enough to get started on some items and not be under immediate pressure to get kills, or at risk of being starved after losing the first two flags. Most AoS maps start players with 0 of the secondary resource, and players are immediately racing with the enemy team to keep ahead. Having seen Overdrive’s approach, I have to say I prefer it.

The other point of interest is that Favour makes hero kills important for long-term progression, as pushing lanes and taking towers awards relatively little Favour. Since ultimates make it easier to secure kills, players have an additional long-term incentive to work on their overdrive.

Items:

The item system is divided in two: those items which do not cost Favour, and those which do. The former category is a tiny minority: it consists of cheap consumable items like teleport scrolls, wards, and potions. Healing efficiently in Overdrive is important, so weighing cheap non-combat potions against more expensive in-combat potions, against a refillable bottle, against saving for a permanent healing item, could be the difference between getting an ultimate off before dying, or not.

The Favour-costing items are divided into classes: Weapon, Helmet, Armour, Accessory, and Miscellaneous. At most 2 Weapons, 2 Accessories, 1 Helmet, and 1 Armour are allowed per hero. Some of these items are also primitive, which denotes that the item can be upgraded into one of 3-4 slightly better items, often having a special passive. For example, Speed Boots is a primitive accessory which has three upgrades, while Wooden Staff is a primitive weapon with four upgrades.

One of the disadvantages of a recipe system (like the one seen in DotA) is that a player must understand their late-game plan before they can efficiently choose early-game items. A system with primitive items that can serve as starting points should resolve this, by presenting players with meaningful choices one step at a time. (Dawngate showcases a solid implementation of this.) However, Overdrive completely misses the point, and instead has six primitive weapons all in the same price bracket, all giving roughly the same bonus attack damage, and providing no tangible decision-making data to players whatsoever.

Which will you choose?

It seems these primitive weapons were intended to divide the items based on the icons they used, rather than their effects. Not the most helpful categorisation…

Given the need to absorb damage, healing items are an appropriately diverse commodity: including the classics like life leech, a regeneration aura, and instant group healing, but also some alternatives like a mass-rejuvenation, sacrificing an allied creep to heal, or healing nearby allies on death.

One of the most expensive items in the game passively adds an extra level to the owner’s ultimate, which is a nice way to let players get more out of their investment in overdrive-related activities.

There are three available faction upgrades, for melee troops, ranged troops, and towers respectively. These cost favour and gold, and despite their exponential cost, they become a mandatory investment once one team has started using them. (As we’ve discussed in previous reviews, this is not a healthy system.) Upgrades complete instantly, so there is at least no pressure to start early due to long research times. I did enjoy that the towers’ upgrade increases their attack range; a small twist I haven’t seen before.

Flags and Runes:

The main map objective in Overdrive is a periodic quest. A flag will spawn every 6 minutes in the middle of the map, and upon being returned to a team’s base, it will award Favour to all players on that team. Each flag returned will grant more favour than the last, and the only restriction while carrying it is that dying or teleporting will cause the flag to drop.

Time to earn some favour…

Being situated on high ground encourages teams to show up early to secure the spawn zone and a vision advantage, which can lead to some pre-flag brawls. However, the open-plan terrain, and lack of any tangible disadvantage for the flag-bearer mean that the first team to pick up the flag can (and should) immediately disengage and bring it home, minimising the risk of losing it. If the purpose of flags was to create engagements, this isn’t a complete or effective implementation.

The existence of the flag makes pushing towers early more rewarding, as neither chasing a flag past enemy towers, nor conceding it, are very appealing.

There are four runes which spawn on the map, in familiar DotA style. Unfortunately, their duration is too short for them to make any practical contribution to gameplay: they cannot be bottled, they barely even help with jungling, and the one rune that would have proved useful (regeneration) isn’t available.

Heroes:

There are 12 heroes in total, which is comfortable for a relatively small 4v4 AoS. They each have three skills + one overdrive ultimate, done to a decently high standard of creativity. Sometimes it’s subtle variations which work best: Voodoo Shaman has a skill which hexes one unit, causing it to apply a poison to any other nearby enemy units. The overdrive ultimates of course are the stars of the show, and they deliver by being suitably exciting and high-impact spells.

Powerful huge area damage: ✓

When a hero dies, an invisible ghost spawns at its fountain, and may be ordered to travel to the hero’s corpse where it may perform an instant full-health revival. This isn’t possible at early levels where revive timers are too short for the ghost to even leave the base, but it eliminates a lot of downtime at later levels.

There were unimplemented plans to mark some areas on the map as “dead-zones” where in-place revival would be disabled: such as inside each team’s base, and around the boss areas. Aside from being necessary to stop abuse, this would have encouraged defending teams to make aggressive plays outside their base, before they get boxed in with no recourse.

Hero deaths incur no gold penalty, which means that dying to neutral creeps early-game is by far the most efficient way to get home and back to full life. Losing one’s ultimate or overdrive progress might have been a fair penalty here.

Conclusions:

Some of Overdrive‘s features are less-than-ideal in their implementations, and a lot of that can be attributed to the map being incomplete. What’s important are the overdrive ultimates: a core mechanic which impacts player decisions throughout the game: when it comes to healing, jungling, killing enemies to keep up in favour, or using the ultimates to level them up. There are also subtler consequences, such as how much one should harass an enemy in-lane, or how to conduct a teamfight.

I really like that buying regen and heading to the jungle for the first minute to ready an ultimate is a valid decision: one that creates action early, has its own trade-offs, and wouldn’t otherwise be available. I like that maxing out a hero’s ultimate as soon as possible is an alternative means of progression. Those are great dynamics!

I was lucky enough to chat with one of the players who was tangentially involved with the map’s development, and enjoyed hearing a story about a player who arrived a bit late to lane, but without an overdrive: as though they’d been afk. The enemy jumped, only to discover that the player had been jungling to just under the damage limit, and immediately had an overdrive ready as rebuttal!

Of course, big ultimates like this cost a lot of mana for a level 1 hero.

Reportedly there were plans to expand upon the overdrive system. The changes, still modelled on of Final Fantasy X, would allow players to pick one from five different activities that would be counted towards their overdrive; a choice made at the start of the match. The proposed options were:

Taking damage
Healing self or allies
Crowd control applied to enemies (in seconds)
Last hits
Heroes killed

Personally, I would hate to lose the universal option of taking damage, since it gives everyone a reason to jungle, but there might be cases where some heroes would appreciate something different? I’m not sure. There’s definitely a risk of taking damage being paired up with healing and proving far too effective. Heroes killed might be either too weak (difficult to have it ready at the start of a fight), or too snowbally, as getting 2-3 ultimates in a single fight could be ridiculous.

If this hypothetical system were to become reality, I would propose that part-way through a match (say around level 10), players should be allowed to activate a second means of building toward overdrive, to freshen things up and let them adapt. Committing to a single overdrive activity all game (particularly a niche one) would be constricting and tedious.

I hadn’t invested much time into thinking about ultimates before encountering this map, but I think the ideas speak for themselves and make a pretty good case for exploring alternatives to the familiar “level 6 + cooldowns” approach. Hopefully we’ll see more experiments like Overdrive‘s in future lane-pushing games!

Download: Here