f13.net

It's a cross between Team Fortress, all the MOBAs, Borderlands, and the new Blizzard Game (Overwatch?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XQJvAO4nR0

The unique part? Collectible cards, and deckbuilding. You have to buy and collect cards, build a deck, and in every match you DRAW some of your cards basically getting different powers, effects and the likes, as in a TCG. The mechanics are unclear but the teaser is there. It sounds so stupid it could actually work. "Early Access" coming soon.

Oh this is the game that is forcing them to pretend they didn't abandon Tribes?

Speaking of abandoned, they don't even mention Global Agenda anywhere on their page - do they!?

This company is great at getting things to market. I'll give them that.

Smite is the only thing of theirs I've played and I love it, so I'll give this a shot. At least I can hope for a reasonable one-time fee to unlock all the things.

Pretty excited for both this and Overwatch.  I generally really like the cartoony style of these games, and the idea of a first person Dota has always had a lot of potential in my opinion.  I'd be surprised if they offered the equivalent of the Smite "$20 to get everything for free forever" pack again, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

It's my biggest hangup with LoL and HotS; DotA's "all free" is obviously my preferred option, but a one-and-done fee is also reasonable. I'd even pay up to $60 if the game was good enough (since that's the standard game box price) but I have no patience for grinding to unlock champs nor do I want to be nickle-and-dimed to death.

SMITE, also by Hi-Rez, is a 3rd-person DOTA. Paladins is not a 1st-person DOTA.

It's not? What is it then?

Edit: Nevermind, there's a video. No longer really interested.

Hmm, you're right, my bad.  Thought I heard something about this at E3 but I guess I had it mixed up.  Still looks potentially neat, though the idea of huge game changing effects attached to a randomizer is kind of a head scratcher.

I just watched the video and it seems both derivative and late to the party.

Another TF2 style game in development, with the same style as overwatch, battleborn and gigantic. I find myself more interested in Lawbreakers but will probably test most of them, that's the beauty of f2p gaming.

Hey now, there's a PTS 1.1 patch out: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fnu0Xe9bnZAVPu9eLLBvE2rgZcdqVd7x3SF3ayIDkto/pub (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fnu0Xe9bnZAVPu9eLLBvE2rgZcdqVd7x3SF3ayIDkto/pub). Still waiting for rifle/SMG nerfs...

And hopefully this will get Blizzard to hurry up with Overwatch beta, I could use a TF2-clone to play.

One of the troubles all these run into is that TF2 is actually just really good at what it does.  They aren't really going to add anything to make that formula better.  Heck, even TF2 made itself worse when they added all the new weapons and unlocks.

The way they describe the cards system is awful. The last thing most players want in this sort of competitive game is more RNG.

I'm going to start off with Battleborn and see what happens.

Yes... similar to Overwatch.  No interest at all.

Overwatch looks fucking awful. I'm so proud of you guys.

HiRez is the lord high master of following fads 6 months too late. In this particular case, 2 years too late.

I assume that's by design.  I've seen a few interviews where devs have expressed a train of thought along the lines of "casual audience > competitive audience, so we'll put in mechanics the competitive audience will dislike so that will push us more towards casual players" even if casual players don't particularly like the mechanic either.  Critical hits in TF2 for example.

I'm not sure the stick is better than the carrot when attracting customers but OH WELL that's why I'm not a game designer.

WHile I am all for a new "PvP" objective-based game that manages to be good, even more so if it's an FPS, both Overwatch and Paladins strike me as really dull. Clearly, it's too soon to tell but their art style is sad to me. Gameplay, we'll see. The card gimmick? It could be a genious idea or the epitome of stupid. I'm open to the former, but I'd put a lot of money on the latter.

I bought the founders pack for 20 bucks last night. The game is pretty fun. I actually like their card system.

I tried it too and I like it but it feels a bit weightless. It's way earlier in beta than Overwatch, so I am sure it will improve the same way Smite went from bad to great in the span of 18 months across the beta, but at the same time I am starting to see a pattern in newer "flashy" games that I am not sure I enjoy as much as I thought I did. The last batch of colourful/cartoony action games seem to be very far away from me both in terms of style and gameplay pace, and nothing ever made me feel as old as Battleborn, Overwatch and Paladins recently did.

The card system is an interesting change, but it also screams of pay2win to me and in general it is a huge real money sink which is what keeps me away from games I would otherwise love like Magic:The Gathering and Hex. Also, I am not sure it holds up well against Overwatch, but I should give them both a spin again back to back in a few months. That wouldn't be too surprising though: the strength of Smite came from being very well done but also filling a market hole no one was going for. But when Blizzard is selling the exact same product you are, things are going to look pretty bad regardless of the quality.

In Battleborne, there is SO MUCH going on. I haven't played the others, so I don't have a comment on those.

Let me rephrase.

It's a very strange mix where you have a lot of classes with very few skills. So your actual play is quite boring. But there is all kinds of crazy shit going on in the world that you have to keep up with. To me that's entirely backwards.

Yes, I know I just described the MOBA genre. I don't understand that either.

I'm enjoying it - bought the Founder's pack. I'm enjoying it more than Overwatch which I haven't played because Blizzard is happy to take my money and not let me into the beta.

I'd say its got a long way to go but so did Smite and Smite is a decent fun game.

I have 3 beta invite codes if anyone wants them (no one post wonders please :oh_i_see:).  First 3 PMs get one.  You'll have to send the PM with an email attached since I have to type in the email on my Hi Rez account page and hit a send button for it to happen.

Edit:  I've only played a little bit but I've had fun so far.  It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up against Overwatch.

The business model is what bothers me. It's a big gamble, as it will probably decree its success or failure, but I'd bet for failure. It screams of "pay2win", and I doubt there are many who like that in their FPS.

Ah, yeah, that is a concern.  If there is one thing Heroes gets right in my opinion it's the price tag.  I'd much rather just buy a game for 40 bucks and have the game than have to do the whole unlock song and dance.

A Paladins First Look. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhjvpvMhqT0)

I think they may be going with the same sort of business model they have with Smite, with a few differences.  All champions will be f2p and they will be offering skins for purchase.  If thats the case, then I'm not worried about it being p2w.  As for the cards, after you finish a game, you get chests which contain cards.  You can then craft your duplicate cards to make another card.  So by just playing the game on a regular basis you can add to your collection.

I think you are being optimistic. Chests can contain Legendaries and Epic cards, which means cards that make your character outright more powerful. And realistically, the play-time necessary to obtain the same cards you'll get by spending 2$ will be daunting. Sure you can do it, but in the meantime you'll get reamed by those who shelled out the cash (<--- pay 2 win). Clearly, I hope I'm wrong, as I like Hi-Rez and their games. But I doubt they rippped a system out of any TCG since M:tG to basically give away the most rare/powerful cards for free.

Even then you get gold which you'll use to buy packs when you win games. Plus dropping 40 bucks imnsure gets you a ton ofnpacks too.

Cards are really good in this game, but I don't see too much of an imbalance. You still have to aim and pray to rngesus.

Even so,  legendary cards have a 1 to 2m cooldown whn you die compared to lesser tier cards that can be 10 seconds.

Im not that worried about it. I suck at these games anyway.

The core fps mechanics look via twitch to be much much worse than TF2 or Overwatch (which I wasn't super thrilled with).

The card thing actually seemed like a goofy cute gimmick (except that unlocking/picking a new card mid-fight seems crazy awkward atm) but nothing matters if the underlying gameplay is so vanilla and lame.

I'd declare Overwatch the clear winner from what I've seen of the two but I honestly don't think its going to do any better at unseating CS/TF2/all those russian f2p fps games than HOTS did at being a relevant moba.

I still have 2 keys for this if anyone wants them.

I've got two spare keys for closed beta if anyone is interested.

I've got a spare key for this, PM.

Popped in for a few rounds of this tonight and it feels way better than it did in 2015 to me.  It looks like they're cribbing a lot of stuff from Overwatch, so YMMV but as someone who likes Overwatch this seems fun.

Update for anyone who hasn't played:

• For starters, the TTK is way down.  This is probably the most debatable change for me, since I generally like games with a long TTK, but the shorter gameplay does make the weapons feel more impactful.  It's still slower than something like Quake so we're not quite at instagib CoD levels, but it's still faster than something like a level 1 matchup in Dota or LoL.  It feels a lot more visceral than it did before, which does a lot to help the overall game feel.
• They added ultimate skills, which work basically the same as they did in Overwatch last I played.  I didn't like them there, I don't like them here.  At least they seem a bit less impactful than in Overwatch, and it's not like they ruin the game or anything, they just kind of bug me.  They also added a bunch of new normal abilities, things like alt fire modes and so on.  This has changed a lot of character roles in the game, for example, Pip is a dps / healer now (traded his adhesive bomb for a "healing potion toss" and his ult is that he can transform enemies in to chickens, for some reason, apparently).
• The random card system has been basically trashed.  Now, you build decks before the game, and over the course of the match you put points in to whichever card you want when you level up.  So basically the randomness is almost totally gone.  At the beginning of each match, you choose two decks: one for your specific champion and one "common" deck that any champion can use.
• You get cards from chests, still, I think it's like one chest giving five cards or something.  My inventory is a mess since I've been playing on and off through like three major overhauls of the system so I don't know what all a new player will have access to.  But from what I can tell, since duplicates are pointless, you automatically sell them for gold which you can use to buy individual cards for specific champions.  So the P2W aspects are at least a bit toned down, since it's possible to blow all your gold to spec out one character if you want.  I'm not sure how realistically easy that is since all my legacy junk means I already have ~170 cards and am mostly just missing a few legendaries at this point, but it doesn't seem like a huge money sink yet (though that might change as they add more characters and more cards per character).
• In addition to cards, when you open a chest you have a chance of getting a character skin, and you can also craft weapon skins (for something like the cost of 10 legendaries).  This is kind of underwhelming at this point, since the character skins are mostly just recolors and the weapon skins are just retextures, and the chance of getting a skin (much less the specific skin you want) is pretty steep so the cost gets prohibitive fast.  Presumably there will be some changes here at some point if they want to sell skins and things directly.
• They added a few new characters and modes.  There's a new map type called payload, kind of similar to the TF2 version (or the Overwatch "escort" gametype) and one called survival which I guess has no respawns but I haven't played it yet.  Some new heroes, including Grover (the "Groot" to Pip's "Rocket Raccoon" I guess), Androxus ("Hey, you guys know that 'Reaper' character in Overwatch?"), and Kinessa (I generally hate snipers, but at least she looks cool)

TL; DR: The gameplay is faster, they removed a lot of the RNG and added some cosmetic stuff.

Seems fun to me so far.

I got the founder pack as soon as it was available and I am still keeping an eye on this, but I decided to put it on hold until it's more fleshed out and I am glad to hear it's coming along well. I always watch the "new patch" videos and I have a certain degree of trust in Hi-Rez ability to make fun multiplayer games. My biggest gripe so far is the art/character style, this generic cartoony bullshit that is everywhere, I can't stand it. Smite has a distinctive theme and taste even in its over the top colourful style, but this is generic cartoony crap that draws from all the tropes and stereotypical nerdy stuff with a whiff of Blizzard and I find it desperately boring so far.

It still plays far, far too slowly. They just turned a standard MOBA into a 3rd person shooter without changing the pacing or movement at all, and it flat out doesn't work. Everything feels like you are wading through treacle.

Really not sure why they aren't being a bit more bold with their design - this game feels *old* in comparison to newer MOBAs. It should be a lot, lot faster.

Got in this closed beta for this last night. Maybe they've changed it since Maledict's post because it didn't feel slow at all to me. I liked it well enough though I think they have got some champs that are just stupid crazy overpowered. I went 15-1 two straight games with 2 different sharpshooter champs after only 2-3 games with each of them.

It's fun but I feel like this game is probably going to run into a buzzsaw called Overwatch. It feels too much like Overwatch to me to be successful against that juggernaut - kind of like Battleborn only with less marketing budget. If that's indeed the market they are going for, I think they are going to get killed.

Also, fuck the mounts/horses. The mechanic is goddamn irritating. I hit Left-shift in the middle of combat expecting to sprint and instead I stop firing for 1 sec while I mount a horse that I then get shot off of. It just doesn't work very well and doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Yeah, this is my main concern for this game.  I keep seeing them make decisions which on the surface aren't really bad ideas, but they move the ship closer and closer to the rocks of "trying to compete with Blizzard" and I worry.  People who think Overwatch is a clone of TF2 would probably need special instruments to tell Paladins and Overwatch apart.  Battleborn at least IS a very different game to Overwatch, it just doesn't look like it at first glance.  Paladins keeps moving closer and closer, and I wonder if they really have a strong idea of what they want this game to be.

For example, on each siege map, there are three possible points that you'll be fighting over.  Each round one of them goes live and you head over there.  But that means that every round, about 2/3 of the map is basically useless.  There's no reason for the team to ever split up, no farming for resources or any other point to having such a huge map, it's just kinda there because at one point we thought maybe there'd be some kind of MOBA element here but now not so much.

I played this some more last night and I'm just not sure how much longevity there is to this game. The crafting stuff relies on spending gold (gotten by playing games) and champions can be bought with gold or crystals (the pay real money part of the equation). The maps are OK but not great and yes, 2/3rds of the map is unused during games. You level up your champions by playing games mostly for cosmetic bits. The card collection part is bound to get frustrating because those cards only come when you level your account and open chests, each chest has random stuff so you may get nothing you need and you can buy the chests with crystals (real money). There's only 2 games modes and they are basically variations on the same game mode (payload). It's fun but I'm not feeling the long-term hook and without that, this game will be dead in 3-6 months time.

I think a lot of the problem is a lack of a really strong direction for the game.  They don't seem sure about what they want it to be.  Is it supposed to be a complex strategic e-sports thing, or is it a "go here, you idiots" Blizzard style casual game?  They can't really add in a lot of maps since the gameplay is still going through massive changes and they don't really have a clear plan for their heroes (Drogoz runs in to a ton of invisible walls in midair, for example, which Pharah doesn't really have an issue with in Overwatch) so anything they do add might have to be reworked next week.  The card system is being redesigned constantly, I think my inventory has been wiped four times since March due to the system being overhauled.  They don't know how they want to handle in-game progression: do they want players to get more powerful, how do they regulate that, how long does it last, what gameplay purpose does it serve... all of this stuff changes all the time.  And I get that this is still in beta, apparently, but it feels like there's been an AWFUL lot of work done on the game for them to still be swapping out core mechanics as often as they do.

I guess it has been pretty stable for the last month or so, so maybe they've settled down, but in that case, ugh... I gotta agree that there's not a lot of long-term appeal to this game when Overwatch is doing almost the same thing but with more polish.

This is now available on Steam as f2p.  If it is an "Overwatch clone" at least it's a free, well made one.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/444090/