My son asked me if I would play league of legends with him, so tried it for the first time. So much going on!
Firstly, how does anyone zero in on what hero they want to play, there are so many of them! I feel like it would take a year just to play enough to decide.
Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?
Anyway, 2 defeats from 2 games so far, I write to you from the lobby waiting for the third!
I played Heroes of the Storm, back in the day, and really enjoyed it, it didn’t feel as complex as league did. I was similarly bad at it though!
The MOBA genre is based off a mod for Warcraft 3 called Defense of the Ancients. DotA, being a mod, had lots of “quirks” (aka bugs) in the game play that kind of just became part of the flavor of the game. LoL was the first standalone MOBA, based off DotA and (iirc) developed by some of the people who worked on the original mod. LoL was designed as a standalone game but it recreated all the quirks of the mod because they were believed to be so important to the game.
Blizzard, when they made HotS, looked at some of the wonky, quirky things and said “This is dumb, let’s strip that out and make it simpler.” The result is a MOBA that’s just as fun but less complex. I really enjoyed it a lot for that reason.
MOBA as a genre didn’t come from WC3. There were quite a lot of predecessors to DotA, both in WC3 itself and in first StarCraft, namely Aeon of Strife is believed to be the first popular MOBA custom map out there.
Blizzard didn’t decide that quirks of WC3 engine are dumb. Yes, they wanted to make a simpler MOBA, but the main reason for lack of funny stuff from WC3 is that they used Galaxy engine for the game, the same one StarCraft 2 was built upon.
And HotS feels less complex not because of Galaxy’s vs WC3’s quirks (the former has plenty, too), but because of lack of gold and shop, shared experience and an actual tutorial at the beginning of the game.
That’s actually where I started my moba journey. Was huge HotS player. Mained tanks like Mura, Etc and Garosh. Then Blizzard killed that esports scene 2 weeks after saying they were doubling down on it at blizzcon. Never have a been that mad at a company. I quit blizzard games after that.
Going to League of Legends was a tough switch. Really helped that the League esports scene is a ton of fun. Though it seems having the esports tied money is starting to make that scene die a slow death too.