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The next gen of Mobas

Decrit··1 votes·332 views

I am not really sure to post this here or GD, but since these contents are more aligned to the G&P population i deemed it worthy of here.

Mobas are a rather young genre, started with some sporadic prototypes that culminated with DotA allstar, but as any other game genre it keeps evolving. Along the versions of LoL, but of other games too, some interesting things surfaced that can be objectively considered an improvement of the game, without discarding personal preferences.

Then the question: what do you consider "next gen"? Something that maybe can' t even added to LoL because it grows on a different structure or basics, even.

For example i think as the unification of damaging stats as a "next gen" thing, where mages and fighters use the same stat but applied in a different way ( like saying attack damage and ability power being one, but used differently) so you don' t have an halved list of items, with some retaining an identity exclusive to some roles.

4 Comments

Lost R2 votes

Next gen is a nebulous concept. Generally it means gaining access to new hardware and maybe a new controller; AKA a new console. New hardware means you can do more complicated stuff with prettier graphics and a new controller meant more options for the player, but nowadays the controllers are pretty much set in their ways (save for Nintendo which changes up their controller every generation); the Playstation controller is basically unchanged since the Analog Controller in the PS1 era, nearly 20 years ago.

The plane of PC gaming doesn't really have generations like the consoles do; it definitely doesn't help that computer setups are like snowflakes: each one is different. There was the DOS era, then Windows 3.1, then Windows 95, but the lines between generations were blurred. Even as Windows 95 was the big thing, most games were still playable almost exclusively through DOS. It wasn't until DOS was officially discontinued that we had a big migration to the Windows platform.

If you're trying to quantify generations within a particular genre, especially one so infantile in its stage (as big as the industry in this particular genre is), it gets even harder. There is almost no real definition as to what ended the previous generation and what started the new one. Instead, we're going by seasons, which is basically just the stretch of a year, and each season ends up being defined by something that was added or removed from the previous, and that definition is exclusive to League of Legends. There is nothing really that you could do to create a change so great it would be the absolutely defined gateway into the next generation. Real change comes bits at a time until one day you look back and realize that everything's changed.

Decrit1 votes

Probably i should have explained it better, then...

I am not talking about "console generations", but rather how a game genre develops over time. For example platformers, that evolved from being more simple-action based to games where you hack and jump, or where you have to sue a gimmick to progress further in the game, or even more some FPS games that incorporate GDR elements like skills and such but are not proper GDR's like Deus ex or Team Fortress 2, to an extent.

Then again, periferics may or may not help developing a genre, as well as calculation power, but is not strictly tied to that.

Lost R1 votes

Again, even in individual genres, all the changes didn't happen at once. Someone took the base (Wolfenstein 3D, 1992), added to it (Doom, 1993), refined the details (Duke Nukem 3D, 1995), and used more advanced technology (Quake, 1996).

There's an extremely old saying made famous by Isaac Newton, who said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.". That is, we're only building on the previous discoveries made; ironically, Newton's quote is lifted from another academic from centuries before. The same applies to game design. The definition for "next-gen" is so vague and meaningless it might as well not be used; case in point, the limited weapon system (or two/three weapon system) that Halo (2001) made famous and copied by 99% of all FPSes from then on was originally used in Rise of the Triad (1995), and even that is just an extension of the weapon powerup systems in games like Contra (1987) and Smash TV (1990).

I don't consider there to be any definition for "next gen". It's an empty phrase; the better side of propaganda. Next gen as we know it is defined by the power of the technology, but the technology only defines the height of the ceiling. We're only limited by our creativity; there are plenty of Retraux games out there that show what we can do with technology from yesterday with the knowledge from today. There will always be new additions to every genre; someone new will always come along and add another brick to the house, but it's never going to be something that you can define as "next gen", which as I've said before, is a meaningless term.

For example i think as the unification of damaging stats as a "next gen" thing, where mages and fighters use the same stat but applied in a different way ( like saying attack damage and ability power being one, but used differently) so you don' t have an halved list of items, with some retaining an identity exclusive to some roles.

Ironically, this is a Gen 1 concept in League (Pre-beta, Pre-season 1), having long ago been ditched for obvious reasons. It used to be that Attack Damage affected only basic attacks, and all skills (including pure AD champions like Sivir and Garen) scaled off of Ability Power. Then it was changed.

Decrit1 votes

I see the reason in that, but... bear with me, i had to use a term to describe shortly the phenomena, and "next gen" looked like the right term for that.

Obviously there are not unic big leaps, but rather small steps that can be also barely defined as steps themselves but more like "directions", that will develop in even more things. For example the weapon swap was copied because it added meaningful and strategic decision in the game and that was good, but that could become something even more.

If the wording was so stingy that precluded you to spend much more resources in debating if "next gen" is a thing or not rather actually answering then i am sorry, i' ll remind this next time.

For example i think as the unification of damaging stats as a "next gen" thing, where mages and fighters use the same stat but applied in a different way ( like saying attack damage and ability power being one, but used differently) so you don' t have an halved list of items, with some retaining an identity exclusive to some roles.

Well i was not talking about that: in that way AD and AP are still separate. I am talking about a thing, let's call it Power, that works for both ad and ap: base attacks have a 100% scale and skills have more ( mostly mages ) to offset that, with obvious solution to avoid scenarios where a mage can carry with auto-attacks ( low native as? lower scale?). This is debatable as choice by itself, but is just an example of a more geenrical solution.

Yeah this post was a lot generic.

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