My first blog is going to be about MOBA's.
According to Wikipedia MOBA stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena and is a subgenre of strategy video games in which two teams of players compete against each other on a predefined battlefield. Each player controls a single character with a set of unique abilities that improve over the course of a game and which contribute to the team's overall strategy. The ultimate objective is for each team to destroy their opponents' main structure, located at the opposite corner of the battlefield. However, MOBA games can have other victory conditions, such as defeating every player on the enemy team. Players are assisted by computer-controlled units that periodically spawn in groups and march forward along set paths toward their enemy's base, which is heavily guarded by defensive structures.
The most well-known MOBA's are DotA (Defense of the Ancients, 2003), League of Legends (2009), DotA 2 (2013) and Heroes of the Storm (2015). All of these games have a similar playing field with a map divided in two parts with bases for each team. There are five players per team and at the start of the game they declare if they're going to go TOP (top lane), MID (middle lane), BOT (bottom lane) or JUNGLE (which is a player who tries to kill monsters to get the team buffs). These type of games are featured heavily in eSports where teams play the games against each other in big arena's with lots of public and live broadcasting. Similar to 'normal' sports, the winning team can take home hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Onyx started playing League of Legends (or: LoL) with his friends in the Philippines. Then Kuromochiii joined while they came to the Netherlands and both got their own PC. They chose their champions (of which there are a lot!) and upgraded them in better builds (combination of skills and items) and with spiffy skins (new character customisations/clothes). Their favorites are Yasuo, Akali and Zed, I think, but it's hard to keep track since there are 153 heroes in this game. They're both pretty good at it, Kuro maybe even a bit better than his brother. Both get a good KDA (Kills/Deaths/Assist) ratio, depending on the class and role they play.
Yasuo (League of Legends) montage by Kuromochiii
I tried a couple of games with them and watched the Netflix documentary League of Legends: Origins to understand the game and the culture better. I was happy if I got a kill and didn't die more than ten times in one of those (at least) half hour games. It's not really for me. I get bored, because the map is the same each and every time and so is the goal. But I guess you can say that about a soccer game as well. I don't like watching soccer much (which is probably a shame for a Dutch male), but when I was young I did like to play it, even though every game is sorta similar. So I understand why the boys like it, it's just not for me.
And then this morning in my mailbox I saw a Twitter notification of Marvel. They added a new hero to the roster of their MOBA Marvel Super War. I did not know Marvel had a MOBA. But it makes sense though, Marvel is not a comic book company anymore, it's an entertainment factory making everything from comics to movies and from TV series to games. And since MOBA's are very popular, why not make a Marvel version? They already have the characters and the powers, so it's easy to put them in a game. The game from 2019 already has 62 heroes and villians to choose from. They are all from popular franchises like Avengers, Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four.
So this new character is called Luna Snow. She made her first appearance in Marvel Future Fight, another Marvel mobile game. Later she appeared in the comics, specifically in 'War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas', a superhero team of just Asian characters. Luna is a Korean singer with some sort of ice powers. The singer-part made me think of K/DA, a virtual K-pop band (Korean pop) consisting of characters from League of Legends, among them Akali, which Kuromochiii used to play a lot.
Anyway, anything Marvel peaks my interest and eventhough I don't like the MOBA genre that much, I would like to try this out, just because of the 62 characters that are in the game. Unfortunately, the game is not (and will not be) available in Europe or the USA. It's limited to Asia, including the Philippines. I'll guess I have to stick to Marvel Avengers on the PS4.
So this Mr. Dad versus the Boys is 0 to 1 in favor of the boys. See you next time!
Comments
Post a Comment