I may have finally discovered why I don’t find Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games appealing. As a player & a fan of Blizzard Entertainment games I was selected to be in the Alpha of their MOBA Heroes of the Storm. As I do with every alpha or beta I’m selected for I put in actual playtime: to learn how the game works & to actively report bugs as I found them. There was a problem though: I couldn’t stand playing it. Every match felt like it was an unwanted task at work. Also I didn’t seem to be very good at it, which perplexed me. “I’ve played Real-Time Strategy games for decades!” I said, shaking my fist at the monitor. “I should be a natural at this!” With the help of a friend who was also selected for the Alpha & doing a little research on RTS games I may have hit on the reason, but first: some history.
I’ve been gaming since single digits. Starting on an Atari 2600, the VIC-20, Commodore 64 & Amiga 1000 soon followed. When I bought my first IBM-compatible PC (remember when they used to be called that?) it was just a few years before the Golden Age of Real-Time Strategy games. In 1995 I became part of a LAN party group that met every Friday night to play network games together. Back then if it was networkable we played it. (No IPs yet, everything was IPX/SPX.) The bulk of our playtime was split between first-person shooters & RTS games. Starting with the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) our love of RTS games soon included Command & Conquer (1995), Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996), Warcraft II: Beyond The Dark Portal (1996), Age of Empires (1997), Total Annihilation (1997) & StarCraft (1998). Even long forgotten entries in the genre like Dark Reign: The Future of War (1997) & KKnD (1997) saw hours of playtime.
The general appeal of RTS games goes by many descriptions: god-like powers; micromanagement; macromanagement. However the genre is described the one immutable fact is that you are in control. Bases & friendly units are not predetermined. You decide where the buildings are constructed. You decide what friendly units to create and how to deploy them. You decide how your units attack & defend. This is in direct contrast to MOBAs like League of Legends (2009), DOTA 2 (2013) & Heroes of the Storm (2015). In MOBAs your bases are already established, the buildings already in place, and friendly units automatically respawn after a set amount of time, to traipse down the lanes of the map into battle. The only thing you have control of are the hero characters. You select what hero you want to play before the match starts and have to use that character for the entire match. MOBAs are about combat, not micromanagement. Being in the right place at the right time, to take out predetermined enemies, buildings & defenses is the name of the game.
This might be the reason MOBAs don’t appeal to me. I’ve been playing RTS games for so long that it’s hard for me to play games that look like a RTS but actually aren’t. I want to place the buildings myself, I want to deploy my units where I choose. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is one of the reasons we’re seeing announcements of MOBAs being cancelled recently. Both Paragon (2017) & Gigantic (2017) have announced they will be sunsetted later this year. The RTS genre is far from dead. Homeworld Remastered Collection (2015) & StarCraft: Remastered (2017) have both been released recently to let players experience classic fan favorites in HD. The Age of Empires & Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series have both had recent releases & there are new entries like Banished (2014), Anno 2205 (2016) & They Are Billions (2017). In a market flooded with MOBA games maybe players are looking at RTS games again for the reason we’ve always loved them: having god-like powers & moving the pieces around the chessboard as we see fit.