Vainglory And Translating The MOBA To Mobile

The eSports world has boomed alongside the rise of League of Legends and Dota 2, both hugely popular entries in the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena genre, or MOBA for short. But these games and the tournaments that they have spawned see players tied to their computer monitor, keyboard and mouse as they do battle. However, with Vainglory reaching what Super Evil Megacorp consider to be its full release – despite having been playable on iOS and Android for several months – they’re asking if this genre can find a home on tablet and phone.

Traditionally, a MOBA has featured a map with three lanes going between two bases with AI minions charging down each lane to battle with the other side and try to take out defensive towers along the way. They won’t get much done without the five heroes on each team, who roam the lanes and the jungle areas between them, playing their own overarching game of tactics and strategy to try and tip the battle in their favour.

The key to making this work well has been to distil all of the elements of the MOBA for tablet and phone, rather than to simply recreate the exact same formula over again. While matches still last a good 20-25 minutes, rather than having three lanes of attack and defence in Vainglory there is just one, with a single jungle alongside for heroes to maraud within. With the smaller playing space, there are also only three players on each team, picking from a current roster of just 16 characters – though that’s set to expand each month – rather than over 100, as in LoL and DOTA 2.

“There have been two different paths that people have taken to try and capitalise on this opportunity,” Super Evil Megacorp’s CEO Bo Daly explained, “and one is to basically do the copy and paste trick of going, ‘We’ll just take the exact rules of League of Legends, copy their heroes sort of verbatim and put it on this platform.’ Then they wonder why it doesn’t really work or why it isn’t well suited, right?

“The other approach, and this is the more common approach and what everyone questioned us for not doing, which is that this is a mobile game and players only play them for five minutes at a time so you need to make it super simple and super casual. That’s been tried also, to ask if you can make a five minute MOBA. The answer is actually no; if it’s a five minute thing it ceases to be a MOBA, because they’re […] economy games dressed in an action facade.

“Stephan [Sherman] and Tommy [Krul], my co-founders, had worked at Riot previously – Stephan in particular had worked very closely with the design team – and we understood the anatomy of the MOBA and the internal structure well enough that we were able to build from first principles. We were able to say, ‘What is really necessary? What is the essence of the MOBA and how do we build from the ground up to be perfectly tailored to these devices?’ I think we are pretty unique in taking that approach.”

A similar art style and character design pervades Super Evil Megacorp’s take on the genre, which helps breed familiarity. The characters in particular feel like the typical and somewhat jarring mash up of fantasy ideas, especially when you take special skins into account, so the already quite barmy Koshka – a typically scantily clad girl with big cat-like claw gloves – now looks fit for a night in a disco and has rainbow light trails to her claw swipes while she’s fighting against hulking brutes with chainguns, steampunk robots and an undead chap with an energy sword conveniently holstered in his chest cavity.

Fans of the genre will feel right at home within Vainglory’s world, with core gameplay that’s practically identical. Naturally, having a pared back arena makes it a lot easier to keep track of what’s going on, but tapping on the screen instead of clicking and using hotkeys on a keyboard is actually really quite intuitive, even while it still has the complexities such as a minimap that you can scroll around the map with one finger on, while then using the device’s multitouch to issue commands to your hero.

The minimap also comes into play with the minimalist in-game communication, with pings that let you place a marker on the map for your teammates to suggest a target, give a warning, and so forth. These exist alongside simplistic emoticons, but there’s no built in voice chat functionality.

“We’ve talked about it and we may do it ultimately,” Bo explained, “but we’re actually pretty happy with just how positive the community is and we manage to avoid a lot of the toxicity that MOBAs tend to have in the community, and in part it’s by not having voice chat in the game.”

As I talk with Bo, a game between some of the developers on the trip and community members in attendance broke out, which neatly tied into another point that he wanted to talk about. This isn’t just people sat behind computers, but has a great potential for real world games, whether it’s sat on a couch together or meeting up in a cafe.

And Super Evil Megacorp have some rather grand aspirations for where their game could go. A key part of that is this burgeoning community, but it’s also down to simply getting enough people to play the game until it reaches the levels of LoL and DOTA2, something which can really only come through word of mouth, Twitch streaming – this is only currently possible by routing the image via a computer – and just getting people to try the game.

Bo admitted, “The truth of the matter is that we could stand here and yell from the mountaintops [that this MOBA works on tablet] until we’re blue in the face. It doesn’t matter. Players wouldn’t believe us, and frankly they shouldn’t believe us because we have a profit motive, so all we worry about is the community and hope that they have a great experience and then want to share that experience, which is why the Twitch numbers are so important for us.”

Already, they’re seeing 1.5 million users each month, Twitch viewers have raced past 250,000 viewers who stick around for over 10 minutes and riding on the back of this official release, they’re partnering with OGN to found the first Vainglory Worlds Invitational Tournament in South Korea this month. If you thought eSports was already an unfamiliar and unusual phenomenon, able to pack stadiums and with millions of online viewers for finals, it’s not unimaginable that these players will be tapping on touch screens rather than clicking a mouse. But that’s still going to be odd, right?

“I would disagree,” Bo responded. “I actually think that a bench with a couple of computers and a couple of guys hiding behind screens, you can’t even, as an eSports producer, how do you even shoot that in a way that’s interesting? Whereas we’re already thinking what does [eSports on tablet] look like? Dudes standing in uniforms at podiums, maybe bigger tablets?

“There’s so many ways of thinking of this as having better presentation values, but then I also think of it that a lot more people will end up playing a game that is on tablets, and so therefore more people have a passing interest in it. And it can’t have just the pro million dollar tournament, it has to be the little league and the farm organisations where people always feel like there’s a next step.”

It actually works really well and, after a quick tutorial, it’s into the co-operative bot modes to start earning experience before heading into your first PvP matches. By the time you reach them, you should already know the map and how the basics of the game work, because from there you then need to learn about how a real game pans out and how to control the map’s resources over the span of the game. Making sure to strengthen your minions with the two minion mines is vital, as is grabbing the gold mine when it’s full for a monetary advantage, but a match can often be decided by which team manages to unleash the defensive tower destroying Kraken.

But I personally seem to have quickly found my limit when playing at home, and after an initial string of victories, I now simply find myself outclassed by my opponents. I feel like a weak link on my team, despite trying to communicate and team up. Yet underneath that, I can still see that Super Evil Megacorp have mastered the transition to tablet.

Bo said, “People always thought that first person shooters couldn’t be played on consoles, they thought they were just PC games, but you just need to get the right level of design innovation and also the right level of insight about the anatomy of the game. It’s no accident that Bungie, who had built Marathon, were the ones to build Halo and bring that over, because they understand the true essence of what that game type is.

“I think we’re able to do similar things and put [MOBAs] on these platforms, but I also think that for a whole range of game types – any Action RPG with this sort of 3/4 view camera – I think that this platform will end up being that we’ll look back in a few years and say that it’s clear that this is actually the right platform for this type of game. The PC’s keyboard and mouse abstraction is just that, an unnecessary abstraction when having direct control over things in a natural and tactile way is actually better.”