14 DAY TRIAL // The Multiplayer Online Battle Arena genre is already pretty crowded but the development team at Turbine and publisher Warner Bros. believe that they can challenge the established leaders with their new Infinite Crisis by focusing on team fights.
Leo Tan, the digital communication manager at the company, tells Eurogamer that, “We want the game not just to feel good, but we want it to look good, we want there to be a lot of exciting moments and I think a team fight is the most exciting moment you can have in a MOBA.”
In practice this means that gamers will get specific side objectives to accomplish and that the team that manages to fulfill most of them will be able to get a solid advantage against their enemies.
This will encourage cooperation between players and the abilities of any group can also be enhanced by using a varied choice of superheroes and villains, with special powers that complement each other.
Infinite Crisis benefits from the fact that it can use the very deep catalog of characters and locations created by DC Comics, which is now owned by Warner Bros., and Turbine says that each hero included in the roster has been chosen after careful consideration.
The development team is also differentiating itself from other MOBA by tweaking some mechanics.
Tan adds, “when a drone dies, it drops a coin. Traditionally, your last hit and money gets teleported directly to you. If you don't get the last hit, the drone drops the coin and you can pick that up. That credit is shared between everyone in range.”
Infinite Crisis will have to be familiar enough to appeal to fans of the genre but different enough from its competitors to draw them in and convince them to leave rivals like League of Legends from Riot Games and DOTA 2 from Valve.
Blizzard is also set to enter the same genre with the launch of its own Heroes of the Storm, which will use character from its most popular franchises.
Turbine says that Infinite Crisis is solid enough to already support streaming of matches via Twitch and that the entire fan community is very involved in the development process and offers cool ideas that the studio is currently evaluating.
Infinite Crisis is currently set to be enter an open beta period on March 14 and an official launch date is expected to be announced during summer.