14 DAY TRIAL // Motiga announced a new action game with multiplayer online battle arena elements, titled Gigantic, coming from StarCraft, Guild Wars and State of Decay lead designer James Phinney.
The free-to-play MOBA genre is getting more and more crowded with each passing day, as apparently every studio is looking to cash in on the popularity of the competitive team-based battles.
Of course, seeing how lucrative things are for both Riot Games' League of Legends and Valve's Dota 2, you'd be a fool not to try and get a slice of that pie, but the problem is that they have already ensnared the audiences, so nowadays you have to shake things up a little in order to get some attention.
Gigantic tries to do that by mixing Smite's third-person perspective action with the cartoonish visuals of Strife, and by adding some new elements into the traditional "push three lanes, destroy base" formula.
Instead of making strategic pushes and timing tower takedowns and ganks, Gigantic challenges players to adopt a much less static approach, as each team fights alongside a colossal guardian, with the end goal being to outmaneuver the enemy and slay the other guys' huge AI-controlled beast.
"From the very beginning, our goal was not just to make an awesome free-to-play online game. We wanted to make the best online game, period," said Motiga co-founder Chris Chung, former CEO of NCsoft's North American and European operations and former Trion Worlds' chief strategy officer.
Although the teaser trailer doesn't reveal much aside from the lighthearted demeanor of the game and its beautiful, albeit a tad too colorful visuals, it certainly hints at a very pretty and polished product. There is a glimpse of actual gameplay footage thrown in, but a second is hardly enough time to gauge the game's potential from that.
Fortunately, an interview from Zam delivers a bit more information on the game, as well as extensive gameplay footage, revealing that the general vibe of Gigantic is very similar to a World of Warcraft battleground.
Players can choose from a bunch of different class-based characters and then upgrade them with various offensive and defensive abilities on the fly, being able to dodge, sprint, charge and employ grappling hooks in order to navigate the game's maps, which introduce a new level of complexity by featuring a ton of verticality.
Furthermore, the more dynamic gameplay involving the guardian that roams the map and that you have to slay, and the fast-paced third-person action with a lot of emphasis on vertical movement, deviate from the consecrated MOBA formula enough to carve a niche for Gigantic that doesn't entirely overlap with what LoL or Dota 2 already offer.
Sign-ups for the game's alpha are available on the Gigantic website, in case you want to try out the game for yourselves and you're feeling particularly lucky.
