With more than 500 million players, the MOBA genre is squarely focused on player skill. Gamers are rewarded for succeeding in battles by the use of currency that can be used to upgrade and customise the player’s character. Weapon-based – with enough loot to unlock every weapon – combat rewards some types of players more than others. Warriors and heroes excel at building up a character’s abilities, which, in turn, cause the group to severely weaken the targets of their attacks. Individual play styles are important, but teams generally have built-in strengths that they leverage to achieve victory. Fortnite works using a more progressive approach: Players gradually unlock different types of abilities, each carry-over from the prior game, which increases the feasibility of the game’s expected behaviour. All this and even more. It’s more than just another MOBA.
The Call Of Duty franchise will always be best-known for throwing an avalanche of weapons at its player base! InXile Entertainment’s Fallout 4 is unique among shooters: fusing the traditional first-person sandbox experience with real-time combat. Using a new defence system called skill trees, players are encouraged to customize their character by opting more highly for starting equipment. Boss battles are timed at 10-second intervals, taking a backseat to every other aspect of the game, including quest progression, character customization, and interactions with other factions and environmental elements.
Gamers constantly redefine their gameplay style with every iteration—or near-repetition of new technologies. NetherRealm Studios even admitted after its two failed attempts to launch an MMORPG of any sort that it was quite unlikely to ever make another—and the studio was ever more busy developing online shooters.
FPS shooters tend to be hour-long-single-player experiences devoted entirely to each gun being controlled and the movement available to the game. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—and the player almost never even has time to decide on what gun to use at what point in time. Sins of a Solar Empire was always a career shooter that was way too focused on its vision, the characters, the systems, and the movements. The first Focusing Flare was an ambitious project, but it managed to inject much-needed personality into the franchise with the first Observer Mode.
Assassin’s Creed Origins is a game set in ancient Egypt. It says the game is a sort-of prequel: 16th-century sail-building pirates sail on the Nile, but the game asserts that Rainbow Six is the inspiration. Problematically, the images attached to the release have the wrong date: Assassin’s Creed Origins is going to have to wait until 2018 to come out, so it is unclear when this type of game could possibly come out.
