02.12.16

It was actually yesterday that the Battlerite free weekend begun, but I just got to try it today.

I was, again, expecting a bunch from this game, as it had been generally quite well received, and I really loved the idea of a MOBA without the lanes, and the creeps, and all that stuff. I had also just recently quit Brawlhalla, which had been my main source of PvP for the past months, so I really wanted to like Battlerite, and for it to be my new go-to PvP game.

Perhaps you can already tell from my tone of writing, but I did not. In no particular order, here are things that bugged me:

Really long downtime between such short matches. Characters aren't unique enough. Combat feels washed out, not impactful. Maps are boring. It really feels like there could be a little more to it then just fighting.

Maybe it's a little bit of nostalgia from the games I used to play, so I remember them as much better in comparison, but I don't currently see any reason to want to keep playing Battlerite. The victories didn't mean much to me, nor did losing or my teammate bashing me infuriate me in the slightest. I guess I just didn't care because I wasn't really trying, and that's generally unlike me in a PvP game - I'm very competitive.

So I'll try again at F2P launch, but until then, I guess I'll just spend more time on my backlog and other stuff.

But gosh, now I really want to reminisce about the PvP games I used to play.

Starting with Brawlhalla, which I quit just a week or two ago. Despite being upset for the majority of the time playing it, which is the main reason I quit, I just couldn't pull myself free at times, even though I acknowledged I was upset and not really enjoying the game.

Matchmaking was quick, the matches were really fast-paced, skill-based, I didn't have any teammates to blame for my losses, so I could constantly focus on improving. The entire feel was great as a beginner, and after 200 hours.

But yeah, I quit mainly for the reason mentioned above. (The other being that a fair bunch of the game was built on being able to execute mechanically complicated combos that didn't require any thinking once you learned one. Furthermore, those combos changed from patch to patch, requiring re-learning.) Overall, this really solidified my assumption that team-and-match-based PvP games were always going to be frustrating, which is why I'm hesitant to pick one up unless it really, really fits me.

Before that, I played a month or two of Paragon, but it was fairly traditional mechanics-wise as a MOBA, just dumbed down and worse in comparison to the giants I could always go back to.

Other than that, I've always played Planetside 2, but definitely less actively in the last year or so.

Planetside 2 is currently the only decently good (and properly released) PvP MMO I know. It's been very slowly declining for over a year now, possibly for almost 4 years, ever since its launch, but it still has a decent amount of players for all its purposes.

I have over 1000 hours in it, and it's losing the magic. Sure, it's fun to go in, shoot stuff, participate in battles near unparalleled in size in comparison to other games, but there's no overarching goal. Kill to kill. Fight to capture a continent, just so another one would open up and reset. The cycle continues, and ultimately no one achieves anything.

But then again, that's also the case in any round-based PvP games, where the aforementioned cycle is several tens of times shorter. I guess I'm really just looking forward to something with the depth of EVE, and the action of a MOBA. Darn fairytale, I know, but maybe Crowfall will be half-decent.

I'm not even that big of a fan of FPSes, but still, the fact that there's no rounds, no fixed teammates, and an open-world means I can experience all of the action with none of the frustration. Winning and losing don't exist in the traditional sense, and you're free to do whatever the hell you want, as long as you can.

Sometime during that, I played Heroes of the Storm, which I quit just a tad more than a year ago after about 400 hours and when the matchmaking wasn't really living up to my expectations anymore. (Apparently something to do with there not being enough players at the higher MMR levels.) Still possibly my favorite PvP game in terms of combat, and I often consider going back to it, but I don't genuinely believe I'd enjoy myself anymore.

A very rough estimate for League of Legends is that I stopped playing 2 years ago and have 500 +- 200 hours in it. I just straight out switched to Heroes of the Storm when I got closed beta access to it, and never looked back. The last hitting, long matches and a laning phase, as well as the quick kill times, didn't really suit me. HotS also has an amazing variety of characters to play, not to mention the maps, and the different objectives.

If anything, that's the PvP game I'd go back to, but still, I'm afraid it won't be worth it.

Blizzard makes games with really consistently good quality, at least lately. Now, if only they did something from a genre which I really enjoyed, like an MMO... Oh, wait, there's WoW, and I am guilty of blaming it for the delaying the search for what actually makes a good MMO, as well as ruining MMOs, for a good 10 years.