It's a shooter-moba. I have access and can invite. If anyone wants access, I will need to friend you on steam.
You can post friendcode in comment or PM it, I don't mind. I will add people then send invite, they're not instant they get sent in waves.
I have very mixed opinions on it.
Edit: I need your friend code. NOT SteamID. Easy mistake to make.
Editedit: If I missed you, poke me. Sometimes notifications are weird here.
Editeditedit: Looks like some of these have started to go through!
I played one game of it when the pre alpha or whatever first came out. I didn't really like it at all. The one cool concept was the deny system where you can shoot the souls of creeps and heroes as they fly out of their body to deny Xp. Its definitely not what I expected for Valve's first new IP in forever. Don't think I'm gonna quit Dota for it.
For a new moba I have a few thoughts:
It doesn't really have any new mechanics that are new to moba beside like you said, the XP denial.
The XP denial seems underpowered because the gameplay emphasis is entirely on killing enemy players, there's too much exp from killing players and not enough from minions. Snowballing happens very easily because of this and there's very little ability to come back from behind by playing safely from your tower for farming. Too many characters can just dive your tower and kill you too without consequences.
There's 14 male characters and 7 female characters and I only gravitate to 2 of the female characters as appealing at all. Maybe I'm spoiled by Smite and Overwatch but it doesn't really feel like anything in the game is made for me.
I get absolutely bodied by people that have sweated for 500+ hours in this thing despite it being in early testing.
The accessibility is horrendous. The text chat feature has been made objectively worse than every text chat in any game ever made for the sake of being quirky and different. Colours are also not good and differentiating between team and enemy is not easy. Sound is also not great. Pings are still lacking. No "just use mic" is not an acceptable response to this problem especially not in regions where the majority of people don't speak the same language, let along for the issue of minorities, female players and queer-sounding people getting instant hate as soon as they are heard on mic.
The discord seems to be an entirely unmoderated extension of 4chan.
I can't really find any good information right now. Is this a beta still or this a sneaky release? If it is still in beta a lot these points will probably be adjusted soon, especially 2-4.
I know the Smite community has been excited for the release since Smite 2 has been bombing so much at least and it also is receiving similar criticism.
It's early access development. I'm not even sure it's a beta at this point.
Smite 2 has been bombing? I wasn't aware it was even available to anyone yet? I've been looking forwards to it.
Ahhh, thanks for the clarification.
It goes 24/7 open alpha at the end of the month and they've had a handful of closed alpha weekends and marketing tournaments over the past few months. The game suffers from some weird design/map choices and they've only ported over like a dozen or so gods so far which is a big sticking point for a bunch of people. I'm sure it will be fine eventually, but it's rough around the edges right now.
Ahh well that's kind of understandable. Also if they change characters people are gonna get weird about it. Honestly seems difficult to make a "2" for a live service game. The only obvious choice to make is that characters and their abilities should be different in a SEQUEL but people are going to react negatively to that for some chars.
This is the perfect time for character reworks imo and they're trying at least. As long as they keep the original design intent in mind this is the most efficient time from a dev standpoint to tweak unbalanced and broken characters.
I agree that releasing a live service sequel is tough though. I don't think I've seen one try that didn't receive an astronomical amount of hate for it.
Yeah and I'd say that not changing anything kind of defeats the purpose of sticking a "2" on it as well. You can throw a graphical upgrade on an existing game without the number.
I think a lot of the community pushback is for that exact reason. People expect a different game when a 2 is attached, not a shinier version of the same game. I really don't know if any IP that's done this well from a marketing standpoint. Maybe OW2, but that's also been a trainwreck.
I don't know that I agree necessarily with your second point though. A big selling point for a lot of the live service games going through this process is a changeover to a newer game engine. You'd be surprised how limiting in terms of features, graphics, and performance it is to be on an engine that's over a decade old.