#Battleborn Vs #Overwatch: Are they the same thing?

Having played both games, I can safely say no, they aren't. They are similar, but in the same way that Metroid Prime and Call of Duty are similar (here's a hint: they aren't really). Allow me to explain why, and to do that I will start by talking about what Battleborn is:

     Battleborn is the team-based arena shooter developed by Gearbox that released on PC, PS4, and XB1 not too long ago.It advertises itself as being a badass game filled with badass heroes for badass players and just really REALLY loves that word "badass". But then again, these are the same developers who brought us Borderlands, so that's not too difficult to comprehend. In practice, Battleborn is a first-person arena shooter that uses MOBA elements to create a unique and cartoony multiplayer experience, as well as a Borderlands-style story mode. Each of the games current 25 heroes is completely unique, has their own skill set, and a colorful array of dialogue. The game uses comedy to great effect in order to make the game feel like it doesn't take itself seriously and therefore neither should the player. Normally I would say this is a bad thing for a competitive shooter but Battleborn manages to do it in a way that comes off as "look bro, we're just here to have fun. Don't be toxic to your team, don't worry so much about winning, just get the hell out there and blow shit up".      The game's painted landscapes and colorful visuals, as well as intentional censor bleeping of swear words makes it come off as a cross between a television show and a video game, which is true to the standard Borderlands design that is to be expected from Gearbox.
      As for actual gameplay, it's a lot like a MOBA: each character is pre-made with their own theme, personality, and set of 4 skills and a passive, as well as augments you can get as you level up in a match to alter their abilities to suit the situation or your own playstyle. There are 3 pvp modes: a 1-lane + jungle MOBA map where you push minion waves and capture objectives to destroy the enemy teams sentry robots, of which their are two. But instead of lasting as long as it takes somebody to win, each match has a maximum of 30 minutes. If the timer runs out the match either ends in a draw or the team who has the highest total percentage of sentry health (each sentry accounts for 50 points for a total of 100) wins. There is also a traditional 3-point king of the hill mode, as well as a minion-pushing mode where the goal is to push your minions to the enemy teams altars and sacrifice them, with each minion sacrificed giving you points depending on how big it is, with the first team to reach the goal or whoever has the most points at the end of the timer winning the match.
     The solo campaign follows traditional Halo-style "point A to point B with enemies and objectives between you" linear maps with the story about how an evil interdimensional force is destroying all the stars in the universe and a coalition of several factions populated by the last living races in the universe fighting to prevent the last star in existence from being destroyed as well. Cliche, but imaginative. All in all it's a solid, fun, goofy shooter meant for MOBA players who like Shooters as well.

As for Blizzard's latest addition to the Battle.net launcher, Overwatch is still a team-based arena shooter but the way it approaches things is a lot more akin to Halo multiplayer or Quake than a MOBA. Matches are attack/defense/payload (as far as the Beta has shown) on asymmetrical maps filled with twists and turns and buildings and all sorts of other potential avenues for tactical advancement. Each hero is, like Battleborn, given their own unique theme, personality, dialogue, and skillset. Each hero has a basic attack with their primary weapon, two utility skills, and an ultimate which charges over time passively and by damaging and killing enemies. The time-to-kill in Overwatch is tiny, with many heroes possessing ultimates that can easily wipe out the entire enemy team if positioned properly. The balance to this is that respawn times are very short and do not get longer. They are essentially as long as it takes you to watch the kill-cam of how you died which is a fixed length of several seconds, and then you are back in the game. The atmosphere of the game is still colorful and full of life and action, but the mood of the game is a lot more serious than Battleborn. Overwatch has the air of a comic book, while Battleborn has the air of a late-night comedy show. I only played the Open Beta for a few days, so I can't give too much else about Overwatch, but I liked it enough that I did preorder it and look forward to playing it on the 24th, and so will give a much more detailed overview of the game when I get my hands on the full version.

To summarize:
Battleborn is a shooter for people who like League of Legends and shows aired by Adult Swim.
Overwatch is a shooter for people who like Team Fortress 2 and Marvel movies.

You can buy Battleborn from Steam here for $59.99: http://store.steampowered.com/app/394230/
You can pre-order Overwatch from Blizzard here for $39.99: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/buy/

#Paragon: 3 Weeks Later

     Tomorrow, Paragon's Early Access turns 3 weeks old, and I've played quite a lot of it since then. Not as much as I'd like to, of course, but sadly I don't get paid to sit in front of my computer screen playing video games all damn day. I've played around 50 games of PvP and have tried numerous heroes and play styles. I've experience pretty much every thing Paragon has to offer at this point, and I think I'm ready to give a finalized review of the Early Access stage.

     Paragon does everything right. Because of this, Paragon was very easy for me to settle in to given my experience with other MOBAs. I was easily able to recognize what heroes were good for what roles given their abilities, the map layout was easy to memorize, the card system was fairly easy to get the hand of if you approach it like custom item sets in other MOBAs, and the movement system and various other mechanics came pretty naturally. However, that is all because I am no stranger to this genre. Coming in to Paragon blind as somebody who has never played a MOBA before may be very intimidating to some players. The game lacks a lot of tutorial aspects, the card system can be confusing, the map can turn in to a maze, and a lot of Paragon's mechanics are fairly complicated, and that's all on top of the general high skill curve that comes just from it being a MOBA. If you're looking to enter in to the genre through Paragon, I would suggest finding something else. At the very least until Open Beta comes this summer.

     As somebody who hated the default control scheme of Smite (ASDW to move, Mouse to look around and aim, 1234 for abilities), I like to think that Epic Games took what Smite failed at and improved on it. ASDW for movement, Q RMB E and R for abilities feels very natural and button presses require minimal finger movement. I have always thought that a fluid and intuitive control scheme is one of the most important things for a MOBA to get right, and Paragon hit the nail right on the head with this one. In addition to the general controls, the movement system is also fluid and easy to get accustomed to. The idea of "Travel Mode" comes off as taking on from Heroes of the Storm's play book, which is fine by me. Having a faster out-of-combat movement mode for getting around the map is something more MOBAs should have, although it is not without risks. Getting hit by an enemy hero while in travel mode will not only disable travel mode, but it will root you in place and disable any movement abilities for several seconds. Some of the most intense moments in a 1v1 lane has been when both me and my opponent were in travel mode and were sizing eachother up, moving closer and closer to try to bait the other person in to disabling their travel mode so we could get in to position, or hopefully root them. Other movement abilities to be expected in MOBAs such as Blink and Teleport come in the form of cards that you can slot in to your deck and pick up in-game.

   

     While on the subject, the Card system is a fairly unique replacement for the traditional Item Shop that most MOBAs use. Players start out with one (sometimes two) starter decks for each hero, and can then earn card packs through progression or by purchasing them for 10,500 reputation (the free currency that can be only earned by completing matches). Each pack contains 5 random cards that the player can add in to the starter decks or create a new deck entirely. Each hero as 2 "Affinities" that are totally not ripped off from Magic: The Gathering's mana colors or anything. These affinities are Fury (red), Growth (green), Order (white), Intellect (blue), and Corruption (black...well, now it's dark purple but same difference). Some heroes have both their affinities as the same, but most of 2 different ones. A hero can only use a deck with cards from their affinities or the generic "universal" affinity (totally not colorless mana) which can be used by any hero regardless of their affinity. Cards are divided in to 3 categories: Primes, Equipment, and Upgrades. Prime cards are only activated after your team is granted the Orb Prime buff by defeating the boss minion in the jungle and delivering the Orb to the drop point. Prime cards give powerful bonuses to both stats and lane pushing power, the exact bonuses depend on the selected prime card. Equipment cards are essentially what you'd expect them to be: potions, wards, and various forms of gear. Some equipment cards provide general stat bonuses, and others have unique activated effects. The final card type is Upgrades. Upgrade cards provide significant bonuses to one stat and can be slotted in to an Equipment that provides the same stat bonus as the upgrade (an equipment that gives attack speed and physical damage can receive an attack speed or physical damage upgrade, but not a life steal or energy armor upgrade). Most equipment cards can have up to 3 upgrades, and provide a bonus for fully upgrading them.
     After you build your deck for a specific hero, you select it at the beginning of a match to use those cards. During the match, you will earn CXP (Card Experience) from killing minions, heroes, and buildings, as well as by collecting from a harvester (a device you can place in the jungle to gather CXP and XP that, when collected, is given to every member of the team). CXP is separate from XP and every Card level gives you 3 Card Points to spend. You spend these points like you would gold in other MOBAs to get more equipment, or purchase upgrades for the ones you already have. More powerful cards cost more, and so require more card levels to purchase. Because of the RNG nature of the card system, there is a lot of concern that the game will become extremely grindy and RNG based when competitive play is enabled, due to certain decks being stronger than others. As it stands, everything you need to be viable is given to you in the starter decks, but the concern is not misplaced. Epic Games will have to be very careful to make sure that they don't add in cards or combinations of cards that result in Meta decks that become required in order to play competitively. All in all, despite potential for issues in the future, the Card system is a well-implemented and fun mechanic that does the job of "item shop" pretty well.
   

     Matches typically last around 35 minutes or so, although you can get some that last 45 or more if the teams are fairly even. In cases of one team being significantly more skilled than the other, matches can last anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes. That brings us to another issue: matchmaking. Right now there is no true MMR system that pairs people up, although it does try to put equally skilled players together using some internal parameters. In fact, the only way to really gauge progress at this point is through the use of http://agora.gg which uses Match History to determine its own version of MMR which doesn't really match up with the one the actual matchmaking system uses, although it DOES provide a clear measurement of progress that the game itself does not offer at this time. All that said, most matches are fairly even, although you will still get steam rolling teams that massacre their opponents.
     The overall pace of the game is not too fast, but not too slow either. It's right in the middle where most MOBAs should be. You have your clearly defined 3-section games, with an early, mid, and late. Early games tends to last around 10 minutes and involves players going through the motions of pushing lanes, leveling up, and gathering card points. Once one team starts to gain momentum and is able to push through the first line of towers, Mid game starts and sees a lot of lane rotating and roaming as both teams try to outmaneuver the other in order to secure tower kills. Late game typically begins once one team has pushed all the way to the enemy inhibitors, starting the typical game of "siege the base until it cracks". There are lots of ways games can play out, but that's just been my experience with Paragon thus far.
     There are only 14 heroes so far, so there isn't a lot of variation in team comps. And in fact there isn't a lot of comp in team comps. The only PvP queue available at this point is Quick Match, which allows a player to select a hero prior to joining queue, and then gets paired up with 4 random other players to form a team. It does seem like the game at least tries to form a viable team, but that could just be due to the fact that there are so few heroes right now. There is a lot of controversy surrounding balance issues among some heroes right now. There's the argument that the melee carries Grux and Feng Mao, the tank Rampage, and the carry Murdock are all seriously overpowered and need heavy nerfs, and to the contrary you get the people arguing that the heroes aren't overpowered, they just are easy to snow ball with due to their kits and require caution to make sure they don't get fed. I find myself in the latter category, although I can't deny that Rampage being able to ult and soak up tower shots like bug bites or Murdock being able to deal 2700 damage in 2 hits late game is pretty broken and should be tweaked, but not as much as people may claim. Overall, despite obvious flaws that can be attributed to the game being in early development, matches are a lot of fun and some could argue even relaxing due to the pacing of everything, but that is broken up when fights start up and it quickly turns in to an intense and energizing brawl.

     As for the developers, I think it's safe to say that Epic Games is nothing if not venerable. They've released quite a lot of classics and hits over the years, and have experience in making Arena-based multiplayer games. Not my first choice for a company to make a new MOBA, but so far they've proven that they can stand with the best of them and have delivered a very promising games. They plan to release a new hero every 3 weeks, which will be very interesting to see, they post frequent blog updates and are very transparent about what they're doing. They are also very community-oriented and have been talking with their players in numerous forums including their own. They've been answering questions and being very upfront and friendly with their player base which is very nice to see from a major player in the Video Games Industry these days. They've also taken to heart the stigma that "MOBAs are toxic clouds of pain and suffering and are infested by the worst of humanity", and have been doing everything they can to stop it. Player Toxicity is met with very fast punishment, and players have come on to the forums to complain that they got anywhere from a 2-7 day ban from the game for their behavior "without a warning". The temp ban is the warning, and I am very happy to see EG cracking down on negative players. The forums are actually more toxic than the game itself is which is a refreshing change of pace. And I'll admit I don't do anything to combat the toxicity in the official forums, but then again my assholiness is brought about by me being blunt about things or responding to people in kind rather than a general desire to cause trouble or flame people. Although, that said it does need to be brought up that a lot of the games playerbase at this time is MOBA newbies who don't understand what they're doing, which has caused a lot of tension in the players who take early access alpha builds of MOBAs deadly serious, which is the epicenter for a lot of the general negativity that is produced by the games community. That, and the fact that Paragon is cross platform with PS4 (and possibly Xbox One in the future if the rumors ring true) which brings up the typical "PC MASTER RACE" argument that serves no purpose, although PS4 players don't have access to chat functionality so that can cause communication issues. There is however a team comms functionality which allows players to make pings and callouts with just the press of a couple buttons.

To summarize, Paragon has proven itself to be a very interesting game filled with potential to stand with League, DOTA, and Smite. The games current state leaves a bit to be desired but that will change with time. It's complicated for newbies, but easy to pick up if you're a MOBA veteran. Matches are fun and  engaging, and relatively toxicity-free. The developers have shown that they genuinely want to make a great game and care about their players' feedback. And as for the community? Well...it's a MOBA community that's for damn sure. 

We'll have to see where it goes from here, but as it stands I highly recommend picking up Paragon if you're willing to be a tester for an unfinished game and love MOBAs. 

O-oh...you were looking for a numerical score? I forgot you people love numbers...um okay...how about....I give Paragon a perfect "I highly recommend picking up Paragon if you're willing to be a tester for an unfinished game and love MOBAs out of 10". There. That's your score.

(You can pick up a Paragon Founder's Pack starting at $19.99 here: https://www.epicgames.com/paragon/founders)

Sevarog: Paragon's Newest Hero

     At the time of writing, Sevarog has been available to play in Epic Games' MOBA Paragon for a little more than an Hour. I was among the first to hop on the second the servers were available and jumped right in to try out the 14th hero to join the growing population of Agora, and was...intrigued. Not impressed, not disappointed, but intrigued.
     Sevarog is a Growth/Corruption affinity Hero that is advertised as being a able to excel in either a Tank or Jungler role. His Passive ability "Soul Tap" allows him to build stacks of souls. Each stack gives him +3 max hp, and his model grows larger and more detailed at 20, 40, 70, and 100 stacks. His Q ability "Siphon" deals physical damage in a line in front of him. Killing a minion with this ability gives him +1 soul stack, while killing a hero gives him +3, and the ability gains a damage bonus every time he grows from collecting souls. His RMB ability "Phantom Rush" let's him dash forward and ignore unit collision, although terrain and Dekkers wall still impede his movement. His E ability "Subjugate" is a long range, small AoE that applies a snare, and then a slow while dealing physical damage. His R ability "Colossal Blow" lets him hit enemies in a cone in front of him, instantly killing minions and launching enemy heroes back a long distance.

     Because of his Q and Passive, he should be spending a lot of time farming minions, although due to his complete lack of any real damage if you build him tank, last hitting with his Q and getting soul stacks can be quite a chore, especially considering the cool down it has in earlier levels and the difficulty in setting up killing multiple minions simultaneously with one cast. Once you get him going, however, he becomes a walking (hovering?) fortress that can soak up tons of damage and provide CC to melee carries, and knock ranged heroes towards his allies to be slaughtered. However, as I said previously, if you intend on building him as a tank, forget about getting kills. You do so little damage without furiously spamming your Q and E (and eating up your energy in the process) that you'd be better off just farming until your team needs you to become a meat shield.
     I foresee Sevarog becoming a highly effective support, however, simply due to his CC abilities. If you build him as a tank, you can body block shots for your ADC, snare the enemy carry so that yours can get some free hits in, or dash behind them for a quick flank and them ult them under your tower if they push to hard. The range on his E is absolutely terrifying, and a skilled user will be able to zone out tanks or melee carries during a team fight just long enough to kill the squishies and tilt the fight in to his teams favor. I'd say practice on landing his E and using it in various situations, and then don't even worry about farming souls, just use tank cards and max out his E first if you want to be extremely obnoxious to the enemy team. The uses for a flat out hard CC are endless, especially in Paragon where heroes like Grux and Feng Mao dominate the lower ELO's due to high mobility and brutal melee damage.

     For items, I would highly recommend building a lot in to CDR and Mana so that you can spam your utilities more often and for longer periods of time. Sevarog really doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wants to be in people's faces crushing people. He seems to me to be more of the cold, calculating type who enjoys manipulating the battlefield. I'd say better to have somebody like steel or rampage fill the tank role, and have Sevarog be built as a control mage. That's not to say don't give him survivability, as you want to be able to survive dashing in to ult squishies towards your team or your towers if you're able. Use your Q to last hit minions as they come buy, and rely on your E to control the battle field and win each fight for your team.

     If you're planning to take Sevarog in to the jungle, I HIGHLY recommend taking some cards to give yourself more physical damage and attack speed. Sevarog does so little damage that his clear time will be extremely slow, although farming with his Q will be much easier. Still build in to items that give him HP and Mana, with a little CDR splashed in for good measure. Only go full tank if you want to stand in the middle of everybody getting shot so your team doesn't and do practically nothing else. Give him some love in other areas to make sure he can actually use achieve his high utility potential.

     All in all, after playing with him for a bit, my personal opinions are mixed. On the one hand he looks totally badass and has a lot of neat abilities, but on the other hand I like damage dealers and his performance in that area is so underwhelming that it's almost boring to me. Nothing he does feels like it has any impact behind it, and his pushing power is almost non existent due to his slow wave clear time. I feel like even though Epic wants to say he's a tank and a jungler, I feel he'll really shine when used by skilled support mains who can take advantage of his CC to manipulate the field to their advantage. I'll have to play with him more and mess around with his kit, maybe build a few decks just to see what all he can do, but as it stands he's not at all what I expected him to be, and there's a lot to be desired with this hero for me. That doesn't mean I won't play him, though. I used to think Anivia was one of the worst champions in League of Legends until I started messing around with her ou tof boredom and saw what she could really do. Now I own her Blackfrost skin, have level 5 mastery, and have been maining her in the mid lane for 2 years now. Maybe Sevarog will be my new Anivia?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA nobody will ever replace my bird.

Not even a pair of disembodied arms wearing a cloak and holding a hammer with a bunch of neat CC abilities.

(If you'd like to try out Sevarog for yourself, you can purchase a Founder's Pack for Paragon for $19.99 here: https://www.epicgames.com/paragon/founders, or you can wait until summer when the game goes in to Open Beta.)

#Paragon Hero Spotlight: Grux

All joking aside, Grux is a strong melee, physical damage scaling Hero that can excel in both lane and the jungle. You want to build him mostly damage with a splash of attack speed. If you are having trouble staying alive, you can sacrifice a little damage to go in to hp. He is one of my favorite Heroes to split-push with, as combining his Q and RMB abilities allow him to clear entire minion waves very quickly, and his raw damage allows him to brutalize towers. Combining his E with his R makes for a very powerful team-fight initiate, where he charges right in to the center of the enemy team and stuns them briefly, allowing him to swing wildly and provide huge amounts of damage while his team wreaks havoc on those caught by his rampage. His E also provides him with an escape should he need it.

Paragon Gameplay

#Paragon: Is it worth a damn?

Today marks the beginning of the Early Access season for Epic Games' new MOBA Paragon. This means that anybody willing to pay at least $19.99 can get access to the early build of the game without having to hope to get lucky and receive a Beta invite. As a long-time fan of MOBAs, I was excited for the release of this game from the moment I heard about it, and naturally grabbed a Founder's Pack the moment they were available on the 13th of March, and after a few days of waiting, I finally got to sign in and play.

     As an Anivia main in League of Legends, I've always had a fondness for mid-lane mages in MOBAs, and so I decided to begin my Paragon adventure with the hero Gideon. He's mana-hungry lane-pusher with a lot of utility in his kit. He can call down an AoE meteor shower for wave clear, a skill-shot slow, a short-range teleport that can get him in and out of fights, and his ultimate creates a black hole that sucks in and continuously damages enemies, making him excellent for initiating team fights. I played a few AI co-op matches with him to get the basics of the game and to understand how to utilize his kit, and then went in to PvP once I hit account level 3 where I played a few more matches and saw a lot of success.

   

The game is fairly straight forward and instantly intuitive to any MOBA veteran. You've got your 3 lanes, with neutral camp populated jungle in between. A marskman and their support go in one of the side lanes, a tank goes on the other, a mage with pushing power goes in the mid, and a high-mobility assassin or crowd controller wanders the jungle to ambush enemies in their lanes. Two towers are placed in each lane and must be destroyed to go after the inhibitors, which allow the team who destroyed one to begin spawning super-powered minions in that lane as well as gain access to the core which must be destroyed to win the game. If you run out of mana or are low on health, you can recall back to your base to heal up and purchase upgrades before heading back out in to the fight. All standard stuff that every MOBA has, so Paragon is not unique in that sense. However, it does add its own flair to things with the gorgeous scenery, unique hero design and aesthetics, and the card system. Which, I suppose the card system is really the only thing I can think of that Paragon does differently, and even then it's just a spin-off of the standard item-purchasing system that you see in other MOBAs. But, it is a neat idea. Basically you play games and level up both your account and heroes to get rewards, all while obtaining Reputations points. These rewards can be card packs, or you can purchase card packs for 10,500 reputation (not with real money, that's the important thing to note here). These packs contain 5 random cards that you build in to decks. These cards contain items such as equipment of various stats, potions, wards, activated items, and upgrades. You then create a deck to suit your favorite heroes and then take them in to battle. The cards you pick will represent the items you can purchase with card points, which are earned alongside xp. These items are added to your slots, and then you can add upgrades to them as the game progresses by spending more card points. On Gideon, I frequently upgraded my items with the Caster upgrades, which increased my Energy Damage output, as well as the Mana and Health upgrades which increased my maximum mana and hp respectively. There are also items I've obtained that provide stats such as attack speed, physical armor, energy armor, life steal, critical strike, and other basic stats that you find in other MOBAs. The idea behind this card system is that the more you play, the more cards you earn, which in turn gives you better items and more options for builds. This is a unique take on things that might make some people angry due to a potential advantage somebody might have over a player that doesnt have as good of a deck, but the fact that you can not get cards by spending real money means that the only way to get cards is to play the game more and more, which equalizes out. A player with more cards than you has probably played more than you have, which means they are probably more skilled than you are which means they have an advantage any way.

     All that said, the game boils down in to a stereotypical MOBA that doesn't do a whole lot differently, but manages to execute the traditional mechanics perfectly. I wouldn't recommend purchasing a founders pack to anybody right now unless you REALLY want to get started, as there really isn't anything Paragon offers that any other established and free MOBAs offers already, but it is still a gorgeous, smooth games that I will be sinking a lot of hours in to. The game will be going free to play when it finally launches, and new heroes will be released for free every few weeks, so there's a lot to look forward to.

     All in all, Paragon is well worth it if you're looking for more of the same in a very pretty Unreal Engine 4 powered dress.

(If you are interested, a Paragon Founders pack can be purchased for $19.99 here: https://www.epicgames.com/paragon/founders)