By GG-Kaboom 2 years, 5 months ago • 0 Comments
Are you a Dota fan? Then you’re going to love this game. At PAX I had the opportunity to check out League of Legends. I met with Jeff Jew, a lead representative for Riot games. Yes, I did get to play but let me break down the facts first. The game is a sequel to Warcraft 3. It’s just like Dota but upgraded. There’s new characters, maps, stats system and shopping menu. Mmm Shopping. Speaking of new characters some of them go by the name of Teemo, Morgana, Ryze and Annie.Since the character models in Warcraft 3 were directly pulled from Warcraft there was no room for extras. So with this game, Riot was allowed to venture off and create more heroes some of which are very unique such as Annie. She’s known for her teddy bear of death basically. Creepy? I know.
In total League of Legends has about 35 heroes in their current beta, but there will be 40 by the release date. Unlike Dota, the average round in League of Legends is around 30-45 minutes long as compared to the 1-2 hour. My main problem with RTS games in general are the complicated controls and camera angles, but not anymore. Riot simplified the keys to make them easy to understand. All your spells, items and other things are mainly on the left side of your keyboard. That way you only have to use one hand for your controls leaving your right hand to stick on the mouse for moving around. Your primary keys are A S D W and 1 2 3 4. Can’t get much easier then that. They also have a “lock camera” option which is set to Y which sets centers you in the camera automatically.
One other worry I had was newer games usually take more effort from video cards to run such as Crysis, Mass Effect 2 and so forth, and considering how many gamers are still running 8800’s and 9700’s it brought me next question to, can an average video card run League of Legends? Jeff’s answer was short and sweet, “If you can run WoW, which most computers can, then you’ll have no problem running this game.” It’s also 100% free to download and play and has an expected release date of October 6th.
On to the good part. My first game play experience with League of Legends. I’ve played Dota in the past (which is very similar), but overall I never was a huge RTS gamer. I would easily get overwhelmed with all the hotkeys, skills, shop items and such. But I do enjoy how RTS games suck you in and keep the game play highly intense through the whole round. Either way, It’s worth a shot even with my lack of skill for RTS. Apparently players really enjoyed the game because all the spots were taken. Luckily, Jeff asked one of the booth workers to swap me spots so I could try it out, woot! I took over as Blizcrank which is a Gollum like hero who kicks serious e-butt. It was 5 vs. 5 and I had Jeff at my side coaching me through the game. When I said the keys were simplified, I meant it. I picked up the controls within 5 minutes, and had everything memorized. Q was my grab skill, R was my Ulitmate, you get the idea. The graphics looked more “buffed” and touched up from it’s prequel. I guess you could say the graphics were a bit cartoonish, but it didn’t have the “kiddy” feel at all. Although they were using the same style of graphics from Dota they looked more buffed and detailed. You could definently tell they did some work on it. Having what little experience I have in the RTS field, I put it to use to try and kill some bad guys. I was getting kills left and right. My kill to death ratio came out to be 10-3 or around there. That’s pretty pro if you ask me.
Bottom line, the game play is very interactive, and keeps you glued to your monitor. League of Legends is highly team based. If you didn’t work as your team, you lost. It was as simple as that. Like I said earlier, I’ve never played RTS much in the past, but this game made me change my mind. I didn’t want to stop playing! Whenever I got free time at PAX I would go back to Riot’s booth, and try to get a spot to play. By mid day they had a full waiting list of players trying to get in. Turned out to be a hit among players. I ended up being able to play a few more times throughout the day. Once I started to hear “Blizcrank is annoying!” (which is a compliment) I figured I’d leave the boys alone. Who would have thought that a girl would be their biggest challenge?
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