Sunday, March 11, 2018

Gigantic knives win gun fights

I spoke about the recent AoS derivative game Gigantic some time ago, so I won't go into much detail now. As it's being scuttled by its parent company by this July*, I might as well get a couple of posts about its more salient features in under the wire.

Those, my poor quality-deprived friends, are choices!

So-called MOBAs, being dumbed down from the original Starcraft / Warcraft custom RTStrategy maps to suit the fast-fingered, slow-brained tastes of whiny mass-market millennial trash, tend to lack tactically-relevant customization options. I don't care if it's DotA2, LoL or Smite. Even buying gear is almost always a straight climb up a blatantly obvious upgrade ladder. Some of the less known or newer titles like Prime World or Paragon offer much more pre-game customization through collectible card decks, but even they're pretty weak on letting players adapt after match start.

Gigantic, on the other hand, appended miniature two-deep skill trees to heroes' combat abilities, plus a choice of specializing in one of three abilities at level five. Some of these are mere damage or resistance upgrades while others can radically alter how an ability functions, adding force fields, teleportation, etc. More interestingly, they resisted the urge to make every choice valid for every match, thus qualifying as one of the few development teams to realize that "situational" is not a dirty word. The character above is a high-damage melee assassin / bruiser type, so for most matches the bonus damage option with the added stun is the obvious choice, hands down. Occasionally, you'll be fighting a tank-heavy team and the armor break will be more important. Rarely, very rarely, you'll be fighting a firing squad team.

Quite satisfying to stand in front of three idiot parasitic snipers -not killing them- cracking your whip above your head, tanking enough damage to kill you five times over while your teammates whittle them down. Suck my iconoclasm, bitches.




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* I'm well aware this may just be a publicity stunt by the company, as developers rarely give such long warning. Still, the game was intriguing enough to warrant publicity.

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