SMNCs staying power, and a brief update on Halo 4

Recently I was accepted on to the beta test of Super Monday Night Combat. So far the game has been enjoyable, and is certainly a very good attempt at bringing the DotA genre to a shooter perspective. The game has multiple maps, which is something the DotA genre never managed, which are all well made and each one has it's own completely different feel to it. The Pros, this games name for champions/heroes, are also fun to play with most been unique even though a couple are a little too similar. In this respect I can't praise the game enough, so what makes me think that it might not live around to tell the tale?

The casual market is certainly the biggest market right now, and while yes I strive for competitive aspects in each and every game, if the casual market is over looked then the game will rapidly decline. This is bound to be the case with SMNC. Being a DotA style game, it has the learning curve of running head first in to a brick wall. League of Legends countered this with a fantastic tutorial mode, and good in depth write ups of what champions did. They have now also added videos to all the characters so you can easily identify what is what.

SMNC doesn't do any of this. The practice mode it has is actually a custom game mode, with no practice to be found. Also finding information on characters is difficult as the option is a tiny little button not clearly marked. While they have moved it to a better location instead of being down in the bottom right hand corner on it's own, it still isn't clear what it does. This is all in the store page however, come match time when you choose a character I still haven't found a single way that tell you what each champion does. So you have no idea what you are going to be playing as, nor fighting against, if you didn't find it in the store before. With this being a free to play game I doubt peoples first reaction will be to jump in the store. The UI is also horribly clustered, and it force you in to a global chat room which takes up a huge chunk of the home page, something everyone I have played with has complained about. The other major issue I have with this game is the matchmaking system.

Matchmaking is something that is now rapidly growing in the PC market, and I no longer mind this as they are running on dedicated servers and it is used to make sure you get a good match. Sadly this isn't the case with SMNC. The matchmaking just slaps ten people in a game together. Which means that if a premade is going somewhere, as a single player you have a chance to end up fighting against it. I have been in many matches where the premade just destroys me, and I have no way of fighting back. The worst problem about this, is that you can feed champions like in any DotA style game. As you level up you can increase your skills and damage, as well as gaining a passive health and damage increase. Now when you hit level 8 you have already seen you damage increase, and you are also now doing 50% additional damage if you choose to spec into it from the offensive skill. 50% is far to big a number, as if you get fed early on it's not uncommon to be level 8 while the opponent is around level 4-5. As a premade you will most likely have a team of level 8s fighting a team of level 5s, which means the non-premade team has even less of a chance.

The game is a really solid game, with a few balance tweaks needed. This wasn't meant to be a game review saying that SMNC is a poor game, far from it in fact as I love playing it at the minute. However I am used to playing in competitive rule sets and against higher skilled opponents. As a casual player I can only see this game been hell right now until they tweak things and massively improve the matchmaking (Which is something they have actually attempted in Patch 27).  The game will be free to play so I recommend it to everyone upon release as I'm hoping these issues will be sorted out by then.

Halo 4


Just a brief update on Halo 4 folks. Frank O'Connor has come out and told us that "I’ve responded to it a couple of times. There aren’t ‘perks’ in the game as being described here. And classic Halo is still there."

This is good news as it means that CoD style perks won't be used. I didn't think this would be the case as such, and don't think I mentioned as such yesterday. He has also said that the engine isn't the same used for Anniversary, and more news will be out on the composer soon. 343i also asked for some questions which they were planning on answering in an update. Once that update is out I will dissect the information for you all.

The source for the Frank O'Connor quote is found here.