About a week ago, I got an e-mail granting me access to the closed beta test of Motiga’s in-development MOBA title, Gigantic. Now, most of you are probably well aware of the hurdles the studio has been facing, such as having recently laid off a significant portion of Gigantic’s development team on account of insufficient finances. Although Motiga is still “aggressively” negotiating with investors to reinfuse life (i.e., money) into the game, it seems that things are not looking particularly bright for Gigantic’s future.
In spite of that, I’ve spent the past week or so dabbling in the game to see how it’s shaping up. If things pan out for Motiga — and I certainly hope that they will — then we can consider this a preview of things to come. But if they don’t, then I suppose I can at least give you some impressions on what may have been. At any rate, after taking the game for more than a few spins, I think it’s about time I share my thoughts.
The core gameplay of Gigantic will be familiar to anyone who has ever played a MOBA, but that’s not to say it’s just another League of Legends or DOTA clone. Basically, it works like this: Each team fights on the behalf of a gigantic mythical creature (hence the game’s title), and the idea is to destroy the enemy team’s guardian while protecting your own. Placed at strategic points throughout the map are nodes at which players can summon creatures that provide benefits such as healing, enemy detection, and so on. Summoning, upgrading, and protecting summoned creatures generates power for the team’s guardian, so players have to strike a balance between guarding their own creatures and attacking those of the enemy team.
Once a team has accumulated enough power, its guardian will go on the offensive, making its way to the opposing team’s end of the map to do battle with the enemy guardian. During this time, it’s up to the attacking team to fight their way into the enemy base and do as much damage to the other team’s guardian as they possibly can before their guardian retreats and the cycle begins anew. All in all, it’s a pretty straightforward affair: Fight the enemy team, level up your skills, accumulate power for your guardian, and try to take down the enemy’s as quickly as possible. One thing that I particularly appreciate about Gigantic, though, is that it has a system in place to ensure that matches don’t drag on for hours on end.
Instead, after the game has been going for a while, the guardians will meet at the center of the map for a final clash. During this final clash, no new monsters can be summoned (though already-summoned monsters can still be upgraded, and enemy monsters can still be killed), and essentially the game turns into an all-out brawl between the two teams and their guardians until only one is left standing. As someone who has to do a great deal of his gaming in smaller, bite-sized chunks, I appreciate the fact that I can jump into a game of Gigantic without worrying that the match will go on for an hour and a half when I’ve only got thirty minutes to play.
I was also a fan of the third-person, action-oriented gameplay that Gigantic employs, mostly because I’m almost universally terrible at the top-down, RTS-style MOBAs that tend to be the norm for the genre. Depending on the character you choose, Gigantic can play like either a third-person shooter or a good ol’ hack-and-slash, and that style of play is, at least in my opinion, much more engaging than looking down on the action from above. It does, however, mean that performing well in the game relies to some extent on twitch skill and sheer reflexes, which some players may not find to their liking.
Gigantic’s roster of playable characters is an incredibly diverse one, as well, in terms of both aesthetic and playstyle. There are human characters, nonhuman characters, male characters, female characters, characters of various ethnicities, plus one little girl with a very large sword. I sampled many (though not all) of the available characters during my time with the game, and my far-and-away favorite has to be the fur-clad sniper, Imani, who excels at dishing out obscene damage from outrageous distances. She’s pretty much useless at close range, and the assassin Tripp was my worst nemesis in most matches, since my only real option was to toss a smoke bomb and try to hoof it out of there before I was spotted and run down again.
The game also has a pretty interesting meta-progression system in place in the form of the Fortune Card system. Every day, you get to choose one of three possible Fortune Cards (though you can get additional draws by way of microtransactions), and each card is associated with a certain objective. Some of mine included winning three matches, killing the player who last killed me multiple times, and so on. Upon completing the goals listed on your fortune cards, you get rewarded with a hefty amount of in-game currency that can be used to unlock additional characters, skins, and summonable creatures. It’s not exactly the most complex or in-depth progression system I’ve ever seen, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately, I found it to be a great incentive to play “just one more game” to try to complete that one Fortune Card objective for a big payout.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Gigantic focused on it being nothing more than an “Arathi Basin clone,” referring of course to World of Warcraft’s (in)famous territory-control battleground, and while I can certainly see where those criticisms are coming from, I personally had a lot more fun in Gigantic than I’ve ever had in a game of Arathi Basin (fight on the node, not in the road, et cetera). But then again, I generally don’t care much for MOBAs, so maybe that’s exactly what Gigantic is: a MOBA for people who don’t like them. Your mileage may vary, of course, and given the recent struggles that Motiga has been facing, it may be a moot point before long.
But in my opinion, Gigantic has the potential to bring a fresh perspective to the already oversaturated MOBA genre, and I’d love to see the studio make a comeback and put the game firmly on the map. Whether that will actually happen, however, we’ll just have to wait and see.
