Vainglory

[penk]

I’ve been on the lookout for a new game to put my new Moto X Pure Android through, a device that’s extremely high powered and seems perfect for games. Ever since I saw the tablet revolution taking over gaming, I’ve been hoping for a decent, realtime, immersive game that I could get behind. (Why WoW and Eve aren’t on tablets yet is beyond me).

My son Zach was a huge booster of MOBA games before they were cool. DOTA2, and later League of Legends were daily activities. I tried them off and on, but found the complexities and knowledge curve too much for casual gaming.

Enter Vainglory.

Many companies have claimed to make the MOBA experience enjoyable on a mobile device, but this is the first one that’s gotten me completely hooked. I’m still in casual play mode, but I’m finding it intensely enjoyable. The graphics are magnificent, the characters interesting and varied, and the gameplay is perfect. It’s a dead-on implementation of the MOBA ideals (and yes, it has last hits :).

I’ve put in a couple hours so far, getting a feel for 3 of the heroes. There’s so much more to learn – if you watch the videos on the Vainglory channel on Youtube, watch the detailed rundowns of how to play each hero. The technicalities are vast and deep, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to that point with more than 1-2 favorites, but I’m ecstatic that the company behind the game (awesomely named ‘SUPER EVIL MEGACORP‘), spared no expense in making the game easy to get into, but also having huge depth to it.

Anyone want to team?

Comments

[drwex]

The reasons that many games haven't gone to tablets (and why many mobile-to-PC ports fall flat) include:

- limited framerate. It's rare to see anything on tablet driven above 30 fps whereas anything on PC under 60 is laughable and 120 is common even on cheap gaming PCs.

- Aspect ratio/FOV locks. Without a specialized graphics card to render these things you end up having to program all of this into your app or more likely just leave it out. On a PC you just make calls into the graphics library and it's done on the card, vastly reducing your code burden.

- input device issues. Yes, you can hook up a tablet to a keyboard and mouse but that's kind of like putting sled rails on a bicycle. A PC's (or for that matter game console's) specialized input hardware allows for a MUCH higher resolution of control and accuracy than anything tablet/touch can manage. Those games that require targeting on tablet almost always use some kind of in-game auto-aim or lock mechanism because otherwise you have sad players. And don't even TRY matching up a tablet gamer in any sort of PvP against a PC gamer. The tablet gamer would be instantly destroyed.

None of this is to say that there aren't good games on tablets and that their hardware will get better - both true. But trying to take a game like WoW or EVE and putting it onto a tablet would result in hilarity and frustration, not a good gaming experience.