Small Beginnings: Gigantic's Alpha is underway
Hot on the heels of PAX Prime, Motiga has just kicked off Alpha testing for their upcoming MOBA, Gigantic. According to the official alpha announcement, over the next several months Motiga will add hundreds of players. Unfortunately, only those residing in North America are currently eligible for entry, with plans to share more regarding other regions coming later.
Alpha signups for Gigantic have been live since July, but players can still signup for a chance at making it in. Motiga has yet to say how often the studio plans on adding new players into the alpha.
We had a chance to play the MOBA at PAX, where we battled across an objective-based arena stuffed with two easily irritated 150-foot Guardians, all while playing as a swanky birdman. You can check out our interview with Motiga and said 'birdman' footage below:
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Michael Dunaway has been part of the MMOBomb team for years and has covered practically every major Free-to-Play MMO title since 2009.
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First I would like to point out that Motiga doesn't really like calling Gigantic a "MOBA". And to be honest, I can understand why. From what I could see, there's no minions, there are no lanes, there's no shop with a bunch of items, and there's no towers/inhibitors/ancients/etc. Those 4 aspects alone make up a large part of what makes a MOBA a MOBA. So if the game is lacking those 4, what does else does it have? Well, a roster of different "heroes" to choose from, and gameplay which consists of two teams of 5 fighting each other.
So, is the definition of a MOBA now merely "a game where people pick different characters and then battle it out 5v5"? If that's the case then we need to start calling Call of Duty a MOBA. You get to choose from different types of weapons and classes, and have the option of making each team only have 5 players that fight it out. So if you wouldn't call CoD a MOBA you shouldn't be calling Gigantic one.
I think we need to remember which games actually made "MOBA" a genre in the first place, and base our definition of what a MOBA is on that. Those games were DotA, HoN and LoL. In all three of those games, they all had the same common features: 2 teams, 5 characters, 3 lanes, minions that spawned, a jungle, farming, killing a powerful creature located in the middle of the map for an advantage, and of course the main objective of destroying your enemies towers/turrets and finally their nexus/ancient. THAT's what a MOBA game is. You pick a character, you destroy minions, enemies and towers for gold, you level up and buy items to become stronger, and you cooperate with your team to siege the enemy's base.
This game looks more like Team Fortress 2 than Dota 2, League or HoN. So once again, if you're not calling TF2 a MOBA, why are you calling Gigantic one? BTW, this isn't a post directed toward Spunkify but rather the comments where people were calling it a MOBA. I know why Spunk called it a MOBA ( he had to list Gigantic under one of the categories listed on the site, and MOBA is the closest thing that describes it that we have ).