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MOBA Fates Forever fights for space on your iPad
Fates Forever is a fantastic iPad-only MOBA with gorgeous graphics and intriguing gameplay. It is free to play and available on iPads using iOS 7.0 and up. It is a game of balance: you must defend your base while attacking the opponent's base. The game features three different modes: bot, co-op, and online, all of which are fun. You can practice battle strategies and get a feel for how the game works in bot mode. co-op mode is a step up from bot mode where you play with other people against bots. The online mode is a lot of fun because it features three vs. three battles which means amazing twists of fate. For instance, your team could be making a lot of progress attacking the opponent's base but if you do not keep a watch on your own base, the opponents could easily take control. Each match lasts around 15 minutes, sometimes upwards of 40 minutes. It depends on how you play and how well your competitors do. You gain levels in Fates Forever when you win matches. These levels help unlock relics, which are skills that offer passive and active abilities. You have to choose a relic at the start of each match and tailor your strategy around it. For example, the "restoration relic" provides a small amount of health when you kill an opponent's minor enemy, known as a tribute. When you tap on the relic's icon during the game, you will make it active and for the restoration relic, it will instantly heal yourself and nearby allies. I found this relic helpful in a lot of cases where I was surrounded while attacking an opponent's base. The character you choose also affects how you play. If you choose May, the lynx, you will focus more on archery. If you pick Renwil, the warthog, your attacks will be heavy melee-based. This allows different types of players to focus on their own style of gameplay. I really like using melee characters but it was nice to try out different characters to see what fits best. I also enjoyed the use of grass, which hides your character from the other players. This made it easy to surprise opponents and seek some refuge when things started to get dodgy. Another nice feature lets you recall back to the starting area. This is helpful because it lets you visit the store to stock up on health and other items. Fates Forever starts off with a six-step tutorial which does a great job of explaining the gameplay and easing the player into the game world. As you play through a match, you unlock more skills for your character. This is reset at the beginning of a new match which is helpful for people who want to experiment with different tactics. Fates Forever has fun daily quests. The daily quest I played was to win with a certain character five times. Completing it rewarded me with some ore, a type of currency in the game. Ore is used to unlock characters, which range greatly in price, so it is easy to see someone spend a lot of time collecting currency. Interface bugs got in the way of the fun. For example, the match making would sometimes put people in a match with someone of a much higher level. The controls were not the most responsive, but these problems are not great enough to deter someone from enjoying the game. With the many different characters to choose from, daily quests, three play modes, and combinations of armor/weapons, Fates Forever is a great free game for people who like MOBAs.
Mobile MOBA Fates Forever offers official trailer
Back in June we learned about a new MOBA that was being developed for tablets... and only tablets. Called Fates Forever, this self-proclaimed re-imagining of League of Legends utilizes gestures on the touchscreen for movement and activating attacks in three vs. three real-time combat. Curious how this plays out? Hammer & Chisel has released an official gameplay trailer that showcases some actual in-game footage as well. You can get a glimpse of a few of the heroes as well as see some combat in the video after the break.
OpenFeint developer aims for a hardcore audience with Fates Forever MOBA
Jason Citron is a true veteran of iOS gaming. He was one of the two developers behind Aurora Feint, and later vaulted it up to the huge social network that OpenFeint became. Now, Citron is back to making games with a new company called Hammer & Chisel (formerly Phoenix Guild), and he's just announced today that his upcoming game is called Fates Forever. It'll be a multiplayer online battle arena title, similar to the extremely popular League of Legends, but built from the ground up for iOS and a touchscreen interface. "If you look at games," Citron told TUAW recently, "very rarely do you find one that's generally new, and usually when you do, it's because of the UI change." Citron believes that even hardcore games "could be made materially better by changing them to use a large format touchscreen," and so he's decided to take on the MOBA gametype. Fates Forever will have battling heroes, just like League of Legends, but with a simplified format... at least at first. The map Citron is working on features just two lanes (it will pit three players against an opposing team of three, and matches should take around 15 minutes), and he says a lot of the mechanics around itemization and balance have yet to be determined. His focus right now is building standard touchscreen gestures for the heroes' various abilities. "The skillshots are all these fun little gesture things that you can pull off," says Citron. One champion will do a dash move that's controlled by dragging him around the screen with your finger, for example. "You hit the button on the left, you get a little ring around him and then you can drag the indicator away from him. When you draw out a path from him, he shoots flames on the ground." Citron says the goal is to take gesture mechanics that users know and love, and use those to match the precision and controls that you'd usually need a mouse and a keyboard on a PC for. When Citron began this project, the MOBA genre was very much PC-based. But in the last few months, several companies have thought to bring it to tablets. For example, Gameloft's Heroes of Order and Chaos, and Zynga's forthcoming Solstice Arena. "I figured [MOBAs] would be a trend," says Citron, but adds that "I can't say that I would have expected as much action to be going on tablets." Still, Citron says Zynga's entry will likely be tied down by in-app monetization efforts, and he thinks he can do the game better than Gameloft has. "I think ours looks better, has more innovative controls and it's generally fun to play." The plan for Fates Forever is to have "the core battle game out this summer, with a very light metagame around it." Once the core app is out, Citron and his company (currently about five full-timers and about the same number of contractors) plan to tweak and upgrade it according to the community, and will even build a tool called The Forge, where players will be able to suggest and build their own heroes, with that content possibly even reaching the game. "I very much see this as a marathon, not a sprint," says Citron. "I see this as a long-term thing. I'm starting with a nugget of something, and we're evolving it with the community." Citron's goal with Fates Forever is to "blend deep traditional game design with respectful game mechanics," he says. "It's obviously going to be free-to-play," and supported by in-app purchases for options and customization. But "our game will never force you to stop playing," he adds. "And you can't pay to win." Currently, the project is being put together in Unity, and while it will initially appear on the iPad only, the title may come to Android or other platforms later on. Fates Forever sounds interesting. We'll get a chance to play it later this year. Plenty of other companies have aimed and will continue to target this growing "hardcore" audience on Apple's tablet platform, but that specific audience is finicky to say the least. In the end, Fates Forever will have to stand on its own quality. If it can find the League of Legends-sized audience on tablets that Citron is looking for, then we could be playing this one for a long time to come.
Fates Forever is MOBA enough for PC but made for a tablet
The MOBA market is pretty full these days, but Hammer & Chisel is trying to find a unique angle with Fates Forever. It's meant to have everything you'd expect from a MOBA, with the game outright calling itself a re-imagining of League of Legends. But you can't play this game on anything less than a tablet. No smartphones, no consoles, no computers, a competitive MOBA designed only for use on tablets. So what makes it uniquely designed for tablets? Fine touch controls, for one thing. Instead of clicking, you can use gestures to direct your heroes, and you can also activate special attacks specifically via the touchscreen. That opens the door for controls that would be tedious or unworkable on a PC and cumbersome on a smartphone. How successful this approach will be remains to be seen, but the game is aimed for a release later this year. [Source: Hammer & Chisel press release]
