Infinite Crisis is WB Games’ answer to the growing popularity of the MOBA. In a decidedly smart approach, they’ve decided to use their licenses to the DC Universe to hopefully create a more engaging and dynamic game than we’ve ever seen before. Will it have what it takes? We sat down with the fine folks at Turbine, the development team behind the project, to see what we could discover.
What we discovered is that the genre is something they know more than a thing or two about. Throughout the interview, we will be referring to the following map of Coast City.
What exactly is Infinite Crisis?
Basically – super heroes, super villains, fighting each other in an urban setting.
Intermingled? So, we’ll see some untraditional alliances?
Yes, because, in the story, the universes are all combining so before they all go back to killing each other, they have to sort of settle the universe; figure things out. Then they’ll go back to killing each other. There’s more to the story than that but that basically lead us to “great, so how do we make these characters larger than life – which they are – even though the cameras pulled back and the guys appear so small. Well, obviously, we have to show the impact on their surroundings, right? These guys are going to be battling it out in Gotham and such, so that lead us to allowing [players to] destroy things.
Yeah, I saw them throwing about 10 cars at each other out front. What’s going on with that?
Right! Why not? They’re super heroes. [If] there’s a car on the ground, you should be able to pick it up and throw it. [If] there’s a wall on the ground, you should be able to break it down, which will become part of the gameplay so that’s kind of what we’ve done. We’re building three maps. The first one is Gotham Heights, which is all Batman, all the time. Dark, foreboding, kind of Goth. It’s [a] fairly well understood domination, capture the point kind of map which we did intentionally to really give short sessions of only 20 minutes. We start with 5 people.
5 on 5, on all maps?
Exactly.
Alright, that’s the perfect number.
We started experimenting with this catastrophic event and said, “well, what if a big giant meteor came crashing into the map and changed thingsâ€, which was really, really cool and exciting and fun. We made some adjustments along the way so we can see out there today that it’s a little bit [of a] different map. Rather than the meteor coming, you know where it’s going and when it’s going but you had nothing to do with that happening. That should change the dynamic. First map, it’s now, take control of the point instead of a lane.
Yeah, people seem to play their MOBAs rather formulaically. You know, same thing every time. So, will there be random elements disturbing that sort of gameplay?
No, not random. Never random because random and MOBA do not go well together. You practice all your strategy and, well, it’s kind of like moving the goalposts in the middle of a football game; it’s no good. But, the meteors are something that will happen periodically throughout the game that you don’t cause, so you know they’re coming and when. They’re just another thing that you have to plan around; control points that you have to take, which should feel more MOBA-esque. The map that we’re talking about today, which is Coast City, it’s not finished but we wanted to start talking about it early. It’s going to come online sometime this summer and it’s really taking it to the next level where destruction is a big part of the gameplay.
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