Beta Test: Arena of Valor (NS)

It has now been a few weeks since the Arena of Valor closed beta on the Nintendo Switch started and has since ended.

Before going into the game, what I knew was limited to the fact that it was a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) akin to League of Legends or Dota 2, both of which I have playing only a combined time of about seven hours; 5.5 D2, ~1.5 LoL.  I also put in about 2 hours on the now dead Dead Island: Epidemic, but that was more MOBA-esque than the previous two games.

So that is some context with me going into the Arena of Valor beta the other week.

Not having played a MOBA on a console before, I appreciated the handful of tutorial levels that I felt more orientated me towards the control layout as opposed to how a MOBA is played.  I started off playing a one on one match and the tutorial culminated in the regular five on five, three lane match that is common in this genre.  The very nice thing too, was that all of the tutorial levels were played with and against computer controlled players.  And here is where I feel like what I am about to write is going to get really weird.

I loved the fact that I felt I was able to learn the mechanics of the game while not playing with real people, especially real people who are strangers scrutinizing my every move, misstep, death, and apparent lack of MOBA hardened strategy.  I felt that I could make as many mistakes as needed to get used to how the starter character operated.  I could die as frequently as needed to recognize when to attack, when to retreat, and how to gauge my healing ability versus making a run to try and topple a tower.  However, if there were no other human aspect to this game besides me and Arena of Valor was a single player experience, I would probably play no more of the game than the one hour I put into this beta.

This is obviously not a new found critique of the MOBA genre, but I feel like Arena of Valor works best when played with other people, preferably people you know, or at the very least, for me to play the game with people I know.  Other people may prefer to play with strangers, but being me, if I am going to be playing any game where you are expected to work together as a team, I want that team to be people I already know.  So for the few games that I played against whom I presume to be real people (although from what I read during the beta, most/all early matches were all against computer opponents), I mostly played in the one-on-one single lane match.  This just made more sense to my preferred play style of not having to worry about failing four other ream members, only myself.  However, only playing in one-on-one single lane matches, you lose out on a lot of what makes MOBAs so popular.

But let us get back to Arena of Valor specifically since that is why we are all here.

In short, the beta ran fine for me, except the one queue I waited in that was supposed to last 32 seconds and ran just over 4 minutes; but I came in expecting that from a beta test.  Arena of Valor operated just as I was expecting a MOBA to with a handful of characters that operated as your standard ranged, magic, support, and tank options.  I did not notice much of any performance issues playing in handheld on the Switch, and if there was any skipping, it was minimal enough to make me feel like it was never there in the first place.  If you had told me that this was simply a demo for the game and not a beta test, I would have believed you and concluded that while somewhat fun, I just do not think that this would be the type of game that I would play on a regular basis.  

Sitting Pretty At 15%.  Whatever That Means In Terms Of My Team's 118%.

Unless of course there are other friends out there who want to run some lanes and kick the crap out of people without ever having to actually talk to each other.  But just a word of warning: I might be the weakest link on the team.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

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