First Impressions: Arena of Valor (NS)

I feel like I have never been a big MOBA person.  I tried out League of Legends briefly and did not get into it.  I tried out Dota2 and played that for an hour or so, but it ultimately did not stick.  I also briefly dipped my toe into Dead Island: Epidemic before that game was taken offline, and while I did have some fun playing that for a couple of hours, in the end I decided that it was not my thing.  So going in to Arena of Valor (after spending a weekend with the beta) my hopes were not too high, but if it turned out the same as all of the others, I would have lost a bit of time, but no real money because AoV is one of the few free to play games currently available on the Nintendo Switch.  So I gave the full game a try, albeit without using any real money on purchasing anything, so still approaching it from a free-to-play perspective.

Why do we not jump to the tl;dr now.  Earlier in the week, I decided to delete Arena of Valor off our Switch.  Not because I was not having any fun, I was frequently having fun when I was winning as opposed to getting gang-shanked forcing me to, in a sense, stare at my lifeless corpse for X number of seconds on the battlefield while our team's towers fell around us.

For those of y'all who are not familiar with Arena of Valor, let me try and break it down quickly.  You pick a type of map (5 vs 5, 3 vs 3, or 1 on 1), you then choose a character who has a particular play style (tank, ranged, magic, etc), you then attempt to destroy your enemy's guard towers which eventually leads you to attacking and destroying their home base.  If you die, your have a respawn timer that, for lack of accuracy, starts at 15 seconds, and grows longer (in essence punishes you, forcing you to play better) each time you die; there was one game in particular where I was killed no fewer than eight times and my respawn timer was somewhere just over a minute.

One aspect that I was frequently impressed with, even while I frequently died myself, was that I found that I was matched with other players who were all or about the same level that I was.  I do not mean skill level, but in-game level based on experience gained while playing.  However, that in-game experience on my side did not directly translate to actual experience in being a better player as I did spend some time trying out other characters and not trying to specialize in the one.  Maybe that was a big part in why I would have bouts of losing?

On that note, I was not a particularly bad player.  I tended to stick using one of the free mage options, Kirxi, mainly because she was not a tank, I was not expected, or capable of leading charges or being in the front line, and acted more as attack and area of effect support.  If I was playing 1 on 1, I would usually choose someone who could take more damage without having to spend a cumulative 5 minutes in a 10 minute game waiting to respawn.  And while there are more than likely, spreadsheets and whatnot devoted to properly building Kirxi and all of the other free-to-play and earned heroes, I really only added skills and abilities that I thought sounded good based on how I was playing.

What ultimately made me decide to delete Arena of Valor off the Switch was looking at the backlog of physical and digital games I had actually paid money for and knowing that I really wanted to spend time with those games and not just the free game that I probably would have sunk more time into if I did not already have a queue.  And as is the case with MOBA's, or at least from my perspective, is that there is no end game, although I know that there is some bits of lore that I either missed or just went right over my head.  Having a random group of characters fighting against each other for no real discernible reason is going to make me lose interest.  Maybe if you were forced to join a faction and from that faction you had a cast of characters who had equivalents on the other team(s).  Like if Bethesda came out with an Elder Scrolls MOBA that had something to do with various people being pulled into the realm of one of the Daedric Princes (not Sheogorath though because that would be too easy of a choice) and forced to fight each other for their own amusement.  That might be something I could get behind.

But anyway, this is where Arena of Valor stands for me.  It was a fun game that contained very little substance that I did not feel compelled to sink any more time than I already had because I have plenty of other games that I am actually wanting to play.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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