League of Legend’s Dominion has been out for a bit now, and I’m still somewhat unsure about it. On the one hand, it’s a lot of fun and lets you play a bunch of different champions. On the other, I still don’t get that MOBA (read: DoTA) feel from it, and playing ranked Summoner’s Rift is still the ‘real’ game in my mind. With that said my day-to-day LoL time is one ranked game, and then a few Dominion games (replacing Normal SR games).
Dominion’s faster pace is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because in almost all games you will get enough gold to complete a core build, and the 10-20 minute timeframe means you can play far more games (and try far more things) than you could playing SR. It’s a curse because there are only a few ‘interesting choices’ to be made during a match. If you capture the top point, you hold it. If you don’t, you attack it. Rinse/repeat until the game ends. There is no counter-jungling, no lane ganking, no laning-to-teamfight-phase transitions, no ward/counter-ward gameplay, no adjusting of item builds based on how the game is going. It really is a simplified version of the game, and I question how successful this will be long-term. Dominion is entertaining now, but I could see it getting “more of the same” very quickly, something SR (because it’s DoTA) has avoided for years (long before LoL came out).
Balance continues to be somewhat of an issue as well. Champs like Ramus, Jax, and Akali are always banned, and for good reason, while champs like Vlad and Nasus are unplayable. This is not a huge issue right now, but when ranked play is available for Dominion, I’m expecting to see some silly, OP combinations played.
In totally unrelated news, I finished Bioshock 1. Great game, great story, got a little long towards the end IMO. The final 30 minutes or so were solid, but the two hours or so before that had a huge “here just to drag the game out” feel IMO. Playing Bioshock 2 now, and so far so good on that front. Considering I picked both games up for $5 on Steam, it’s hard to complain about the value here.
Hardcore Casual 
I was always a little put off by the fact Bioshock 2 was done by a different team. How does it stand up atmosphere/story wise to the first so far?
Bioshock 2 got some hate in reviews, but I very much enjoyed the anti-Ayn Rand plot vibe as a contrast to the prior game, and there were some rather amazing “lore” moments later on (you’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it).
The only thing is that I never really felt threatened as a Big Daddy. It might have been purely psychological (“I’m in an armored suit!”) or the fact that I was already comfortable with the combat system from the first game. Either way, I plowed through it pretty quickly.
I actually don’t mind the plot-through factor. At the end of Bioshock 1 I was pretty tired of the combat, and had resorted to just brute-force wrenching while skipping all the hidden ammo and such. So far at least, Bioshock 2 seems to be better about ammo and the amount of force you need to use.
I also think the hacking mini-game is superior, if only because it’s much faster.
Well, that answers that. :) I’m curious to see what they’ll do with Dominion in upcoming patches.
You only just finished Bioshock 1? A bit late to the party there my friend.
Interestingly enough, I got a university scholarship on the back of an essay I wrote in my senior year of high school about Bioshock, and how it blurs the lines between pointless entertainment and controller-based education and story telling.
Still one of my favorite games of all time.
I enjoyed both Bio-shock games. The first was obviously groundbreaking but I thought the second kept up its legacy pretty well. The only thing I didn’t like about either game was the revive chambers. It just felt too cheap to die and then come back fully revived to the same point you left. At least the save system is flexible enough that you don’t have to use them.
Bioshock 2 had a pretty fun multiplayer. Doubt there are man folks playing it these days of course.
Why not play system shock 2? Isn’t Bioshock just a dumbed down and fancy (graphically) version of system shock? Bioshock was just too easy when I could respawn again and again without cost and slowly get X down.
Anyway, I got through half of Bioshock and realised how pathetic all the puzzles were and just left it… unable to do any more of those stupid things.
It isn’t DOTA though, or MOBA. It is Arathi Basin, forced into a MOBA game, on crack, at the speed of light.
You should read this though, the most fun Dominion game I have had lately:
The nice, yet odd, thing about Dominion is that the game is never over until it actually ends. Since all champs get XP and gold over time, late-game teams can come back from an early deficit.
It’s cool, but it also somewhat cheapens the game IMO, because champ comp almost matters more than individual skill or early-game decisions.
I find the comeback a very nice feature. Though “amazing comebacks” are usually mostly because some champs scale better and at losing team has advantage of faster respawn timers.
For example Jax is relatively weak champ until he gets his 2 core items farmed. And the switch flips and he starts wrecking people and cap points 1 vs3.
I also think dominion supposed to really play with 1 top and 1 bot pushers , with 3 junglers , for some reason its rarely played like this .
You do know that the respawn timers are different based on if you are winning or losing in Dominion, right? The game is orchestrated to be a close game every time.
This is like speeding up the slow kid in a racing game so that he has a chance for a last-second win vs. the person that is actually better at the game.
This isn’t how you design a game you intend to have tournament-play around.
I loved both Bioshock games. Good gameplay, great ambient environment and story. The triumph of the games is really how well they pull you into Rapture – it’s gloomy, dark, broken, a place of drowned dreams.
I can definitely attest to the atmospheric nature of the two games. Normally I don’t go for first person ‘action’ games (I use that term loosely by the way) and instead prefer strategy or RPG.
However, within 5 minutes of starting up Bioshock 1 I was hooked. Perfect, UNIQUE setting IMO.
I haven’t played it that much, but I still haven’t lost a Dominion game. The first three matches were such blowouts that I thought the mode kinda sucked, but the last match I played we barely scraped the win 2-0. And that was actually the most fun I’d had in LoL in quite a long time.
That last match showed me that there are strategies and tactics to Dominion, they’re just not the same as in SR.
Couple of things: I wouldn’t say it’s not a MOBA. I agree it’s not a DOTA-clone, but I think it’s a big leap forward for the genre to leave DOTA behind and make new game modes. I just think we should keep the definition of MOBA as loose as possible and encourage more of this innovation. To be clear, I don’t look at it as a replacement for SR either, but I do think it’s a great supplement.
@Bronte: My brain hurts now. Arathi Basin is far from the first PvP map with a control point mechanic, and since LoL plays nothing like WoW, can we stop making that useless comparison? My brain will thank you.
I came here pretty much to say the same thing. I think that defining MOBA as “DotA Clone” is not the best of ideas. There is so much more that can be done in this genre. Potentially capture the flag, king of the hill, and assault / siege just to name a few. Personally after several thousand games of DotA and SR, I find the idea of new game modes refreshing. I’m pretty bored with the classic style of play.
Beyond that, I think that you are over simplifying dominion play. I feel like the surface has barely been scratched for what different strategies are available. SR can similarly be simplified in my mind: Farm minions. Kill towers. Kill the nexus. As you touched on, and as most players know, there’s a lot more to SR than just that. Likewise I feel there’s a lot to more dominion. I feel like the community is waiting around for the strategy “pros” to feel the game mode out and tell everybody else about the different strategies to use on dominion. The different roles that can be taken. How different champions are actually very good, despite an initial appearance of being under powered on the map. I’ll concede that Veigar and Nasus, the two most dependent upon farming minions for power, are a bit under powered on the map. Other than that, I think they all have a lot of potential. The assumption that Vlad is bad on dominion strikes me as very odd. I don’t exactly think Vlad is in the greatest place at the moment for either map, but I think he’s strong on dominion. His passive ability greatly benefits from the large amount of free gold that you receive on the map.
Normally when I get around to catching up on blogs, I find I almost always agree with what you have to say. This time though I think you are terribly mistaken, as is the rest of the LoL community that see dominion as being a simplified game.
@Saucelah: It’s a primarily MMO focused blog, so it makes sense that’s the first kind of thing people would compare it to in my mind. Though I totally agree with you.
Time will tell. DoTA has stood the test of time, and it’s a formula that has worked amazingly well for years. I’m not saying Dominion can’t do it as well, but its a tough hill to climb.
DoTA/SR work because of the details, the little stuff that turns games around. The “hard to master” aspect. To me Dominion seems to be missing a lot of that. We’ll know in 6 months or so if the game mode has evolved like DoTA/SR evolve, or if we are still doing the ‘same stuff’. It’s honestly pretty hard to tell right now.
Dominion is neat, but as someone else mentioned it feels like a weird hybrid of LoL and Arathi Basin.
My big concern is that it is going to result in its own ugly nerf/buff cycle that will bleed over into SR and hurt the game overall.
We already saw this to a small extent from TT, but fortunately TT was always so unpopular the effect was minimal.
Dominion is more unique and got a lot more hype. It also came out when the LoL community was already much bigger. As a result, Dominion got a lot more attention than TT ever got. So I am very concerned that LoL devs won’t be able to resist the temptation to make sweeping balance changes gamewide based on things that happen in Dominion.