If Riot Games decides to add weapons and a Battle Royale mode to League of Legends, it will look something like the just-announced Survive. In fact, at first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re looking at a new LoL game mode, given the visual similarities between the two. Much of the Supervive team worked at Riot, including the studio’s CEO Joe Tung, who was EVP of LoL. He came up with the basic idea for Survive while there, but technical limitations meant it could never work in League.
However, Survive has become much more than a LoL game mode, and the only real similarities now are the appearance and character selection with MOBA-style abilities. I tried it out during a recent hands-on session, and it’s closer to a fast-paced top-down character shooter where you compete as a team or solo against 39 other players in a battle royale. You’ll choose where to drop, kill creeps to level up and collect gear, then go after other teams to defeat them and be the last one standing.
“At first, the game looked and played like a much more traditional MOBA,” says Tung. “18 months later or somewhere around that time, we let players play it and they told us unilaterally that the game was too slow. So this is the closest thing to a reboot we’ve had on the project, we took the game offline for a period of months and rebooted the sandbox from top to bottom. Now the game, I don’t think, shares as much DNA with the MOBA genre, certainly compared to what it was before that point, now the game feels a lot more like an action game.”
Survive moved away from some MOBA elements, and as someone with thousands of hours in League, Dota, and countless other MOBAs, it was hard to let go of things I expected to happen. You move your character with WASD and aim your main attacks and some abilities with the mouse, so there’s no way to control the camera. When playing as a glass cannon from the backline, it was annoying at first that my camera was almost always centered on me when I wanted to watch the frontline of the battle to see what opportunities I could exploit.
When I moved to playing tank leaders, including my guy Kingpin, who is basically a version of Dota’s Pudge or Overwatch’s Roadhog, I finally started to feel a little useful. Throwing out a massive grappling hook and then smashing whoever caught me with my melee stun was satisfying and obvious enough for me to understand the impact my abilities were having.
But Survive has the same problems as a MOBA when it comes to understanding what’s going on in combat, and after four hours I’m still struggling to make sense of every ability that disappears. Even when my team was doing well, winning a game and going top 3 in the next two, I struggled to know what impact I had outside of the most obvious abilities I was hitting, and it was nearly impossible to track if my main attacks were connecting. But it took hundreds if not thousands of hours in Dota and LoL to get going, so I expect the learning curve to be similar, albeit a bit reduced due to the smaller roster.
While the combat does feel like a MOBA with guns, the rest of Survive doesn’t feel much like a MOBA. The map is massive and consists of many floating islands, with gaps between the different areas. You can fly across these gaps with your glider, which is an incredibly satisfying way to get around, but if you take damage while gliding over a chasm, you’ll be impaled, dying instantly, in what is already considered an offensive way to kill someone. Pushing someone is one of those hype moments that really makes you feel good, and I expect it to become the highlight reel for Survive.
“We’ve been trying to figure out how you solve the motion problem for a long time,” Tung said. “You have a top-down camera and you need to have a big world to make a battle royale work, but running through the world with a top-down camera, especially with the MOBA movement model, is not engaging, it feels slow and it’s not fun. [But] the slide is working now and we’ve bypassed this whole set of issues around passing, it doesn’t feel good.”
Then there’s the Survive revival system, which has a huge impact on gameplay. Until the last few fights where the Battle Royale round forces you to team up, running away when the fight is going badly is the strategy to use. If a team member goes down, or even if your team is forced to split up too much, the best strategy is never to play a hero to win the fight. It’s run the hell away and find a revive station. Standing on it will alert nearby enemies, but if you can fill up the progress bar, your entire team respawns and you’re back in the game.
It affects every decision you make. There’s always the question of whether running is the best option, and getting away after your team goes down can be very satisfying. However, the downside is that one death from your squad can be punishing, and often the best play is for the others to tail and run. This means that battles sometimes turn into long-distance poke-fests, with each team trying to draw one ability to gain the upper hand.
I expect when things open up to more players this will become the meta and the epic multiplayer battles I experienced will be rare as there is too much at stake. I hope I’m wrong because dancing on the edge of the ability range hoping an enemy steps in the wrong place isn’t nearly as much fun as jumping in and wreaking havoc is.
The four hours I got with Survive are nowhere near enough to offer any definitive statements (registrations are open for a playtest starting later this month), but I really believe it could be another 10 000 hour game as the dev team likes to claim it will be due to the complexity. There is a lot of potential depth and so much to master that even after four hours I feel like I know very little and am still a total beginner.
The foundation feels strong, the combat is inherently fun when it finally gets going, the battle royale system works surprisingly well and, most importantly, I want to play more. It’s too early to say for sure, but this could turn out to be one of the great live racing games of the future. It’s a bad name though.
