Gamescom: EA unveils Warhammer MOBA

By
Steve Bailey

August 16, 2011

EA has announced Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes for PC, to be developed by subsidiary Bioware. The game will be free-to-play, and built around the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) genre of player vs player specialisation. Beta registrations have opened in tandem with the announcement, with official launch due in the fourth quarter of this year.

Further to Wrath of Heroes, EA used its conference time at this year's Gamescom event to reveal a new iteration of its urban sports franchise FIFA Street, as well as unveil the Battlelog and Ridernet systems, social layers for Battlefield 3 and snowboarding title SSX respectively, as evolutions of the Autolog infrastructure present in 2010's Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Mass Effect 3, the final instalment in the sci-fi RPG trilogy and a key chunk of Bioware's current portfolio, was confirmed for release in USA and EU at the outset of March 2012.

The MOBA genre is in definite ascendancy within the multiplayer online gaming space, spearheaded by Riot Games' League of Legends, and affirmed by EA's announcement of Wrath of Heroes. Unlike EA's MMORPG titles Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Star Wars: The Old Republic, Wrath of Heroes is sidestepping an obligatory subscription, and instead embracing the free-to-play structure which is often seen in other MOBA titles. Valve Software has also taken the opportunity to detail Defense of the Ancients 2 at Gamescom, an apt presence given that the original DotA (a popular mod released for Blizzard's Warcraft III in 2003) is regarded to be the forebear upon which games such as League of Legends are built.

Legacy aside, MOBA games are intriguing for what they represent, namely a dynamic bridge between two slowly-blurring paradigms: the team-deathmatch facilities of client-purchase games (both packaged and digital), and the online-service approach of MOG titles. Of course, team PvP aspects have long been seen in MMORPGs (such as the Arena system added to World of Warcraft several years ago), but we're now seeing the legitimisation of this feature as a genre in its own right.

IHS Screen Digest has recently published a report on MMOG/MOG, forecasting the market to 2015 in the western world, along both subscription and microtransactional monetisation models. MOBA games are included in this report under the MOG banner, but are not yet split out from the overall market sizing and forecast.

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