We’re checking out Bigpoint’s Shards of War for our next “Things You Would Change About” article. In case you don’t know it, we are talking about a free to play sci-fi theme MOBA where players play as Sentinel characters, craft their own gear, fight in 5 v 5 matches to push lanes, drop turrets and claim victory. The game offers WASD controls and quicker game lengths average around 20mins (according to the developers).

There’s more about this game that we like than what we don’t like to be fair, but of the things we think need changing here is our list:

• Underwhelming Turrets - The lane turrets don’t seem particularly terrifying. So many times when playing the game as a squishy we’ve found that an enemy team member has been able to chase us all the way beyond our turret whilst it is firing at them, get the kill on us, and still make it back out with most of their life left. This is an even bigger issue with characters that have big heal ults or extra movement where the turrets seem to be more of a nuisance than they do any great threat, and given that they are your main source of defense in a lane this can be extremely frustrating. Whilst we don’t think there should be an overall ramping up of the damage they dish out, as this would have a snowball effect on reduced minion pushing, harder hero pushing, and slowly but surely extend the game times we do feel there needs to be a balance. What we’d like to see is some sort of feature where the turret grows stronger the closer an allied player is to it, perhaps different range bands, so trying to take down a player that is sat under their turret… well… you’re in for a bad time!


• Lobby Leavers - Players quitting games is rampant. There are two primary reasons why players quit a game, because they think the game is lost or because they didn’t get to play the character they wanted. As character selection is always a “whoever clicks first wins” and doesn’t allow players to queue as the hero they wish to play and match-make players that way, or have a turn taking system so players sometimes get to play their preferred character, it means players quit as soon as they don’t get what they want. The issue is that you then have to queue again, and the queue times are already quite bad with 5min +, worse with the added chance of getting quitters on both teams. Aside from changing how people queue as mentioned, these players should be penalized in the same way that those who leave mid-game should be: queuing with other quitters (which will be a really long queue wait) and flagging up the number of games they have left on their profile.


• No Surrender - The game lacks an option to surrender. The reality is that the game does, for some reason, seem to have its share of quitters who will write off a game as unwinnable and just jump ship leaving the bots to have all the fun (which further propagates a teams’ demise as often as not). It’s not completely unjustified as if a team is far behind then there’s no “underdog mechanic” as seen in some other MOBA where the players behind in levels get a boost to help them catch up to stop the game snowballing. When players quit they get punished as mentioned, which is fine, but it then leaves the other players to carry on a game that is pretty much guaranteed to be a defeat. We think if a player quits and is gone for more than five minutes (enough time to reconnect if there was an issue) or two players leave, then it should trigger an option for the other three remaining players to Surrender the game (2 votes needed) and they still get their rewards (unless one of the leavers was in a group with any of the remaining players to avoid abuse).


• Map Variation - The game needs more varied maps. Unfortunately we’re big fans of Heroes of the Storm and aren’t as fond of the more traditional single/few map MOBA such as DOTA2 and League of Legends, so this is more of a personal thing, but we hate that the maps that are available are all pretty generic and all too similar. Bigpoint has done a good job of churning out Sentinels (the player characters) and have a nice variation, but the maps and modes are essentially the same thing over and over, whilst the game boasts a “get into the action and skip the laning phase” realistically it still is a laning phase, it’s a constant push on the enemy tower with the odd jungle objective thrown in. Not wanting to sound like a fanboi but more developers need to look at Blizzard and try to change things up in their MOBA.

These are some of the things that we would change about Shards of War, but what do you think? What would you change about this game? Would you add anything else to the list? We await your opinions! Let us know!!!!!

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2016 at 10:00 am and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.