Vainglory Release Date: Will Dota 2 And League of Legends Players Try iOS MOBA? (+Game Overview Trailer)

A new multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game is about to enter the fray. 

The PC MOBA market is rather saturated, so game developer Super Evil Megacorp has decided to go ahead and make a MOBA for the iOS. 

Vainglory was introduced at Apple’s September 9 launch event.

The iOS only game is slated to be out some time in October, and slowly roll out globally by the end of 2014. 

Kristian Segerstrale, COO and Executive Director of Super Evil Megacorp, told IGN that their mobile MOBA, is “an unapologetically core MOBA — not dumbed down, but a real MOBA with the kind of control precision and graphics you expect.”

Super Evil Megacorp co-founders’ Stephen Sherman and Tommy Krul also spoke to the Guardian about their thought process of making the MOBA. 

“For it to feel like a legitimate MOBA, certain things had to be in place. It had to be a skill game, it had to be fair, it had to have zone defense, and players had to know what their roles were, where to go, and how to interact with their teammates in a way that was useful,” Sherman said.

“It had to be tactically competent: it couldn’t be reduced so far down that you couldn’t have the skill depth and the element of overpowering your opponent mentally, and trapping them,” Sherman added. 

Vainglory has a single lane as compared to the three found in a PC MOBA, and will have a jungle area and mines for players to get gold.

“We really want to maintain that level of decision making, skill cap, and strategic and practical depth you’d expect from a core MOBA,” said Segerstrale.

“There’s a jungle shop in the middle, if you want to live dangerously.”

One game is expected to last about twenty minutes, and to make sure games end at around that timing, a Kraken will spawn in the jungle at about the fifteen minute mark that teams can dominate to help them out. 

So will experienced Dota 2 and League of Legends players take to the game? 

“We wanted it to be approachable, but deceptively deep,” said Sherman.

“We have some cool ideas about how we are going to onboard players who are new to the genre.”

Krul added: “It’s like the layers of an onion: you have to create a core which is actually very deep, and then you build the shells around it that allow people to easily get into the game.”

“It’s about converting players from ‘Let’s check out what this game is because it looks kinda cool’ to ‘Holy shit! There’s actually a lot of stuff here and I’m enjoying myself for hours on end.

“That’s where the magic happens, and that’s what we’ll hopefully be able to do.”