‘Supervive’ Aims to Reinvent ‘League of Legends’ for a New Generation
If you’ve been playing video games on a PC at all over the last 20 years, you’re likely to be at least somewhat familiar with MOBAs. Short for “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena”, the subgenre of strategy games has long been a staple in online gaming, LAN parties, and the esports community. If you haven’t played games like Dota 2 or Smite, you may at least be familiar with a little game called League of Legends, the mother of all MOBAs whose active player base of over 150 million makes it one of the most popular games on the planet.
The thing about MOBAs is that, since their inception as community mods for real-time strategy titles like Warcraft III and Starcraft in the early 2000s, they haven’t really changed all that much. In most matches, two players or teams enter the fray, pick their lane, and point-and-click their way to victory. There’s more to it than that, but for gamers who aren’t fluent in the mechanics of battle arena strategy, watching a game of League of Legends — let alone playing one — can often feel confusing and, to some, kind of archaic.
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That’s a mindset that the developers at fledgling indie studio, Theorycraft Games, hope to change with their new free-to-play hero “battle royale” title, Supervive. With a team that includes industry veterans who’ve worked on games like League of Legends, Halo, Destiny, Overwatch, and Valorant, the creators of Supervive are bringing their diverse experiences to the table to create the ultimate multiplayer gaming mashup that pulls from just about every modern competitive game there is to reinvent the MOBA experience for modern sensibilities.
Recently, Rolling Stone sat down with the developers for a playtest of an early build of the game (described as “pre-pre-alpha”), and over a few hours learned the ropes of its genre mashup mechanics. This version of the game was clearly still a work-in-progress, but the devs have confirmed that they’re targeting a “late 2024” launch for the open beta which will be available to all who register.
With that, here’s everything we discovered during our time with Supervive.
What is Supervive?
Originally announced in June 2023 under the codename, “Project Loki,” Supervive early play testers described it as “League of Legends meets Apex Legends meets Super Smash Bros.” If that sounds like a mouthful, it is, but it also doesn’t quite do justice to the sheer gamut of familiar elements the game invokes. At its core, it’s a top-down, squad-based hero game where teams choose their individual Hunters — characters with unique classes and abilities — to work together on an open map to take down both CPU-controlled enemies and other player-controlled squads.
Unlike traditional MOBAs, which pit a single player or team against another, Supervive’s main mode has 10 teams of four per online lobby (40 players total), all competing against each other and the environment to survive. The Hunter class system, combined with the huge number of squads active across the map is reminiscent of the popular first-person shooter Apex Legends. The map itself is a sprawling labyrinth of different areas with treasure to plunder and new gear to stumble across (a la Diablo). At the start of each round, squads are airdropped into a zone of their choice, where an ever-present storm looms over the map, controlling the arena and guiding competitors into pressure points for combat (like Fortnite).
Moment-to-moment, players lead their characters in real-time with the keyboard and mouse, unlike other MOBAs where point-and-click controls are the standard, and a huge part of the gameplay stems from adeptly traversing the environment, leaping over gaps and perilous traps, and engaging in shooting and melee-focused combat. There’s even a glider that every character can use to make big moves across chasms, at the risk of being hit or running out of stamina (hello, Zelda). The ultimate goal is to complete local objectives, run the map, and wipe out all other squads within the 20-minute time limit. Other modes include smaller two-person duo squad battles, or quicker, more direct battles in 4v4 deathmatch.
How does it play?
Given how many influences Supervive has folded into its core gameplay loop, it’d be easy to assume that it lacks originality. And yes, superficially, the game looks like many of the major hero shooters and MOBAs on the market, but the adaptation of so many familiar elements is one of the game’s greatest boons. From the onset of our playtest, we were guided by a handful of the developers at Theorycraft to learn the ropes in basic deathmatch. Selecting a rocket-launcher based Hunter, the first minutes of the round quickly became a frenzy of gunfire, explosions, and last-minute med-evacs as testers got their footing with movement and attacking.
The controls are easy enough for anyone who regularly plays with a keyboard, with directional movement mapped to the standard “WASD” keys and each character’s special abilities mapped to surrounding buttons. For players unfamiliar with keyboard controls, the game can feel a bit overwhelming as the balance of movement, including precise jumping and switching to the glider requires timely input at the risk of death. The inclusion of real-time shooting adds an additional layer where, unlike most PC-based strategy games, pointing to a basic area and clicking has little effect.
In Supervive, accuracy is key as combat focuses less on area of effect and more direct hits being lined up, akin to a standard shooter. Given its focus on quick reactions married with platforming elements, it’d be surprising if dedicated gamepad controllers weren’t supported for the title’s public beta or full release. Its systems might even be better suited for controllers than keyboards altogether.
At a glance, it’s simple enough to see where the top-down shooting and looting come into play, but what’s harder to glean is the melee, specifically how the Super Smash Bros. elements are baked in. Many characters, like grappler classes, are built around up close and personal combat. The rocket launcher class that we mostly stuck to, for instance, has an ultimate move that lets the players boost in near enemies for a devastating punch that either KO weaker classes outright or slam them into walls or off edges of the map. One key aspect that many players will need to recall is that using a glider to bridge gaps leaves them vulnerable to attack, with a single well-placed hit dropping them into ravines for an instant death. Frustrating when it happens to you, but endlessly satisfying to execute on others, it’s one of the strategies pulled directly from Smash Bros., where the term, “Spiking,” is derived from. Anyone who’s ruined a family game night as Donkey Kong will quickly know what’s up.
Can It Thrive?
In the pre-release phase, the biggest question facing Supervive is whether a game culled together from a dozen other games’ most famous parts can carve out its own space. Is a game with so many moving parts going to alienate casual audiences, or will the familiar bits work together to create a perfect pick up-and-play experience? After roughly three hours of play time during our test, it’s still too early to say. But Supervive has a lot going for it.
In conversation with the developers in between major objectives and firefights, it became apparent that the goal of the team at Theorycraft is to create an accessible multiplayer ecosystem that rewards a variety of gameplay styles. Multiple team members expressed frustration with the lack of evolution in MOBA gaming over the last 15 or so years. For newcomers, games like Dota or League can be impenetrable, as the nature of real-time strategy and arena games means that there are limited options for play. Pick a hero, pick a lane, and learn the best way to win. Rinse, repeat.
Here, the focus is less on rigid offensive or defensive measures and more about experimenting with the endlessly overlapping ways to change the stakes of the game in real time. In one match, our squad — outclassed by the strength of more brutish team builds around us — opted to build a home base lined with spike walls, where we could safely pick off all who approached from a distance. The plan worked for a while, before the storm crept near, leading us to scramble to relocate before the final opposing team ended the round with a targeted nuke on our cluster of bodies. It was hilarious.
If the goal of Supervive is to create those kinds of chaotic moments of perpetual improvisation, the developers are on the right path. Unlike many of the biggest AAA studios, the team at Theorycraft has chosen to lean more heavily on community playtesting than most, with a reported tens of thousands of players entering the game in its pre-alpha stage to provide feedback.
Ultimately, Supervive will live and die on its ability to foster a dedicated community. Whether the game overwhelms or manages to thread the needle on creating a low barrier of entry with a high skill ceiling remains to be seen. But as it stands, there’s no other MOBA-like game out there now that allows you to “Falcon punch” an opponent into a moving train. And for that experience alone, everyone should give it a go.
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