Realm of the Titans Comprehensive Sneak Peek Pt. 1

Recently I was able to visit Aeria Games and demo their new game Realm of the Titans. For those of you unfamiliar with Titans, it’s a MOBA or massive online battle arena similar to League of Legends, Dota, and HoN. The common objective in Realm is to destroy a set of structures leading up to your opponents base and ultimately destroy the enemies “home base”. It’s a formula MOBAs adhere to pretty strictly and Realm is no different. However Realm aims to change how we play the game up to that point.

By combining familiar dota and league of legend gameplay elements, Titans looks to carve out a niche for MOBAs where players can have a hardcore dota like experience with creep blocking and denying, with the customization experience found in LoL’s masteries and summoner spells. Over the next few days I will be outlining my experience with the new MOBA and my overall thoughts and impressions of where the game is and where its headed.

Titan Skills

While some MOBA elements remain constant from one game to the next Realm’s Titan Skill System is what sets itself apart. The Titan system allows a player to choose a certain skill or attribute to use in addition to the standard four they have access to via their hero. This skill can be anything from a simple heal to a passive slow, invulnerability, temporary stealth, a fireball skill shot and so on. But just having a lot of different skills to initially pick from wasn’t enough for Realm. Often times when you pick summoner spells in League of Legends you find that the team you face off against would be much easier to handle if you had picked a different spell. Realm aims to fix this by allowing you to swap out your Titan skill every minute or so. Yes you could start the game with heal and then switch to a completely different ability later on.

I found I swapped every 4 minutes or so depending on what my current objectives were. If I wanted to gank I switched to a passive slow on my attacks, If I wanted to heal up quickly I switched to a spell that allowed me to heal at the neutral shops instead of trudging all the way back to base. On top of all of this the majority of the spells passively scale up to four times as the game goes on, ensuring that they are always viable stat wise. This element of diversity can really impact the way a match could play out and it will be cool to see just what crazy strategies and spell combos we see emerge once players get use to the system and spells. At the time we demoed the game, Realm had over 20 Titan skills available. When I asked if they would all be available at the start, associate producer Travis Hawk said, “Almost all the Titan skills will be available to players at the start; we don’t want people to feel that others may have a significant advantage because they have had more time to gain access to more of the skills”. I did see a few skills that were disabled until a players profile had reached a certain level but those all could be counted on one hand.

Just having loads of skills though doesn’t make a players experience feel unique. Realm recognizes this and allows for yet another layer of Titan skill customization. After every match you gain battle points (or B P for short). These can be spent on a wide variety of things but in particular they can be spent to upgrade certain Titan skills. You heard right, you can upgrade and customize your Titan skills outside of a match using a system called AMP. Travis gave us an example “say you really like using the fireball, you can purchase upgrades that allow it to have a farther range, more damage and a shorter cool down. But these are flat changes, you can also upgrade the ultimate slot which allows for things like the fireball to pass through and hit a whole line of targets instead of just one”.

Skill changes like these go beyond the flat changes to summoner spells that masteries provide in League of Legends. Travis tells us that they are far from finished with the Titan system, “we are constantly updating it in order to provide more customization options to the players, we really can’t wait to see what players do with it”. I have to agree, it certainly will be interesting to see what players figure out they can do with the Titan spells especially since they can be swapped and customized before hand in order to pull off some pretty epic combos!

Be sure to check back here to MMOHut tomorrow as we discuss the new map in Realm of the Titans.

By, Michael Dunaway