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Colt guides us through the first-time player experience for Vainglory’s PC Alpha, as well as a full bot match!

Transcript below.


Hey everybody it’s Colton for MMOHuts.com and today we’re going to look at the new player experience for Vainglory’s PC alpha. I wanted to do more of a first look, an evaluation of where the game’s at, but it’s too early in its alpha to really give it a fair shake which I’m trying to be more considerate of. So we’re going to look at the new player experience, this is what you will go through the very first time that you boot up this game. It’s going to greet you with a tutorial. You’ll have the option to skip it if you’ve played Vainglory a bunch, but I recommend going through it, even if you’ve played it on tablet or mobile, just to get a feel for how things work on PC. We’re going to go ahead and click on the first bit of the tutorial here. Mmkay. So if you didn’t know here we are, there’s a bit of a loading screen, I cut it out. The thing about this alpha is that it still thinks that you’re playing on a tablet. It tells you how best to hold the tablet or mobile phone, which is a little bit vexing, but it will get fixed I’m positive. I look at this less as an alpha and more of a pre-alpha proof of concept. Alright, now it’s going to right click to move, that’s pretty much the same as any MOBA. QWER are where we’re going to find our abilities, I believe it’s about to teach us how to level those up. Alright. It makes you manually click them in the beginning, for reasons I’m not 100% certain of. But once you’re in play – it could be something wrong with my hot keys. It’s basically just teaching you how to level up skills and how to fight an enemy champion. Cool. And you get stars at the end of your tutorial that show you how well you did. You can’t really move on until you complete the objectives, that I know of, so why exactly does this – not 100% – but you do get Koshka as your first character, and you will unlock more characters for completing the tutorial – it unlocks a handful of characters for you to play with. Alright, so, here we’ve got our – I’m going to – this is super frustrating – I have no idea why it’s not letting me use Q, W, E, and R. Or Q/W/E. Now Kashka’s abilities all work on the turret, so during this tutorial make sure you’re using your abilities to get through it faster. But basically it’s just going to make you do this, I mean, it’s a tutorial, it’s really straightfoward, if you’ve – like I said in my most anticipated games of 2019 video, if you have played any MOBA, you pretty much know how Vainglory works mechanically, except for that each character only has two abilities and an ultimate, and then everybody gets a healing potion. So we got Catherine and Gwen. And then the final lesson is going to have us play a 3v3 game with bots, which we have to do to complete the tutorial. So again if you’re familiar it might behoove you to skip the tutorial, but there you are. It’s always good for a little refresher. Alright so here we are, this is going to walk us through the process of a bot game. It’s a very guided bot game and it will probably be over very quickly. Alright, so we’re going to move on up here, we’re going to take this tower, see it’s just like, everything is super weak. Towers in this game do not die nearly that quickly. I kind of appreciate that they try to keep things moving along instead of like, roping you into a multi-hour series of bot matches. And, there you go. That’s the tutorial. Really simple, really straightforward, I think minus the load time that took maybe ten minutes? Very simple. OK. After you complete the tutorial, it’s going to give you this like, Today in Vainglory showing what’s new, things you can access like the Festive Bunny Box, the new Battlepass, Snow Queen Celeste. It shows you if you can buy these things and what else you can do. I’m going to real quick – alright, and then we’re going to – now, another thing we can do, once you’ve completed the tutorial, you’ll want to tap up here in the corner – or click, it still says click because it still thinks it’s a tablet version of the game – and you can sign up with your email to create an account. I’m going to go ahead and do that real quick. And you’re given some stuff, you’re given some chests. Now if you don’t want your name to be a bunch of gibberish, you need to click choose player name, and so I will choose . . . there we go. And you get some free chests to open, which sometimes take a second. But you get the silver currency which I believe is called Glory, yep, and we’ll go ahead and jump right into an actual bot game so you guys can see how that works. I recommend, even if you’ve played a ton of MOBAS before, I recommend jumping into a bot game to find – if you’ve ever played Vainglory before – to find a character that you like, and kind of give yourself a game to get familiar with them. For this game, I’m going to play a – oh let’s see who do I want to play – Idris because he’s pretty cool and doesn’t afraid of anything. Default. When you’re in a game with actual players you’ll be able to click here and choose where you wanna go and what role you want to play so that people can call roles during champion select, which is helpful for seeing what your team needs. Which – pay attention to what your team needs. Don’t be that guy. Alright, so once you’re in a game, it’ll ask you to choose a build. This is basically going to play off your recommended item list for each build. And it makes it easier to kind of choose your items more quickly during gameplay, which – it is not allowing me to use my keyboard in any fashion. So, this is going to be an interesting game. But it’s a bot match, it really shouldn’t matter that much. I should not have picked him, with not being able to use my keyboard. That was a mistake. But that’s OK. So basically how this character works is, he’s kind of like Master Yi from League? Except he can also do ranged attacks. He actually has his ranged W which is like, almost like, oh god I can’t remember the character from League of Legends that throws the big chakram, cause I haven’t played League in forever. But kinda like that. This is going to be a death which will be embarrassing to say the least. It does follow him as he moves away. So the chakram is super useful. I’m going to see if I can’t – there we go, see? And we’re on the board. Going to clean up some last hits here. Really wish I knew why – that’s gotta be a bug, because playing on my laptop yesterday and I didn’t have that problem. So I don’t know if it’s to do with my keyboard, or… I’m going to go ahead and take this opportunity to place a ward, and then I’m gonna go back. This is in early alpha so it also could have been a bug, like from a recent update that just made the keyboard not work. Which would be less than great, but that’s fixable at least. So we’re going to go ahead with the hardcore autoattacks this build. And real quick there’s actually a button down here if you’re uncertain of how your character’s abilities work you can click this question mark. And it will show you how your abilities work. Based on what stat I itemize into, I’ll get buffs to my melee attacks and my ranged attacks. Basically once I hit 100 power in either physical attack or crystal, which is like ability damage, each will unlock a new facet of the character’s power passively. Which I really want to get to for this build, I really want to get to a 100 power – 100 crystal power – as fast as humanly possible. Because that will unlock for us some ranged attacks. And I died. I got way too greedy. There are probably people watching who are super good at MOBAs who are probably just about turned themselves inside out watching that happen. Also pinging has no dedicated key yet, like it does in most mobas, so if you want to ping, you will have to click up here in the top left where my mouse is and then click on the screen where you wanna ping. So this game has been ported to PC in the most direct sense possible in that almost nothing has changed from the tablet version except for they added keyboard hotkeys that I guess don’t work. Alright we’re going to go ahead and take this first tower, and then we’re going to take this first dude right here. Also another thing, just while I’m thinking about it, like DOTA, this game has a shop in the jungle. There are not to my knowledge items that can only be bought there, which is typically a DOTA thing, the secret shop, so at least it’s got that going for it. But there is an item shop in the jungle so you don’t have to leave lane to buy things if you’re doing really well in your laning. So that’s something to keep in mind as well. I’ll try to show it off. That was dumb. I don’t know why I thought ulting him was a good idea. Under tower. But I definitely did do it. Oh right. I can’t back with the keyboard. Alright so we should have just hit 100 power which you can check by clicking this and clicking More Info. Nope, we’re not. We’re at 127 weapon power but we’re not quite at 100 crystal power so our ranged attacks are not online yet. Having a ranged autoattack on this character makes him incredibly versatile, but you have to get there, you have to unlock it. Got that free assist cause we managed to tag him. And see the thing about the keyboard not working the way it should right now is that this character actually has an element of timing to him. If you do your Q and then either your W or E with proper timing, in succession, you’ll get – they’ll get buffed and get added effects. I’m just going to tank this tower. Ooh, okay, now we’re gonna back off. And let’s go see if we can’t buy some more items – oh nope hold on. Okay cool my allies are clutch. This character’s also a pretty decent jungler cause he has a combo meter. As long as I”m not thinking of the wrong character. Let’s see if I come over here – okay I’m thinking of the wrong character, never mind. I’m still relatively new to this, I’ve played a fair bit on tablet but I mostly play one or two characters on tablet cause I find aiming the skill shots a little difficult on tablet. So yeah, this is the item shop in the jungle. And we’re going to go ahead and buy our next crystal. It doesn’t heal you like your base does, but that’s gotta be expected. Alright looks like we’re closing in on the end of this thing. There we go, see now we have our ranged attacks online. Our ranged basic attacks. I’m going to go ahead and, oh right we haven’t taken down the towers around that yet. So we can’t kill it. Yeah, and this game’s pretty much over. There we go. And so that’s the new player experience for Vainglory. You’ll play a short tutorial, you’ll choose your player name, make an account, and then you’ll be able to start retaining the stuff you unlock. And it’s fun. It’s a little simpler than some of your other MOBAs cause you only have two abilities and an ultimate to worry about for your character as opposed to three. There are some active items but not nearly as many as a game like League of Legends, and then of course you have quests which you can do, which you can click over here to look at. You can’t play in ranked until you reach a certain level and do a certain amount of things. So this shows you your progress, like completing these quests will help you get to the appropriate level to play ranked. Of course you get free chests every two hours, just as a quick aside, I actually did get a new talent for Kashka, which you can get from chests, which are kind of like runes in League of Legends. Except they’re character specific. I don’t have any more free chests but I’ll get two more in an hour and forty five. And yeah, that’s pretty much the game in a nutshell. There’s obviously cosmetics and things but we’ll get more into that once the game is a little more stable. The game runs fine but I still haven’t figured out why I’m having difficulties with some of the other things like the keyboard not working. But thank you for tuning in, we’ll have more coverage on Vainglory in both its PC and mobile form as time goes on and thank you so much for joining us. We’ll see you next time right here on MMOHuts.

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