Today, Hi-Rez offered Lore Hound a special VIP sneak peak of its next game mode to be implemented, Domination.
Honestly, they’ve done it again when it comes to the environment. With a heavy Egyptian influence, Anhur should feel right at home among the obelisks.
Granted, I do have that Egyptian mythology and architecture bias…
The new map features various pathways through rock heads, leading to sand piles with genie sand dunes as the “towers” with creep running in the three lanes to assist the gods. With tight corners, and high walls, escapes are not easily made with ganking being commonplace with lots of blood on the rock walls.
The game starts out with the 3 towers neutral to both sides, and 400 points on the counter for both teams. As teams kill the genie, then proceed to stand on the sand dune to capture it – spawning their own genie to defend in the mean time – will tick away points from the opposing team at a set time interval.
Gods start out with 1,500 gold, and at level 3; just like in Arena. Exp is gained through normal Conquest means, with gold income being faster than Conquest, but slower than Arena. Hi-Rez has managed to effectively produce an in-between mode between Arena & Conquest.
Click the jump to get my impressions on the game mode in the two short matches I played in (OK, they were about 25-30 minutes long each, but still!)
Starting off I marveled at the environment, and how smoothly the game ran. iTZKooPA mentioned it was probably due to the fact of low rendering requirements, it was mostly walls. There’s also the fact the map is about the size of Arena, give or take a bit of space.
At the beginning of the first match, we clearly dominated when it came to team fights, and ganks. However, it remained a close match throughout (we were tied the majority of the time) because we either weren’t capping towers after we killed them, or we kept losing the towers. Still ended up with a win because of the kills giving us the gold/exp advantage.
The second match was even worse than the first. Nuking the other team to the ground we quickly secured the map and held a major 100+ point lead the entire game.
Personally, I found this game mode more interesting and enjoyable than Arena. I also felt it was too short, wanting an additional 5-15 minutes added to gameplay. After talking to one of the devs and their goal to provide more modes of time investment, I moved to agree with the decision for it being 20-30 minutes. Not to mention the fact that the two matches played were largely one sided. It’ll be interesting to see what becomes more competitive as things move to release – Conquest, Arena, or, now, Domination?
What do you guys think? We don’t have much to show or go on, but it was definitely intriguing.
Smite should release some archangels plz respond.