Till now the majority of MOBAs have followed the example of DOTA and set themselves in the fantasy genre, and in that instance it was largely in that setting because it was a mod for Warcraft 3. It’s welcoming, then, to see Bigpoint move away from the norm and restructure their game, Merc Elite, around a military setting (even if that is itself somewhat familiar for us gamers).
As you can from the trailer below, it’s bringing mechanics like realistic line of site and direct-fire control to freshen up the MOBA skeleton a tad, too.
It’s bizarre how un-MOBA-like Merc Elite appears simply from having its setting so radically shifted from what I expect of the genre. From that features trailer I’d guess a top-down multiplayer deathmatch game, not something in the same ring as DOTA 2 and LoL.
The three features the trailer highlights – realistic line of sight, cover-based combat, and direct-fire control – may not in themselves revolutionise the genre but they may well be enough to seperate the Merc Elite from the other slew of recently announced MOBA’s
You can sign up for the beta here, batches of keys are already being distributed.