Fates Forever is OpenFeint creator Jason Citron's new touchscreen MOBA
Show me the MOBA
Gaming is all about acronyms. The biggest - but by no means the longest - of them all at the moment is MOBA (Multiplayer online battle arena).
Think League of Legends. Or if you want an iOS example, Gameloft's Silver Award-winning Heroes of Order & Chaos.
In a MOBA, you play a hero character who, aided by minions and the hero characters of other real-life people, needs to smash an opponent's base to bits. Oh, and protect his own base, too.
You can now add Fates Forever to the ever-growing list of MOBA games. The game is being developed by Hammer & Chisel (formerly known as Phoenix Guild), the "post-PC" game company fronted by OpenFeint founder Jason Citron.
Citron reckons that all gaming genres "could be made materially better by changing them to use a large-format touchscreen". So, he and his team have. Well, the MOBA genre, anyway.
In Fates Forever, you will be able to control your character's special abilities via gestures, like swiping a finger to send a trail of fire spewing out in that direction.
And Citron is hell-bent on ensuring the same degree of precision available to a mouse and keyboard gamer is available to players of his new touch-based title.
As it stands, Hammer & Chisel plans to launch "the core battle game" this summer. That will have "a very light meta-game around it".
Hammer & Chisel will then tweak that version following advice from the community. The studio will eventually release a tool called The Forge that will enable players to build their own heroes, too.
Hammer and tongWhen Fates Forever does surface on iOS, it'll be a free-to-play experience. But Citron claims that there'll be no pay barriers and that the game won't be pay-to-win.
If Fates Forever proves a success on iOS, then you can expect the Unity-powered game to be ported to Android.
TUAW