When March of Giants was initially announced, my excitement for what could be the perfect ‘me’ game was quickly tempered by an awareness that the market conditions for a new MOBA are currently less than favorable. However, while speaking to Ubisoft Montreal Creative Director Xavier Marquis at a recent preview event, it immediately became clear that the current state of affairs did little to detract from the decision to bring the 4v4 real-time strategy-infused hybrid to the fore. Instead, the project is grounded in the former Rainbow Six Siege lead’s longstanding passion for the genres, alongside a studio-wide desire to bring something new to the conversation.
“When we started the game [March of Giants], we were not blind,” Marquis acknowledges. “I’m a MOBA player, so I know it’s difficult – I saw so many projects die, not only for MOBA, but also for battle royale, etc. It’s a classical question: can we be a part of this business? But it was not our question, it was not a business decision. We wanted to do something because we thought we had something different to say. Since the beginning, because I’m a player, we’re also partially designing the kind of game we would like to have.”
Marquis’s strategy chops don’t just extend to MOBAs. Having started with 1992’s Dune, before going on to play Command and Conquer, Warcraft 3, and other RTS monoliths of the era, he’s experienced the gameplay evolution first-hand. “I saw the beginning of the MOBA, I saw this glimpse when it was just a small mod lost [amid] tons of mods,” Marquis continues. “I saw the magic of, ‘yes, it seems easier than an RTS because it’s less click [intensive] and it’s only one character that you need to manipulate.’ But at the same time, I was a bit sad because I lost the absolutely fantastic dream to master an army. Still, I had this in my mind: ‘Is it doable to bring back this feeling, but at the same time with the approach from a MOBA?’ Centric to a character, but at the same time playing the battlefield.” While I won’t get into the minutiae of how Marquis’s machinations are playing out, I will instead shamelessly plug my March of Giants preview where you can read more about them.
As I also noted in said preview, the historical shift from RTS to MOBA was profound, with players progressively locking into that far more individualistic power fantasy more and more as time went on. The dual-hegemony of League of Legends and Dota 2 has hoovered up the vast majority of the market. Plenty of challengers have entered the arena, with most, such as the Warner Bros. Games-backed Infinite Crisis and Epic Games’ Paragon, failing to attain sustainability and subsequently shutting down. Even Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm didn’t live up to the powerhouse developer-publisher’s expectations, despite the monster IPs it was built on. Ostensibly, the MOBA had been ‘solved.’
This challenging environment has done little to deter Marquis and the Montreal team from forging ahead. If anything, it’s only made the fire in their bellies burn hotter, and it’s not the first time we’ve seen this. When Rainbow Six Siege burst onto the scene a little over a decade ago, it managed to do exactly what the March of Giants team, itself composed of plenty of ex-Siege talent, is now attempting to recreate. Distancing itself from the arcade shooters that largely dominated the day, and leaning heavily into the tactical elements that hallmarked the Rainbow Six series, Siege didn’t reinvent the wheel (Marquis himself was a big Counter-Strike player), but innovated in a way that created an exciting new gameplay loop that continues to withstand the test of time.
Marquis recalls: “I remember before we shipped Rainbow Six Siege, I read an article that said ‘everything has been designed and invented for the shooter, it’s done.'” In response to my pronounced eye rolling, he smiles. “You see your reaction? Today it seems to be locked – I’m interested. I’m not alone, the entire team also [feels this way].” Marquis further states that, post-Siege, he “needed something strong in terms of adrenaline […] something tough” to work on. Well, the devs have certainly picked quite the arena with MoG.
Alongside Ubisoft Montreal’s RTS splice, Valve’s Deadlock has also recently challenged this notion in the MOBA space, with its shooter elements providing a drastically different approach. This, Ken notes in his own musings, makes it “brilliant and fresh,” and I’m sure the tens of thousands of players logging in each day can attest to that. I felt similarly while playtesting MoG, which hopefully bodes well for the future. While it’s impossible to tell at this point if March of Giants will have a similar impact to Deadlock, the Montreal studio’s pedigree for concocting winning formulas can’t be discounted. Above all else, it’s clear that MoG is a project born out of passion, rather than one designed to tick boxes and appease shareholders, and that in itself does much to pique my interest.