Total War: Arena is a new free-to-play multiplayer spin-off that has many elements in common with MOBAs. However, the 10 v 10 battles with each player controlling just three units is not just another League of Legends or DOTA clone.
“This is not a MOBA-game,” said The Creative Assembly’s lead multiplayer designer Gabor Beressy to Eurogamer. “It’s not a DOTA clone. How do you define a MOBA game? If you just say it’s a multiplayer online battle arena, yes, it is. But it is Total War, so it’s not a DOTA 2 clone. We’re not going to have lanes and creeps and towers.”
“We definitely think the concept of a MOBA, the multiplayer online battle arena game, is what this is,” he said, “but generally when people say MOBA they mean DOTA clone or League of Legends clone, and that is not what we are,” said The Creative Assembly’s lead designer James Russell. “Some people would call this an MMO, and it is an MMO in that it is massively multiplayer and it is online only. So yeah, you could call it an MMO. MOBA should be an appropriate term, but it’s been taken over to mean something else.
“We could say this is a Total War MOBA, and then when they’re playing it people would go, ‘No it’s not!’ But it is an appropriate acronym. It is a mutiplayer, online, battle arena.”
They also suggested that Total War: Rome II players will get to play Arena before anyone else. “We definitely want our existing core Total War players, the people who buy Rome 2, to have privileged access to Arena,” Russell said.
