A significant title arrived in the App Store last week, one that fans of multiplayer online battle arena games (or MOBAs, for short) will want to check out. It’s called Fates Forever, and it’s the latest effort from game studio Hammer & Chisel. It’s received dozens of good reviews thus far, as well as hundreds of thousands of downloads – which indicates that the avid community from the immensely popular League of Legends could be taking notice.

The game has been tweaked to work specifically with touch-screen commands, which will mean a world of difference to those who are used to playing with a keyboard and mouse at their fingertips. Fates Forever is the latest among many efforts either shipping or announced to bring the MOBA genre to mobile platforms, including Zynga’s Solstice Arena and Super Evil Megacorp’s Vainglory. While some mobile MOBAs have already been in the market a while, nothing has yet made a huge splash. Fates Forever is looking to change that.

Jason Citron, the founder of OpenFeint and chief executive for Hammer and Chisel, spoke at great length about the game. “We have hundreds of thousands of players who’ve tried the game,” he said. “Many of them are really into it. Some of them, we’ve heard, have given up Hearthstone and switched to Fates, which is pretty cool.”

The game was developed in just 18 months’ time, a true feat considering how deep and involving it is to amateurs and Legends veterans alike. As to why mobile was the ideal platform, Citron explained, “We tried to figure out what kind of games that already work on the PC would also work on tablets. This is a bit of a tangent, but I don’t think you get new game genres very often. Genres are reflections of the way our brains are wired. The human brain doesn’t change that much. As technology changes, it gives us the ability to make new types of game experiences, but rarely do you get a totally new genre. So we didn’t say, “What’s a totally new genre ” We said, ‘What genre exists on PC that we think we can do well on the tablet ‘

“We picked MOBA because it’s very popular. It’s culturally in vogue. I thought we could do a good job of it on a tablet, and I guess we did.”

Fates Forever can be downloaded here.

Source: VentureBeat