Kicking Ass with Gigantic’s Xenobia at PAX South 2015

During PAX South 2015 we jumped at the opportunity to get a fresh look at Motiga’s upcoming competitive multiplayer powerhouse, Gigantic. In this updated hands-on look at how the game’s development has progressed in recent months, Sardu offers up his impressions of one of Gigantic’s main support characters, Xenobia.

Kinetic. Fluid. Vital. Following my most recent hands-on time with Gigantic, I've realized that it's hard to pin just a single term on what makes the combat feel so fresh and engaging. Gigantic, at its core, takes many of the best elements from MMO arenas, battlegrounds, and dungeons and manages to blend them into a highly addictive and unique multiplayer experience.

It achieves this thanks to a deep understanding of what makes each of these points of inspiration a compelling experience, strips them down to their core essence, and distills a fluid and fast-paced combat experience that feels both familiar yet entirely new from beginning to end of any given match played. Once you consider the combined experience of the development team behind Gigantic, you begin to see how a new studio to competitive online multiplayer gaming – Motiga – has managed to unleash such a masterful creation.

For example, project lead James Phinney, who we recently interviewed during PAX South 2015, is certainly no stranger to competitive online games. Having worked on major players in that space including StarCraft and the Guild Wars franchise, Phinney is just one of the many industry veterans at Motiga who has a deep understanding of how to craft engaging experiences for competitive-minded gamers.

Hands-On with Xenobia

As with my previous hands-on time with Gigantic, I opted to stick to playing Xenobia for the multiple matches Team Hammer played at PAX South 2015. While she can indeed be considered primarily a support character, there are also numerous ways that characters can actually offer up support. Healing is obviously a major piece of the puzzle, as are defensive or offensive buffs, or even offering up some solid crowd control.

To give you an idea of how Xenobia fits into the greater tapestry of possible support role capabilities, her base skills are outlined below [right] along with the general key mapping in Gigantic [left]. This also helps illustrate how key mapping is carefully considered to allow players to remain wholly focused on combat and character positioning in Gigantic rather than being distracted by the in-game UI thanks to clever and effective use of both keyboard and mouse.

A further breakdown of Xenobia’s current base skills can be seen below. Please note that these are the base version of the skill. As you gain levels during a match, hitting the left [Alt] key will allow you to spend points in skills. The first four skills offer branching options that can help you hone in on specific needs or combat roles based on team comps and match flow.

Anatomy of a Gigantic Character

Given my natural tendency to play necromancers in any MMO awesome enough to offer them as an option, the above should help give a better understanding as to why Xenobia has been my first pick up until this point. While you won’t find any form of minion summons, that missing component from the typical necro toolbox is more than made up for through the combination of life drains, curses, and slows. Each of these are staples in any worthwhile necromancer’s arsenal, so I also consider it mainly a bonus that the drains can also be upgraded in a way that can also benefit allies.

As a result, Xenobia plays somewhat like a cross between a more traditional necro and shadow priest from World of Warcraft. For example, Xenobia’s first skill, Gaze of Envy, is very necro-inspired life drain, yet is a channeled ability similar to the shadow priest’s Mind Flay ability.

Xenobia isn’t necessarily a glass cannon (though she can definitely be quite squishy) since her damaging skills are more of the DoT variety rather than of the nuke persuasion. However, as you level up throughout a given match you’re going to have ample opportunities to shift her overall combat style in multiple directions. If you do prefer to stick to a primary support (aka healing) role, that option is indeed available. While not nearly as sexy as augmenting your ability to curse, stun, snare, and rapidly drain life from enemies, I suppose healing is a noble enough pursuit, and one your teammates will greatly benefit from.

One of the biggest overall improvements to Gigantic since your previous matches at PAX Prime comes in the form of the UI. In the previous setup you’d lose quite a sizable chunk of viewable screen real estate each time you wanted to upgrade a skill. This overlay has been swapped out with a sleeker, sexier branching tree overlay that feels a bit closer to a toggleable tooltip that appears directly above the skills when you hit the left [ALT] key. This is a subtle change that ultimately makes a sizable impact.

The canyon map we played on this time around offered a more linear path through the middle of the map, with plenty of smaller tunnels and passageways that could be used to help break line of sight, or provide temporary cover when needed. The flow of the map actually invoked strong memories of some of the level design found in early Unreal Tournament capture the flag maps.

Unlike CTF where the goal is to traverse the map in both directions as effectively as possible, Gigantic is all about the directional push. While this does draw some inspiration from the wildly popular MOBA genre, the goal isn’t to march into the enemy base and destroy a relatively static structure or creature. Instead, your team’s boss can help you push forward and it’s your goal to both defend it while working towards defeating the enemy team’s boss.

As Xenobia, I found that she plays most effectively when paired up with a strong melee character. A perfect example is the extremely strong combo of Xenobia in a support role while paired up with the very beefy (pun fully intended) Lord Knossos. So long as you’re making effective use of the environment and don’t over expose yourself to longer range attacks, these two characters can form a wrecking ball that can be hard to shut down later in the match.

While my experience playing Xenobia has been somewhat minimal up until this point, I’ve already hit that point of feeling as though I understand the character’s basics well enough to begin contemplating more advanced gameplay tactics. That’s part of the overall magic of Gigantic. Combat is highly intuitive and instantly accessible from the word go, yet offers just the right amount of depth to see how it will appeal to even the most hardcore of competitive gamers with a mind for the meta over time.