Fates Forever, the new MOBA from Jason Citron's Hammer & Chisel Announced

In the conversations I've had with Jason Citron over the past five years, one thing has always been very clear, Jason Citron is a very talented young man. But lately it's like he is a whole new man. Excited, proud, and full of ideas. Could partially be because his newly renamed games company, Hammer & Chisel is showing off an early version of their first game, Fates Forever, a massively online battle arena game (MOBA) for tablets only.

Fates Forever is a MOBA game and yeah, we've heard a lot about MOBA on iOS in the past few months. For those not familiar with MOBA, see Wikipedia an MOBA. But Fates Forever shows some real promise in ways others we've seen have yet to.

The fact that we are seeing more MOBA on iOS seems logical as for many months it was a genre that was conspicuously missing on iOS. League of Legends has been very popular on the desktop; why can't we have a mobile MOBA?

Jason and his team at Hammer & Chisel are taking a bit of a different angle that what we've seen so far on MOBA for iOS. They are building out a lushly detailed, large scale MOBA game that closely resembles the depth and length of gameplay of League of Legends, but updated for tablet. In my short time with the game I found it, incomplete, yes and that's to be expected, but also amazingly easy to get into and really hard to put down. The unique characters, their voice overs, their special moves, gameplay aspects--all combine for an interesting and promising game.

Some of the interesting changes to the MOBA formula seen in Fates Forever, and remember it's still early, are that minions constantly regenerate when killed, they won't keep running back to the base to heal. The only power ups are to the three special powers each player has, and those reset between matches. Everyone starts out even, every match.

Hammer & Chisel have a lot of work ahead of them to finalize Fates Forever, but the progress so far is amazing. It is certainly one of my most anticipated games. We'll keep you up to date on the progress as it moves toward launch.