Laser League from Roll7 could be the next big eSport

“We’ve invented a new sport,” he said. “Every new sport has–it doesn’t just happen. The rules of a sport don’t just suddenly exist, they happen over a period of time.”

In basketball, the three-point shot wasn’t made official until the 1979-80 season, Bennett pointed out, and that change, considered a gimmick at the time, changed the game massively.

“We want to go into early access to take what we think is a refined experience that plays, works, is fun… then work with our athletes, our players, to create that rulebook.”

When the team has those rules solid, when it feels, Bennett said, like a sport rather than a game, then it’ll come out of early access.

I’d played a couple rounds of Laser League before hopping into my chat with Bennett. The game has a slight learning curve, but I was pulling off some slick moves in just a couple minutes. There are six classes to choose from, each with its own ability: Shock, Smash, Ghost, Thief, Blade, and Snipe.

As described before, the Shock class stuns players, while Blade functions similarly to Genji in Overwatch – a dashing slash move. The Thief can steal captured points. Ghosts can phase through lasers, and Smash characters can knock opponents around. Probably my favorite class, though, is Snipe. This character works a bit differently from a traditional sniper. Instead of trying to hit one of these moving targets, you’ll drop a home point somewhere on the board. Then, as you move around, a visible line connects you back to that home point. When you activate it, you’ll, as Bennett put it, ‘teleslice’ anyone between you and your home point. Despite the visual indicator that would let you avoid the snipe move, it’s still surprisingly useful and is satisfying very quickly.

I talked with Bennett about what sort of hooks the game will have. Even a deeply entertaining game like the aforementioned Overwatch has hooks to keep pulling players back in, and so does Laser League. There are two progression systems in the game – Experience and Mastery.

Experience is a general point system that levels you up, with levels providing cosmetic unlocks of various kinds – brands, kits, laser textures, and even emoji you can drop during play. Mastery is sort of a class-based achievement system. Each class has a bunch of Mastery tasks that you can accomplish to level up your Mastery of that character. It doesn’t give you a gameplay edge over the other players, it simply advertises to others that you know what you’re doing.

Instead of trying to insist you’re really good as Widowmaker, the mastery level is intended to advertise that you can walk the walk. I’m concerned about the lifespan on this system, but I love the idea and hope it works as Bennett expects.

Laser League will be the first game from Roll7 with full “proper” online. We’ll see matchmaking, party play, and local play.

Eye-catching competition

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/06/21/laser-league-roll7-interview-preview/