So I got into the Strife beta recently, and have played a few games. For those of you who don't know what Strife is, it's the new Dota-style (A.S.S.F.A.G.G.O.T.S) game from S2 (the guys behind Heroes of Newerth). The game is focused on casual play and they seem to be focusing on keeping "toxicity" to a minimum.

The toxicity thing is a big thing for this game. You can't see how many times your allies have died and all-chat is disabled until the game is over. There's also a lot of simplifying done to this game. Players near each other share gold from last-hits, everyone has their own courier, there's out-of-combat regen (both HP and MP) and the item system is greatly simplified.

The gameplay is OK. It's not slow, there's definitely stuff going on all the time and because of the regen and a small map, you don't have much downtime. What I find annoying is that characters with movement abilities, seem to be far better than characters without something similar. There's also this weird progression system that I find really awkward. You can level up a pet to make it better which is fine, but then you get this "crafting" system where you can change the base stats of a recipe item and add extra bonuses. I don't get how this works yet.

Okay so after having played this game a bit more, I can tell that I really don't like the progression system. That said, I'm a person who prefers there to be no progression system at all. The game should be fun enough on its own to not need any forced external goals.

I'll use the crafting system as an example. The crafting system allows you to spend ores (one of three currencies gained after each fight or through spending money) to change the recipe of an item to get different base stats on that item, or keep it the same. Why would you keep it the same? because no matter if you change it or not, you will still get up to three different bonuses for that item (one common, one rare, and one legendary). You can use elixirs (a different currency) to enchant these items, improving the items bonuses or getting a bonus of a higher tier if you've upgraded the lower one to max. From what I've seen so far, all of these bonuses simply boost some stats of the item by either a flat amount or a percentage, in some cases you just get a new stat tacked onto your item. What's really annoying with this system is that the custom items expire after about 2 weeks (the amount of time varies).

Now I can see what they want with this, they want to make sure that no resource is basically worthless after having played the game for a long while. Again, I think the gameplay itself should be the reason for playing a game, not trying to upkeep slightly upgraded items. Even though I dislike it, pointless progression is a thing some people want in games, and who am I to argue with that. What annoys me with this system, is that it forces the player into a hero role by making it really time-consuming to get to a point where you can play all roles optimally. The runes and masteries in LoL do the same thing, but what S2 has done here is make that system infinite. If you decide to go for a month of vacation, you will come back to a severely weakened profile.

There is of course the argument that F2P games need these kinds of things to earn money. Dota 2 shows that you don't need it, and Path of Exile shows that you don't need to be a big developer to accomplish it.

I played some Strife yesterday, probably not as much as Proxy, but I thought I'd give my opinions.

I found the gameplay extremely boring. It felt slow and clunky. As you buy items and level up I never felt like my character got stronger, attacked faster, etc.

The shop is a complete mess. They tried to make the shop something like Dota with components being built into larger items, but it's not split up into components and completed items, it's just completed items, which makes it really difficult to learn.

Gameplay is also very easy, there's no UI to speak of, unless you choose to pin things to your screen (which I did), spells are fairly spamable since you can just regen. Last hitting is extremely easy and fights with other heroes are also extremely fast. As I mentioned earlier, my biggest problem is that I felt that there was no progression as my character got stronger. One match I was the highest GPM and highest level by 2-3 levels but still didn't feel any stronger than the enemy team.

All in all, I think it's a decent casual game, but I'd rather be playing Smite.