Vela Games, an Irish game studio founded by former Riot Games developers in 2018, unveiled its first game at a digital prebrief event attended by Digital Trends. Titled Evercore Heroes, this game modifies themultiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) formula that League of Legends helped popularize into a competitive PvE dungeon-crawling experience.
While the basics of gameplay and isometric view of Evercore Heroes are very similar to a game like League of Legends, players aren’t directly fighting each other. Instead, four teams of four compete against each other in a cooperative dungeon-crawling experience where players slowly level up their characters, charge the titular Evercore, and eventually win by taking down a large boss. MOBAs, both in terms of gameplay and their community, can be intimidating to get into, so co-founderounder Travis George hopes that the cooperative aspects of Evercore Heroes and other efforts by Vela Games will make this an approachable and friendly game to which platers return.
“We all know that games aren’t always known as the friendliest places in the world — and we’re not going to change human behavior on the internet — but what we can do is be really deliberate about the gameplay, the community, and even the technology choices we make to hopefully orient players to have a more positive experience online,” George says. “Hopefully, that keeps them coming back.”
So far, Vela Games has revealed eight playable heroes: Shade the assassin, the shield-wielding Fyn, Zari the archer, the creature with a community-voted design named Beko, the melee-focused boxer Blink, fire mage Cynder, tech medic Remy, and short-range healer Lotus. They each have distinct abilities, and most of them look like they could be League of Legends champions or Valorant agents, so Riot Games’ influence can really be felt in the design. Definitely keep an eye on this one if you’re a fan of Riot Games.
Evercore Heroes is currently in development for PC, and interested players can sign up for a player test that will run from October 13 until October 16.
