League of Legends Dominion: impressions

For those not in the know, Riot just released a new 5v5 game mode for League of Legends. It's selling point is that it is based on control points, rather than base defense and lane control, and offers a faster paced experience.

Short introduction

In Dominion each team base starts with 500 energy points and, each second, the team controlling more towers removes as many points from the rival's energy as the difference in controlled points. In order to make things interesting faster, Heroes start at level 3 and with enough currency for a couple of items, experience and gold are much easier to obtain and almost every fight is to death, especially the first encounters. This is because the time spent dead has been drastically reduced, to ensure players are more aggresive.

Is it any good?

It is fun, that's for sure. A match consists of 20 minutes of running around, attacking, defending bases, chasing and escaping, with the tide of battle changing easily. So easily that most games are won by very close margins. I have even lost a game to a team with only 1 point remaining.
But all this tension is continuous, without a pause or moment for reflection. While dead, you barely have time to look for your next item and buy it. There's no sense of progression, narrative or strategy, because all actions are more imrpovised than thought out. In this stressful environment communication is too difficult, to the extent that almost noone speaks more than monosillables. Also, the absence of secondary objectives, like guarding Baron Nashor's lair in the classic 5v5 map, takes away from the experience.

In the end, after a battle in Dominion, little more than the result is left. Each encounter in Summoner's Rift, on the other hand, feels like a story in which you evaluated your opponents and tried to counter their strengths, coordinating with your allies*. Also, since death is a lot more relevant, you learn to fear those characters which kill you in a breeze (Annie, Kata, hello!).
Like in narrative, the ideal is to introduce rest periods after moments of great tension, so the player can take a breath before going head first into the next fray. The tension must also go in crescendo, after each pause. This way, each new peak of excitement feels more pronounced**.
On the contrary, when exposed to constant action, as in Dominion, every new encounter is treated by the brain as the same thing, eventually losing part of its interest. If Dominion matches where any longer, it would soon become tiresome. Riot did well keeping things under 25 minutes, but even at that lenght I still get tired of this game mode.

Conclusion

Maybe Riot will some day manage to add extra depth to its new child, but until then it will probably remain a distraction from repetition. Its advantadge is that rival DotAs don't have a secondary game mode to break the monotony, once the competition from Valve and Blizzard arrives.
LoL's best card, its extremely wide and varied hero roster, might not be enough to fend of the attacks by itself.

However, I am not convinced that Dominion will save LoL from Valve and Blizzard's attempts at stealing its market share. The genre has a small fan base and big companies can do a lot of damage to Riot, through advertisement and simple brand awareness.


* Of course, there is always a black sheep who only complains about the noobity of the team. Welcome to the sad reality of online societies.

** Check Schell's The Art of Game Design for more about narrative in videogames. Or any good book about narrative, actually.