Ex-Riot Games, Bungie, and Blizzard devs reveal Project Loki, a MOBA with a ‘shooter soul’

polygon.com:

Former developers behind League of Legends, Valorant, Apex Legends, Overwatch, Halo, and Destinyare trying something new. Or, rather, an ambitious new twist on combining components of all of those games — plus even a few more, like Super Smash Bros. and Hyper Light Drifter — into a single game, which they’re calling Project Loki and are inviting more players to try out this week.

Project Loki, developer Theorycraft Games says, is a “squad-based hero battleground.” At a glance, it looks a lot like League of Legends. But keep looking and you’ll see influence from battle royale games, heroes gliding around a map like they just dropped onto Fortnite’s island, and white-knuckle player deaths that look ripped from Smash Bros. Unlike the slower-moving strategy of MOBAs like League and Dota 2, Project Loki moves quickly, as four-player teams battle each other on a huge map set in the sky. You’ll also notice they’re shooting each other; this is a game with a shooter’s “soul,” its creators say.

In a video from Theorycraft Games released Wednesday, studio co-founder Joe Tung — former executive VP on League of Legends at Riot, and former producer on Destiny and Halo: Reach at Bungie — says the team behind Project Loki is “out to make the deepest games in the world, games that are worthy of thousands of hours of play.” And it’s looking for more players to help inform them what’s working and what’s not in its work-in-progress PC game.

Tung says that early players who have gotten their hands on Project Loki describe it as “League meets Apex meets Smash,” a description that the team loves and “can only hope to live up to.”

While that soup of IP and genres may sound like an overly ambitious recipe, snippets of gameplay that Theorycraft