The Watch, a Ubisoft-backed real-time strategy game with MOBA elements, is now officially live in public alpha on the Epic Games Store, available for everyone to download as a free to play title on PC. Let’s check it out!
What Is The Watch?
The Watch is described as being a competitive action RTS. As such it’s designed for strategic PvP gameplay that combines RTS gameplay with elements from MOBAs and F2P online games to provide an engaging blockchain gaming experience.
Player-Driven Story
This web3 game is set in a ruined sci-fi world where a military experiment by Watch Corp went wrong and caused AI to become powerful sentient beings bent on obliterating humanity. For some reasons they thought it was a good idea to protect them from destruction after managing to take control of them, and this is where you come in, working together with others to save humanity from extinction.
That being said, while the game’s focus is on PvP, you will actually get to complete various global objectives together. These global objectives seem to be divided into episodes, and episodes into seasons, so only the first episode is available for now. This first episode seems to simply be an introductory voting task to welcome you to the resistance, though its description does tell players to secure Airdrops in the middle of the map as the community’s first collective objective, and over 1000 Airdrops seem to have been captured at the time of writing. After this episode is over at some unspecified time, you will be given “more information about our target.” Overall, global objectives serve as a nice way for everyone to participate in this original universe while casting their votes on various decisions that could actually influence the direction of the game’s story.
Setting up Your Army & Powers
Before you get into a match, you’ll need to set up your Equipment. Your Equipment consists of an Army and Powers.
Each player has 5 Army slots in which they can place their unique Troops waiting in the Army inventory. Everyone gets 6 types of Troops to choose from, some of which are melee units and some ranged, with each having a different Energy cost to deploy them, but also different stats and thus varied purposes. For example, if you want a unit that deals high, long-range, accurate damage, then you want the Sniper unit in your deck, or if you need quick units for scouting the map while dealing melee damage when needed, then Zero is a useful part of your army. Of course, there’s also the standard unit with medium ranged damage, a heavy tank unit, and more.
Powers are unique abilities you can activate during the game for a tactical advantage. For example, you can call upon Nano Bullets to send a heavy strike from the sky on enemy units, or you can use Healing Cells to create an area in which everyone is healed for a limited time. These cost Energy just like Troops do, and you can equip up to 6 abilities alongside one permanent passive bonus, and one ultimate ability called the Glitch.
If you’re interested in the cosmetic side of things, then you can also head to the Customize tab right next to the Equipment screen to change unit skins, the flag you use in battle, and the avatar representing your profile picture.
Gameplay Mechanics
Once you’ve set your Army and Powers, you’re ready to jump in and play the Competitive game mode, which is the only one available at the time of writing, with a Versus mode planned to be added in the future. The Competitive mode revolves around winning matches to earn points for climbing the leaderboard. Sadly, there is no tutorial mode available at the time of writing, but that is not much of a surprise for an alpha version, and the developers have acknowledged this in a recent Discord announcement, stating that they do plan to add a tutorial mode in the future to improve the first-time user experience. For the time being, a guide is available in the main menu that explains various mechanics while providing accompanying short videos for them, so that’s nice.
In this early access state of the game, issues are bound to happen, so if the game doesn’t start looking for a match when you click on the mode, you’ll probably have to restart it. Other matchmaking issues may also occur, such as getting invalid match data at the start of a match, putting you back to the main menu to try again. Hopefully these are all problems that will be solved in the near future.
How does the game actually work though? Well, the gameplay is centered around 1v1 PvP matches where both sides have their own Core. This Core is protected by a shield and mobile turrets. If you do destroy one of the turrets, the shield will go down, allowing you to attack the Core and destroy it to win the match. Both players start off with 2 mobile turrets linked to the Core, and they move on their own in specific parts of the map.
Instead of using base-building mechanics like in traditional strategy games, players have one structure referred to as the Spawn that is used to ‘replicate’ the units they have in their deck. Doing this requires using Energy, a resource that recharges on its own over time, with the recharge speed becoming faster the longer the match lasts. As you move your units across the map, you’ll find turret platforms that you can capture to increase Energy capacity, and you can also connect your mobile turrets to these platforms to turn them into new spawn zones so you can deploy new units closer to your opponent.
After 20 minutes of a match, a Prism will spawn in the middle of the map. This is the main boss of each match that you can try to defeat to get passive unit buffs. You can also claim useful unique buffs at Dropzone areas containing Dropzone Boxes, but be careful, as you might get unlucky and receive an explosion that blows up nearby units instead of making them stronger.
All units start at level 1 and can go up to level 4 by killing enemy units to increase their stats. How stats are increased can vary based on unit type, and when you do level up a unit, that level up applies to all other units of the same type as well, and you don’t have to worry about them losing their level from dying during the match either.
Currencies, Weekly Box & Battle Pass
Winning matches is rewarded with Social Credits that you can use to unlock new Powers. Next to Social Credits, there are also Shards, a premium currency that is said to be earnable through ‘various objecitves’ but also available as an in-game purchase. Shards can be used to buy unique cosmetics for your units.
Every week, players can complete various challenges such as winning X amount of matches and doing a certain number of damage to earn a Weekly or Mystery Box that can contain Social Credits, Shards, as well as skins of varying rarity.
Every season, players will be able to progress through a battle pass to earn Social Credits, Shards, and cosmetic rewards. There are rewards you can earn for free, but you’ll have to upgrade the battle pass with Shards to unlock premium prizes. Upgrading the battle pass costs 1200 Shards at the time of writing, and you can pay $9.99 to get the currency bundle of 1200 Shards.
Alpha Championship
For now, it doesn’t seem like the game has any web3 gaming features integrated (and the page on the Epic Games Store doesn’t refer to it as a blockchain game either), but if you’re looking to compete to earn rewards, then you can look forward to the Alpha Championship that is planned to go live soon. You can sign up for it on the game’s official website for a chance to win up to $1000 USD and get potentially featured with one of the game’s Twitch streamers. As for play to earn mechanics, we could look forward to seeing something added in Q4 this year, so hopefully more details will be revealed soon on how the blockchain side of things will actually work. Given the way everything is set up, we can probably expect to see Units, Powers, and/or cosmetic rewards act as assets you can mint into NFTs.
The developers are currently focused on delivering a quality gaming experience, so if you’re looking for a fast-paced strategy game mixed with MOBA elements, then you’ll certainly want to check The Watch out.
