Evercore Heroes wants to wind people up the right way

Oh, it’s a challenge to describe Evercore Heroes. A pleasant challenge. The name doesn’t tell you very much. The team, which contains a number of people who worked on League of Legends, describes it as “competitive PvE”. My own notes from a recent online presentation suggest it’s a WoW raid mixed with a bit of Puyo Tetris. Having had the time to think about it, though, I suspect the whole thing is like one of those fancy cocktails where the different elements separate and form a rainbow strata: Evercore Heroes is simple at first, then complicated, and then ultimately pretty simple again. And hopefully delicious.

Here’s where I’d start. You jump into a team of four heroes, all working through a sort of raid area. You’re fighting mobs in order to get more powerful, because at the end of the match – matches take about 25 minutes – you’re going to have to take on a boss. So you fight mobs and level up, in a way that reminds me of the PvE stuff from League of Legends, stripped of any PvP stuff. You also go after quests, specific objectives which make you much more powerful, and you harvest “shards” from the world, which give you perks. Every so often, though, you get something called a “surge wave”, which means you have to go back to your base and protect it from a PvE horde. Clear a wave and you’re back out there leveling and questing. Complete enough waves and you take on the boss.

Here’s the thing, though. You’re alone, but you’re not alone. Spooky action at a distance! Your team of four are competing against three other teams of four, but indirectly. You’re all exploring the same terrain, fighting the same mobs, collecting the same shards and taking on the same quests as you level towards the same boss, but you’re essentially in different dimensions. You can’t suddenly turn up in my world and lamp my healer. Instead, I see your team in my world as little balls of light moving around the ground. These balls of light don’t do any damage, but they tell me what you’re doing, and they remind me that we’re in competition: first to take down the boss wins. What are you up to, and how do I compare?

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