Simplifies many traditional lane-pushing game mechanics to focus on being a structured team-brawling game. It has a huge range of maps to play on with varying objectives, and relies entirely on hero-specific talent trees to provide customisation options during each match.
Experimented with use of the z-axis, as well as new harvester objectives and an "affinity card" system.
After two years, its developer Epic Games closed the servers, with the generally accepted reason being to focus on the runaway success of Fortnite. The art assets for Paragon have been made free to use with Epic's Unreal Engine, making room for a range of potential successors to emerge from the community.
Community project intended as a spiritual successor to Dawngate. It has since been discontinued. The work to-date was proposed to be made open-source as a Unity3D project, though so far this hasn't taken place.
Tastefully weaves capture-the-flag and control point objectives into the classic lane-pushing victory formula.
Prioritised having a flexible meta and streamlined a number of game systems to make the genre more accessible. The game allowed its community to steer the direction of the story through an accompanying webcomic, and was considered very successful at engaging its players in world-building and lore.
All of its characters are based on real-world gods and myths from pantheons from around the world. It was among the first games played from a third-person perspective, offering a more immersive experience and affecting its vision and movement mechanics. The game uses almost entirely skill-shots, and offers a variety of competitive lane-pushing modes.
Mobile game resembling League of Legends, with slightly simpler heroes and action controls. It's enormously popular in China, thanks to WeChat and QQ social integration making it easy to bring friends, and building its lore and narrative around Chinese history and mythology.
Outside China, a different version of the game is distributed with the name 'Arena of Valor'. It uses a separate cast of characters, including licensed IP like 'Wonder Woman'. Gameplay on the Nintendo Switch is different to mobile, and as a result it is not cross-platform compatible.
Third-party research agency Jiguang published a report in 2017 declaring that the game's audience was 54% female and 52% under age 24. This has been backed up in 2020 by a report from the Shanghai Online Games Association. A report in 2019 from Newzoo suggests 46% of the Honor of Kings esports audience is female. This is comfortably the most inclusive lane-pushing game on the market, though its success appears constrained to the Chinese market.
Due to its two boss objectives and carefully tuned economy, it has a stable meta with fixed lane positions for each hero role.
Emphasises rich and engaging hero combat. The game has many unusual skill-shots, and there no stuns or randomness. Combat instead focuses more on displacement and environmental or situational damage.
The jungle is a persistent team objective rather than an economic space for a single hero to occupy, and a variety of different creep camps and reward structures have appeared in the game over the years.
The game had an unusually refined item system, with a fullscreen shop interface, typed shortcuts, recommended items, recipe autocompletion, all items stacking with each-other (at reduced efficiency), and custom item stats like bonus ability radius or duration.
