According to lead designer James Russell, ”This is not a MOBA-game. It’s not a DOTA clone. How do you define a MOBA game? If you just say it’s a multiplayer online battle arena, yes, it is. But it is Total War, so it’s not a DOTA 2 clone. We’re not going to have lanes and creeps and towers.”
He does think it is a MOBA in a pure sense, however. “We definitely think the concept of a MOBA, the multiplayer online battle arena game, is what this is,” Russell clarified, “but generally when people say MOBA they mean DOTA clone or League of Legends clone, and that is not what we are.”
He went on to note others might consider it a very different genre.
”Some people would call this an MMO, and it is an MMO in that it is massively multiplayer and it is online only. So yeah, you could call it an MMO. MOBA should be an appropriate term, but it’s been taken over to mean something else,” he stated, ”We could say this is a Total War MOBA, and then when they’re playing it people would go, ‘No it’s not!’ But it is an appropriate acronym. It is a mutiplayer, online, battle arena.”
Gamers can register to play the free-to-play title at the official site here.