Moonton's Mobile Legends: Bang Bang Secrets to Success! With Chief Designer Skyhook

Hello everyone and welcome. Today we are joined by Skyhook who is the chief game designer on the hit Mobile Legends Bang Bang by Moonton. Welcome Skyhook. Hi. So it's really great to have an opportunity to speak to someone like you directly, but I had a number of questions about MOBAs and about Mobile Legends Bang Bang in particular and kind of like the first question I want to ask you is really around game taxonomy and classification. So in the game industry there's this big debate about how do we classify a MOBA game? Is it an action genre game or is it a strategy game? And in your opinion, what do you think? Okay, that's a good question because action genre and the strategy are the most important part of the MOBA game. Uh in my opinion they are the same. Uh they are they are they are also very important, but I have to say the reason make people think uh maybe action action

part is more important is because action game uh easy to give player a enjoyment of challenge. Uh for example like Sekiro and Dark Souls, they are very good uh challenging action game. When player overcome the challenge, they have to uh they have a great sense of achievement. Uh in MOBA game in MOBA game the player use the skill to hit enemy which is a kind of shooting feedback. So keep keep receiving this feedback is very strong reason to make player stay in early game. Uh for loyal MOBA game player, the strategy is another very important part. Because some people said MOBA looks like a an action RPG game, but actually it's more like an RTS game. So I I strongly agree with it in each battle through different uh through different strategies provide game devs of MOBA game. When you decide to die hard in team fight or strike who try to get a victory

this experience are exciting. So in my opinion action action genre is like it's like a nest makeup. So strategy is inside of MOBA game. Right. And it's kind of interesting because MOBAs kind of spawned from an RTS, right? Like as a mod to Warcraft III in terms of Dota. And when you think about the differences between a MOBA and an RTS from a design perspective, how do you think about the differences in terms of design or from a player perspective? What what do you think? Uh the first well-known MOBA game is Dota and it was born in the Warcraft III game or editor. So you can say MOBA is a kind of action RTS game. Yeah. But they do have a lot of different difference. Uh firstly is the difficulty of the operation. So RTS is very classic game type, but it also have very hard to gameplay. So like what I said in the

last question, overcome the challenge you will have a great sense of achievement. But if the challenge is too hard, if it's a terrible experience. MOBA game reduce the difficulty of the RTS operation. That is the key point to getting a lot of number players. So the second one is role play. In the RTS game you need to control a whole arm whole army to fight, but in MOBA game you only have one hero. That's mean you will focus on the hero. Also the the background story and the skill design. For example in the Mobile Legends you can be a tank role taking damage or to be a marksman destroy the whole enemies. So player can enjoy the role play more. And the last one is RT uh is multiplayer. Yeah, RTS is more like a single player fight. But in MOBA game team teamwork is very important. You know the human are social animals, so

um a multiple player games can be a social platform. Right. And during the early days of mobile, there were a lot of failed MOBAs. So Fates Forever from the Discord guys, Solstice Arena from Zynga, Vainglory from Super Evil Megacorp, and yet these were companies that were you know had super smart people, they were very well capitalized, and yet they weren't able to quite achieve the success that Moonton was able to achieve with Mobile Legends. And so when you think back about how you were able to achieve success with Mobile Legends, what do you think the difference was? How was Moonton able to be successful with a MOBA? Okay. So like they always said, easy to learn, hard to be master. It's very basic principle of game design. So when we design Mobile Legends on the mobile platform, we focus on how to let more and more people to get enjoyment of

mobile gameplay. Because the our whole team believe the MOBA is very very uh enjoying game play type. So we try to reduce difficulty of the PC MOBA operation while playing the same uh same game fight as possible. Uh like what we said in our slogan, everyone can be a legend. So we focus on the how to make the more and more people to join our game and have fun. Yeah, I think this the most the key point for us. Okay. And so just for our audience so they understand, it kind of sounds like what you're saying just to confirm is that in terms of the focus that maybe one of the big differentiators was the team's focus on the the gameplay, the simplification of the controls, and just the feel and the and the gameplay itself. Is that would that be fair to say? Yes. Yes. Okay. So one last question for for you Skyhook which is really around

you know, achieving a a success in mobile gaming is difficult for anybody. But just kind of thinking back to the the history of Mobile Legends, I was wondering if you could talk about from your perspective, what was the hardest challenge to overcome to achieve success, whether it's from a operations or design perspective, whatever perspective you want to uh discuss, what was that hardest challenge? Okay, firstly I want to talk about uh design part. Because like what what I said in the last question, uh we focus on the how to make everyone can play a MOBA game on the mobile. Yeah, so so how to make the the difficulty uh of the operation is very big problem for us. So about gameplay, we reduce uh we remove the last hit and we lock the screen. We do those things uh maybe we design many simple hero for the new

mobile player to make the every player every new player can join the uh Mobile Legends can have the lot of fun, but the uh low uh low very diff- uh difficulty of the operation. That's very is this is very difficult and also is the the most uh important part to make our success. And also we have lot of others challenge like internet server. Because uh in the very early time people are who are in Indonesia or Philippine, they always report problem of internet. Yes, we place many servers in the global. So our internet group is very work work hard every day to help them reduce internet problem. Yeah. We got a lot of challenge. Yeah. I see. All right. So thank you very much for your time. I won't take up any more of your time with additional questions,

although I have a lot. Very great to get your insight Skyhook. Thank you very much. Thank you.