Infinite Crisis takes on League of Legends with DC characters (video interview)

Riot Games made the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game into a cultural phenomenon with League of Legends. Now, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is preparing to enter the MOBA fray with Infinite Crisis, a free-to-play PC game where you can battle with DC Comics characters like Wonder Woman and Batman.

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We experienced a hands-on preview (see here) of the game, which is in closed beta testing. Infinite Crisis features five players against five in a single arena of combat. In the title, you try to dominate different rings around the circular arena. The action is frenetic and real time. You can play with a variety of characters and level them up.

The game will have crazy versions of famous DC characters. It will have, for instance, Nightmare Batman, a vampire version of Batman who comes from an alternate universe. You’ll also have a Gaslight Batman, based on a Steampunk style character. These worlds will all be realized in the game, like a nightmare version of Metropolis. The whole map will be destructible. You can knock down walls and blow things apart. Meteors might come crashing from the sky, altering the map and affecting gameplay.

The setting is in the DC Multiverse, a world with reimagined characters. We’ll have to see if the DC brand lure and the dynamic, ever-changing battlefields will encourage League of Legends fans to try out Infinite Crisis.

We caught up with Jeff Steefel, executive producer at game developer Turbine, a Warner-owned studio that made the free-to-play Lord of the Rings Online, a massively multiplayer online game. MOBA is a new genre for Turbine, but Steefel says the company knows how to run a game as a service. He says Infinite Crisis will have a major story arc, and he sees it as a welcome addition in a virgin market that can support multiple titles.

Infinite Crisis will debut this fall on the PC.