Uber Entertainment Preparing Free-To-Play Super Monday Night Combat

The follow-up to Uber Entertainment's 2010 pay-to-download shooter-meets-base-defense title Monday Night Combat will be a free-to-play PC title launching in "the next several months or so," the company said. Super Monday Night Combat, as the sequel is called, will draw more inspiration from multi-player online battle arena titles like Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends, according to Uber. That means gameplay that focuses more on teamwork and strategy to protect an advancing army of robots, with more power for base-protecting turrets and less power given to moves that cause one-hit kills. "We've changed the balance and lowered the lethality," Uber creative director John Comes told Kotaku. "People tend to live a little bit longer [in Super MNC]. There's a lot more tactical battles, so the gameplay is a little bit more intense." Though the game will be free to play, Comes said players will able to spend money to "accelerate their power curve," and buy new content like characters, skins, taunts, weapon effects and endorsements, to be released on a weekly basis. "Over time [non-paying players would] have access to the full game experience through a rotation of free characters that rotate every couple of weeks or so," Uber president Bob Berry told Kotaku. "You literally could spend zero dollars and be entertained for a long time. That's really important to us. Despite launch stability and balance issues, the original Monday Night Combat saw over 170,000 downloads on Xbox Live Arcade in its first month on sale, according to a Gamasutra sales analysis. The title later saw further success on the PC, and received a nomination for Best Downloadable Game at the last Game Developer's Choice Awards, eventually losing to Minecraft. Uber is planning to release Super Monday Night Combat on PC by early next year.