I played one game of it when the pre alpha or whatever first came out. I didn't really like it at all. The one cool concept was the deny system where you can shoot the souls of creeps and heroes as they fly out of their body to deny Xp. Its definitely not what I expected for Valve's first new IP in forever. Don't think I'm gonna quit Dota for it.
It doesn't really have any new mechanics that are new to moba beside like you said, the XP denial.
The XP denial seems underpowered because the gameplay emphasis is entirely on killing enemy players, there's too much exp from killing players and not enough from minions. Snowballing happens very easily because of this and there's very little ability to come back from behind by playing safely from your tower for farming. Too many characters can just dive your tower and kill you too without consequences.
There's 14 male characters and 7 female characters and I only gravitate to 2 of the female characters as appealing at all. Maybe I'm spoiled by Smite and Overwatch but it doesn't really feel like anything in the game is made for me.
I get absolutely bodied by people that have sweated for 500+ hours in this thing despite it being in early testing.
The accessibility is horrendous. The text chat feature has been made objectively worse than every text chat in any game ever made for the sake of being quirky and different. Colours are also not good and differentiating between team and enemy is not easy. Sound is also not great. Pings are still lacking. No "just use mic" is not an acceptable response to this problem especially not in regions where the majority of people don't speak the same language, let along for the issue of minorities, female players and queer-sounding people getting instant hate as soon as they are heard on mic.
The discord seems to be an entirely unmoderated extension of 4chan.
I can't really find any good information right now. Is this a beta still or this a sneaky release? If it is still in beta a lot these points will probably be adjusted soon, especially 2-4.
I know the Smite community has been excited for the release since Smite 2 has been bombing so much at least and it also is receiving similar criticism.
I noticed that while I was playing was I couldn't tell who was a creep or a hero and what team they were on. It's interesting coming from Dota where the contrast of heroes vs creeps and everything in the background being distinct is so great.
This definitely feels like a scam, but R6 has been finally getting stale (thanks to the cheaters and toxic players) so I’m game if you’ve got more invites