News Valve announces Defence of the Ancients 2

Then they do an update.

 

Updates were never a concern in Dota days. It was always easy to learn a new hero because they were released months apart.

 

Hah. Team work and strategy determining how good you are is laughable. Hand someone DotA for the first time and they won't even know what those mean until they've put twenty hours in. Pop in for your first game, hm? What do these stats even do? What characters are these? What do I do, why is everyone typing "Blue go bot"? What items are good for me? What ability should I get first?

And that's just the very basic, once you get that covered and run out there you're faced with what the hell is jungling? Why does everyone keep saying "green mia"? Why doesn't my team want me to kill enemy monsters and push forward? What's a denial? Why does everyone who kept telling me to stay in one lane and not push suddenly angrily tell me to help them push "mid"? Why does everyone keep yelling at me in general? I don't have any food, how can I be "feeding" something?!

Only after putting in hours (because each round takes so long) do you even understand all the tools and strategies available to you. Whether that's a bad thing or not is debatable, but it's a pretty cold hard fact. And what's more, say you're like me and get decently good at LoL and invest a good deal of time into it and really enjoy it. Congratulations, you get to learn all of that menial information over again if you want to play HoN. You know what that non-transferable knowledge is? Grinding. Even someone who already knows how to play DotA has to spend hours playing matches with the sole purpose of seeing what everyone does.

Every genre has its downside, DotA's is all of the game specific garbage you have to learn.

 

And ne'er a truer word been spoken.

Although i feel disappointed for knowing exactly what you're on about .

 

I should have been more clear. Yes once you have all of the basics learned (movement, jargon, controls, etc) strategy and teamwork come into play. And you don't have to put in 20 hours to learn the basics. That's just absurd.

Having never played (and never will) LoL I'm confident that the "menial information" does not have to be entirely relearned. Since LoL and HoN are influenced by DotA (especially the latter), I doubt the concept of MIA, gank, push, jungle will be any different. Heroes, on other hand, are another story...

 

Overwatch is a hybrid RTS/FPS mod for HL2. Haven't actually played it yet, but I saw it on ModDB.

 

I notice a lot of people here have never heared of "one of the most played games in the world"...but then again, what do we know about games and gaming...

..I'll get my coat

 

It's HUGE in Asia.

 

I've played DotA for about 2 years. Then I stopped since it was a drug, dangerous
Wonderful concept and game, terrible addiction. I really hope this release will fix the greatest problem with DotA (and online games in general): leavers. It shouldn't be too hard to implement some new control on the players, since I guess the game will not be played on Garena or Battle.net but on a completely new platform. Also, it would be possible to build "newbie friendly" gaming rooms, expert rooms and pro rooms.
Lastly, they should keep the computing power requirements down: everyone with a Intel 4500HD (me ) should be able to play. Graphics are not important in DotA imho.

 

Greetings!

 

What bothers me a bit is that they seem to be confident in the fact that they can REMAKE a game, get people to PAY FOR IT, and still be better than some of the alternatives, some of which are Free (LoL).

Call me biased here, (I am a HUGE LoL fan, in spite of never having gelled with DotA) but I don't quite see how they can. Especially without major innovation.

Riot has, after all managed to get LoL into the WCG already.

 

Crazy idea here, but maybe Valve have several development teams?

 

ahem, what is LoL?
I've been out from the gaming community for a while now (exept for dota, which I stopped playing one year ago)

 

League of Legends, another dota clone.

It's free to play, though every week the heroes you can play for free changes (I think there are about 8 free ones in any given week)

You can buy permanet access to a hero using IP points (earnt by playing, but it cost ALOT) or with real money by buying Riot Points, then spending them on the characters. You can also buy addition skins for the characters you play the most, if you feel like it.

Give it a try, alot of the mechanics are the same as dota abilities (if you are familiar with them, you'll read the descriptions and go "oh, thats like Omniknights heal" or something).

Ashe is similar to Drow Ranger and Alastair is like Spirit Breaker for example. Tristana is LoL's Dwarfen Sniper.

I'm just unhappy there is on FuzzyWuzzy clone in LoL

 

Not really free, then, is it? Valve's done it before with CS (originally an HL mod) and then CS:S, which is essentially the same game as CS with a better engine driving it. You get what you pay for with Valve, and considering that they are more supportive of and attentive to their community than any other major publisher in the business, i think they will bring a ton of NEW players to the DoTA genre (myself included).

I've been interested in the game but never had any intention of playing it, for all the reasons previously mentioned. Now that Valve's picked it up, I will be happily paying for it when it comes out.

 

"So, send your unit to attack that tower over there, while I take my pants off..."

 

get out. DotA is serious business.

 

TBH I'd disagree that it's a clone per se, unlike say HoN imo.

LoL took a lot of the things that they thought was good with DotA and then changed others.

I.E., LoL has no denying, it has brush and doesn't have the randomness of "runes" etc.

You've pretty much summed up the free to play system but i disagree that permanent access to a champion costs "ALOT".

There are 4-5 champs that are 450IP (esp. Ashe) which is just 4-5 wins/8-9 losses/combination of both. The bulk of the chars. are 1350/3150 and are the standard selection. Even these only take around a week / few games per night to unlock.

It's just that quite a few of the newer champions cost 6300, which does take some grinding towards. But then again, at the lower levels, IP should only be saved for champions anyways since T1/T2 runes are pointless.

Besides, people only learn a few set champions anyway and usually lean towards unlocking those. For example, i've been playing the game since April and i've pretty much unlocked every character that i'm confident with and have all the decent/standard rune setups. This means that all IP now is going towards either new characters or characters that i just want to mess around with. It's not unheard of for players who have been playing longer to amass 10/20/30K IP just because they don't need to use it anymore.

I don't really see how you can say it's "not really free, then".

Real money serves no purpose in LoL other than to either:

a) Accelerate your levelling process by buying boosts which increase EXP/IP gain.

b) Give you quicker/easier access to characters by "buying" them.

c) Allow you to purchase skins to customise your character.

All of which are optional, all of which don't affect the gameplay.

 

I should have been more clear as well: you'll learn the basics in just a few hours, or less if you've got friends who can help you out (highly recommended in regards to jargon) but it will take a good 20 hours before a typical person isn't just aware of the basics, but also comfortable with them and capable of applying them without guidance. The point where a person is only limited by their own application of strategy and skill and one can really see how good or bad they are, that's what takes so long.

Compare that to one of the more beginner friendly genres such as shooters where a person can quite readily figure out if they're any good at moving the mouse to their enemy and clicking. It'll take maybe 5 hours for a person to have experienced and be comfortable with every concept in your average shooter. That's why I say DotA takes forever for a beginner to get into, there's so much background information that is required when first grasping the game.

As you say, the DotA concepts are all largely the same and will never need to be relearned, you'll still retain your basic gameplay strategy and will get to skip the aforementioned beginner period, but the heroes... Take a modest 30 hero game. For each of them you'll need to have a basic understanding of their four abilities, what their main stat is, ranged or melee, what general gear that character gets, and what role it fulfills.

That's no small feat! You can get away with not knowing a few of them, but a player is best off knowing all 120 abilities, melee or ranged is required to know for all 30, basic stat required to know for all 30, basic role should be known but it can be guessed by knowing the other info, and basic gear is heavily recommended to know (A LoL example, you know Master Yii is going to be stacking damaging stats, but further information on gear choice says he'll be getting attack speed specifically). This can be greatly rewarding because of the tactical depth it adds to the game, but it's highly prohibitive to someone who enjoys a more casual game.

 

Alienswarm is a good example how this type of game could work on source.