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Lead Dev On DotA: Allstars Joins Valve

Posted by Soulskill on from the moving-up dept.

Brian Y. Chen writes "Defense of the Ancients: Allstars, a Warcraft 3 mod, is now played by millions and translated into 10 different languages. The extreme interest in the game has inspired developers unrelated to the mod itself to begin creating commercial games with similar gameplay: Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends and Demigod. Now it seems that Icefrog, the famously anonymous lead developer of DotA, will be taking the helm of a new team at Valve."

7 comments

  1. WC3 Edit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In quite a few ways, its harder to use than a real programming language, and that maps taken alot of refinment, kudos to this guy

  2. Valve is S.M.A.R.T... by locallyunscene · · Score: 1

    Valve is not only smart for snapping up a great developer, but this could end up being a huge coup for Valve in the business realm. Valve has invested a lot of time into making a DRM scheme that provides enough benefits that players are actually willing to join it. Now think, what major game company has thus far refused to join Steam and is in the midst of creating their own competing system. Hint: this company created the game that DotA is modded on. While I'm not a huge DotA fan myself, a lot of people are and support for DotA-like games on Battle.net and Steam could be a very important feature in the near-future.

    I'm wondering how Blizzard let this one slip through their fingers, but considering some of their business moves as of late WRT customers, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that's they've lost their way a bit in development too.

  3. How do you play this game? by tieTYT · · Score: 1

    So the gameplay is novel in this game? Would anyone mind explaining it to the rest of us?

    1. Re:How do you play this game? by nuclearpenguins · · Score: 1

      I was going to type out a long post about the game mechanics, but Wikipedia could explain it better than I could. Defense of the Ancients.

      --
      Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
    2. Re:How do you play this game? by chrysrobyn · · Score: 1

      I don't know how novel it is. Pick a character, based on their strengths and optionally weigh that against your opponents' weaknesses. You're on a team of 5 or less, against another team of 5 or less. The objective is to destroy the other team's primary building, but to do so you have to get through a number of defensive buildings, hostile "creeps" and of course, the other team. In order to do so, you must gain experience and "level up" by killing aforementioned creeps and opponents as well as NPCs. With gold from said killings and from periodic salary, you invest in a number of weapons, spells and armor, some of which combine to reduce the number of slots taken (from 6 available) or to yield special abilities. There are additional nuances of etiquette (some of which are patches to exploits) and of course strategy.

      In summary, I think the only thing that makes it novel is that it takes familiar ideas from a number of old games and combines them in a way nobody else has. The concepts, while high in number, are easily learned for someone who has played several games before, allowing the focus of the game to fall to strategy.

      I get on binges where I play it every night for a month once or twice a year since I found it in 2003/2004.

  4. Backstabbing Newearth.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Icefrog gave the people at S2 games the go ahead to develop a game that did EXACTLY what he stated in his post. Take DotA to new heights under a new engine and allow for a better player experience. This is a pretty cheap move by Icefrog given that S2 games has put time and money in to the development of Heroes of Newearth with his approval. He now jumps ship and runs to Valve so he could get his own dev team. I've lost all respect for him as a dev for doing this. It's pretty poor ethics in my opinion. I'm sure S2 would have taken him but Valve has money.

    This is too bad because as a beta tester I can see that the HoN team has put a lot of effort in to making a good game which might be scrapped by fans purely to follow Icefrog to Valve's version of the near exact same thing.

    Anonymous Coward

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