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Heroes of Newerth Open Beta About To Start
You may recall last summer when we discussed Heroes of Newerth, a title from S2 Games that's based on the popular Defense of the Ancients mod from Warcraft III. We passed out some closed beta keys, and there seemed to be a ton of interest, in part due to the fact that they have a Linux client. Well, if any of you missed it or want to see how the game has progressed since then, now is your chance — the open beta begins tonight (March 31). There's a countdown on the sign-up page that shows when you can register.
I have been one of the lucky closed beta testers, and I can tell you that the least people I've seen online was 38,000. ragequits and no-stat try-hards FTW!!!
bought it to support them, played a while but stopped for 6 months since it was too unbalanced and not buggy enough to warrant beta testing, and just came back to it a few days ago. The game has progressed a lot and it's very fun to play :)
Not trying to advertise but League of Legends is a very solid clone of DOTA. There is no Linux (sorry slashdot) but it is fairly well balanced.
I had a closed beta invite early on, but the community is angry, rude and just spoil the game.
If you are looking for a more mature community and just for a better game (imo :) )try www.leagueoflegends.com
The game is free supported by microtransactions and has a more competitive/fun playstyle then HoN!
Really? I had to do a double-take, both to see if this was in Idle, and then to see if this actually Slashdot, and not some mocked-up promotional. I wouldn't be so grouchy about this if it wasn't for the fact that this hit the front page, and is, relatively, a minor game.
Not sure what game you've been playing, but I've had great experiences with this game.
The whole point of these games is to have an imbalance, you work together rather than soloing it... maybe that's your problem.
I do recommend LoL if you're interested. Not sure what HoN is like, but it almost looks identical to LoL apart from some minor interface differences.
I've been playing the beta for a few months on my 64-bit Linux platform that usually gets shafted by game developers. If you liked DotA Allstars on W3x, you will like Heroes of Newerth. Those who played the classic DotA will find this "flashy" and imbalanced, fun though. I also encourage Linux gamers to support those few independent game developers that do support our platform by buying the game.
Its funny this as the announcement of the open beta also co-insides with the UK LAN i39 held by Multiplay http://www.multiplay.co.uk/ where they are holding the first tournament for the game with a potential prize fund of £6250 approx $9400 which is sponsored by S2.
This worth the news simply cause this is one of the few decent looking games for linux.
Any linux purist (i.e. someone who has no dual boot) who likes computer (as opposed to console) games should try this, yes all ten of you.
If not for any other reason then to encourage more developers to do this.
If more developers do this it will indirectly improve code quality, cause programming a multi platform game/software requires a certain level of code quality.
I hope linux and windows client here are developed separately.
I still prefer League Of Legends, mainly for it's more lighthearted design.
It's already here folks. http://www.leagueoflegends.com
And it's free..
Big fan of DOTA been playing for months, the gameplay is very very adictive. Bought the game and regulary watch the tournaments on honcast.com although the web casters constant use of the word? "contenuing" drives me nuts
Expect a long but satisfying learning curve from beginner to tournament play.
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This is a list of keys I just generated .... for those that don't want to wait for the countdown ... i post em here cuz they will most likely be useless in ~ 17 hours
Copy paste one of these HoN Beta keys and go to this link to register http://beta.heroesofnewerth.com/
1: rm59h3jbzh68qkd
2: fgeb61svi3l1z3i
3: sj02syosy98lrlz
4: qp4a1cg3kjbjr59
5: at6fddfx0rpaj5r
6: w16tz52rs0ovj2d
7: 0ush2ht9fnqfpmd
8: apsu13kfh83jhfa
9: uyxxtyia2ys6xbo
10: 6t64j2qs4ijtm8x
11: u0kpxg2zfxc1je4
12: 6ffja1ai645ttex
13: m303tod2v65awsc
14: pcwrcsa5hvm2r9k
15: z5fz2ecdp6969pi
16: dzww67dgltvanqp
17: l871g6uw066srpb
18: 3a785niybo1tjdb
19: tg6xjfer3f7ocxp
20: a1jemau485eq4u6
21: otupua09tabcl18
22: uwvmbw7hajaan8v
23: dnlq77vardyxzvf
24: vjw4cj2liriik07
25: toqabjvpma92oiy
26: e61ay2h4vcj06wc
27: ng4mfmbthqdl6d5
28: 5m1231vjs7aedt6
29: izc9f57ekxqlzfa
30: 5oj9avozrz9isrl
31: yje4ra6rhms1ck6
32: 4wlv0e6plqwprs9
33: p7hqjp3t0l2ec4q
34: si7uf513ozhirqn
35: my7c9ogprfhyix0
36: f9pqspygcdswyo5
37: vashwqtc7qpg312
It's a good game to look at and to hear, the interface is only good if you're used to DOTA and you'll be lost if you aren't.
I've never played DOTA. I did however get in the closed beta for this. Admittedly the game ran very well for me but I just couldn't get over how impossible it was to control your inventory and actions and such. A drag-n-drop-able "hotbar" interface would have made it usable, but this keyboard memorization and itty bitty icon box just doesn't cut the cheddar. Maybe this has changed. I also found buying and selling to be a bit convoluted.
Out of the 20 or so games of it I played I never once got a chance to play the "light" side. I would always get booted to the other side some how some way. Several times when the game started I was listed for the light side but spawned on the dark. If this was a bug or due to people leaving I don't know, but it kinda pisses me off that I only got to play the dark side heroes.
The game would kick serious ass and I would buy it if the control scheme wasn't straight out of another game trying to be something it wasn't. This will be a big turnoff to people new to the genre.
The game has a nice polish to it. Linux and mac clients run great! The game is entertaining but not really my basket, too much of the same (DOTA) with little innovation and all the same downsides.
The real dealbreaker for me (as in: Not buying) is the community. Most players are simply rude and impatient; I get no fun out of playing. (I admit, I'm bad at it...)
HoN is a game which refused to change the game to something new and instead decided that every single decision made by the creators of DotA was sacred.
Does things like last-hitting your own minions an not scaling casters in any meaningful way with money really improve the game?
Heck, they don't even let ranged heroes get life-steal.
The most annoying thing is that getting killed still makes you not only be denied experience, give the opponent team money and experience and increased lane control and increased ganking opportunities, it also makes you lose money.
HoN and DotA on high levels means standing around behind your opponents reach and shooting your own minions, games just drag on and on since no one dares make a move or they will lose what little cash they have scrambled together.
League of Legends, while not linux or even mac compatible at present (might never be linux friendly) and has an awful client actually award teamplay with things like protecting a more dangerous team mate then yourself and dying will win the game as much as the person dealing the damage and you won't get punished for it.
Also, it has an interesting metagame which some state is unfair since you get bonuses outside of the game, but let me tell you, actually being able to build almost any hero almost any way and still be effective thanks to runes and masteries is great fun.
I've never seen as much nerd rage as I saw in the few matches that I played this game. Seemingly this game is what happens when trolls actually participate in the community.
I'm sorry that the parent post was marked troll (possibly some angry guy who got stuck laning with too many noobs in LoL.) I was gonna mark it underrated but thought a direct response might be a bit better. I'm someone who actually enjoys LoL. I've been playing it quite a bit with friends recently and taking in the sheer joy in flashing next to someone with Cho'Gath and nomming on their face. But everything the parent poster said is correct - LoL is geared to a more casual fanbase. It still has a learning curve that takes several plays to get the hang of, but it's not nearly as bad as DotA/HoN.
There's also a lot less going on in the game. The characters are stripped down to a bit more basic elements. Which is not to say that's a BAD thing - much like some people prefer older versions of Civilization to the new versions with a hundred different things going on in them, or how, y'know, Chess doesn't have a lot of rules to it. LoL is to team-RTS what WoW is to MMO's, while HoN is a bit more like EVE in that respect. If you like games with denser, more cerebral play, look into HoN - if you want something a little more pick-up-game fun, look into LoL.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
League of Legends is waaaay better.
This guy doesn't deserve a Troll mod at all. He is just presenting a his position and view of the current state in a polite way.
Those of you mods who are browsing at -1 and wondering why there are so many negative moderations goign on, as well as several trolls blasting the game one way or the other, be warned that people who play Heroes of Newearth generally have it out for the people who play League of Legends, and vice versa. The HoN'ers think that LoL'ers are spoiled kids who don't appreciate true deep, balanced gameplay and need someone to explain how you actually make a good game. If you've ever dealt with hardcore EVE players, this should sound familiar. The LoL'ers think the HoN'ers are a bunch of elitist asshats who would rather berate other players constantly than just sit back and enjoy a game.
I've seen threads on the LoL boards where the forum moderators for the two different games get into shouting matches with each other. It's not a pretty relationship between the two games, and bad blood spouts up anywhere either game is mentioned.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
I'm a long time gamer and a long time linux user. I've been dual-booting since 2003, and I've been a linux sysadmin since 2004.
I'm very happy with HoN. It's run great in Linux, the installer is easy. Built in VOIP (though I use Mangler, the linux Ventrilo client). When they announced pre-orders, I immediately bought it to support someone who made a game that could for all 3 big platforms.
Gameplay in itself... Yes, there are a lot of ass-hats. Tons. No really, take that number you're thinking, and square it. But, it's an online, competitive game. Having played Diablo, Diablo 2, SC, WC3 (and Dota), and lots of MMO's... I don't feel like the community here is any worse than in any other of the games I've played. None of them our what I would consider great marvels of society.
It's true HoN shares a lot of similar parts of DotA. But as a person who played a lot of DotA, including in CAL-i, it's a lot better. S2 Games added lots of stuff that Icefrog/DotA just couldn't due to engine limitations.
1. BEING ABLE TO RECONNECT TO A GAME SOMEONE DC'd FROM
2. Remaping keys
3. In-game voice chat is a HUGE improvement. Random people can actually co-ordinate
4. Better shopping system
5. Better item deconstruction
6. Orb effect changes
7. Several new, original heros (Deadwood, Dark Lady, Mad Man, Puppet Master, etc)
8. Several major changes to big heroes (Jereziah vs Omniknight, Kracken vs Leviathon)
9. BEING ABLE TO RECONNECT TO A GAME SOMEONE DC'd FROM
10. The user-interface is better, cleaner.
Thats just 10 of a much longer list.
I fail to see how, in a thread about HoN, mentioning the fact that its #1 competitor also *exists* is offtopic.
While I'm here, I might as well mention that LoL is a fun and innovative game, with some seriously talented industry players (Tom Cadwell, for example) working on it. I wasn't in the HoN closed beta, but I popped in here to see if people liked that, too.
Anyone know of a link to download the client before open beta signup?
I received my heroes of newerth beta key last July, and have been playing regularly ever since. I have played hundreds of games on both the windows and linux clients. The linux client works great and I suggest you try this game out :-).
S2 Games made "Savage" years ago and it has team play style FPS combined with RTS. It runs on Linux and you can download it here: http://www.newerth.com/ There are a lot of comments about Heros being unfriendly to new players, but that's not a problem with Savage. You'll just suck. :)
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
I have been playing HoN since the early beta began. I never played DOTA or any other game like this before so the learning curve was pretty rough for me. It took about 20 games before I really felt that I had a good grasp of the basics (games take anywhere from 15-45 mins). A few of the pros: 1. fast paced game 2. pretty good graphics 3. quite stable 4. great online play 5. TONS of strategies to use (offensive/defensive counters) 6. Lots of heros to pick from 7. Good friends lists, built in Voice servers etc. for fun times Cons: 1. Some people in the community are jerks just like any other online game 2. It can be hard to find a match to play with all of your friends on your team (people dont like to join games when they are all friends on one side since the scrub pick up groups usually dont know how to play together) Playing with 1-2 friends is pretty easy though, just not a full 5 man team. In rebuttal to those who say the game is not balanced, there are really good balances in place to the game. If you think a character is overpowered, pick your hero late (at the end of the countdown) and wait to see what others pick. If you know the characters, there is a great counter character for everyone in the game. Also playing larger games with more players is easier to counter than a 2v2 or 3v3 game.
As someone who had never played DotA, going straight into HoN was quite a shock. I didn't even know that I was supposed to buy items (much less what any of them did), and I was subject to pretty much the same abuse that others here have mentioned. There's no denying that getting to the point where you can play HoN for fun is going to take a significant investment in time. There's just no way to get around understanding what characters are capable of performing what actions, how their abilities fit with the rest of the team, or even what gameplay actions have what consequences (e.g., not knowing what lane to go to). What helped me a lot were the large number of hero guides on the HoN forums that at least give you some idea of what items to get, what order to get them in, and how to use your skills. They don't address things like which characters you need to run away from a 1v1 with, or how to avoid the other team swarming all over you while you're peacefully trying to kill creeps in some remote corner, but they're at least a starting point. The easiest thing I've found for new players is to join games with a kill/death ratio limit. Anything under 0.5 and they're almost assuredly new enough to play with. But they'll still take it seriously. Way too seriously.
That said, it also happens that I've got a couple acquaintances over at Riot Games, the group that publishes LoL. I thought I'd give it a try. My first impression was awful. While HoN feels like a real game, LoL feels like someone's hobby project. Where the HoN interface was intuitive and familiar, the LoL interface left me confused as to what was going on pretty much all of the time. And I'm not even talking about the gameplay yet, just getting into a game. Although I'll note that other people don't seem to have the same problem. As to the gameplay, it was pretty much the same as getting started with HoN. You don't know the characters or items, so you're basically in the same boat. I'm told that you start out on "Noob Island", or some such thing, where all of the players are supposedly around the same skill level. It certainly didn't feel like it when I was being slaughtered nonstop all game with no idea what was going on. It wasn't any better than when I had started playing HoN, and the people were similarly critical.
Oh, and the tutorials in both games are worthless. Understanding the overarching themes of the gameplay is OK, but neither of them address interactions between characters. The only way to learn is experience, even if it takes creating an enormous ignore list in the process.
I didn't get into Warcraft3 (that's where DOTA is from, right?) because of the "heroes" or whatever they had that made gameplay immensely boring.
How does DOTA compare to say, Starcraft? That's my favorite RTS to this point... does it have a high learning curve?
I'll check it out if it's worth checking out. S2 made Savage2 and I really love that game.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
This game is awesome. I've been playing for ~4 months (regularly), I had never played DotA before, but I got hooked. Of course there's a lot of assholes, you WILL get pubstomped, the learning curve is VERY steep (60 heroes ATM, 4 different skills for each, 117 different items, alot of different strategy you have to know, ...).
My tips:
- Don't listen to the jerks. Somebody talkshit you ? Reply with kind words, he'll be mad. People will call you retard if you don't know what to buy/how to play, just ask them how, if he's a jerk he'll keep flaming you, else he might even help you out.
- Don't play for stats (that mean don't steal a killing blow from someone else just for the score).
- Don't feed. The most important thing is to survive. Don't suicide just to get a kill, it's not worth it.
- Find friends to play with (this really helps to win pub games).
- Play in games of your level.
- Don't play pubs when the other team has 3+ locks (way to get pubstomped).
- Play SD (Single Draft) to try out different heroes, find one you like, get better with him and then try a new one.
- Read the forums, there are a lot of guide on pretty much every heroes (skills placement, items builds, skill usage, etc).
- If you ever want to play anything else than pubs, don't play EM (Easy Mode). It's not balanced, it makes you learn the bad way, games aren't shorter because you earn gold faster, the other team does as well.
- Don't leave your games before concede/victory/defeat.
Looking forward to see you play =)
You know, I downloaded this last night. Even though my Linux machine has hardware perfectly capable of gaming (it's my fastest machine right now, as I use it for all my desktop use), I normally keep a Windows machine seperate to play games on. Seeing this have a Linux client peeked my interest though. I downloaded it to my Ubuntu 9.10 machine and spun it up.
And it worked great. Downloaded as a single .sh installer. Sadly Ubuntu apparently by default associates .sh with gedit so I had to drop the a terminal real quick to launch it with sh, but that's pretty minor. I simple install dialog popped up, asked me where to install (I just installed to my ~/HoN), and off it went. Took less than a minute, created menu entries in Gnome, and then it was done. I launched the game and it loaded just as easily and smoothly as one would expect on a Windows system. Though I also got a few minutes to mess around with it, for that brief time it actually PLAYED well too. It felt native - much unlike tweaking something to work in Wine that, while normally getting you into the game and playing (eventually), just feels off.
Based on almost no gameplay I've already pre-ordered this game and will be sending an email to let them know that I'm doing so explicitly for their Linux support. If other companies would start doing this more, I'd finally be able to kill off that Windows machine I keep for gaming.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Are there internet a-holes? We all know the answer is yes, but I've only had about 5 games out of all those played where it was an issue. In those cases, the game gives you the following tools:
-"/ignore chat"
-Voice Chat MUTE
-and a banlist so you never need to play with that person again.
I also am not one to rage personally, so maybe that helps.
Did everyone notice that mention of BUILT IN voice chat? This is immensely helpful - if only everyone turned it on...
The other thing worth noting to those who have complained, is that there are numerous opportunities to learn in safer environments.
-A tutorial that will show you the basics
-the ability to host your own games with the requirements you want/need
-game modes that let you pick exactly the hero you want (you can even host a duplicate hero game mode if you only have one hero you're decent with)
-a Practice Mode that lets you well...practice
-no-stats games that lower overall anxiety
-forums that include many excellent gameplay guides: general guides, specific hero guides, laning, warding, etc
-clans and people who are specifically dedicated to helping new players, also found through the forums.
The games I've seen where someone becomes a potential target of rage usually go down with them not using in game chat, not talking over voice, voice chat sound off, and completely ignoring their team. This is very much a team game, quite the opposite of the earlier comment that it is possible to "one man Rambo" - this is not the case and when people do that it is natural to be frustrated. (No excuses for some of the silly ways people act when they're frustrated, see above comment on tools built into the game to deal with those scenarios.)
To be fair, the current environment (beta) allows people to create multiple accounts - thereby letting them avoid some of the infractions that might result. For example, e-peenrager2211 gets banned by me and I think I won't ever have to play with him again. He reapplies to the beta and creates account emotionallyunderdeveloped7899 and turns up in one of my games. Annoying but unavoidable until solved by official release.
The thing that really distinguishes it IS the complexity. No matter if there are other games I play, they get old and tired once the novelty wears off. This game, precisely because of it's complexity, is one that I (and a group of about 15 friends) continue to play over the past 5(!) years (when you include DotA). While it will take a while to learn all the details - I'm STILL learning and happy for that - it is well worth it.
In addition, when HoN is played at lower graphical settings, it has extremely modest hardware requirements - meaning that you can play with friends who aren't quite as up to date on their machines.