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.

Comments

That's right, mod competitors "offtopic"

[cynical kane]

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.

Re:Heroes of Noteworthy..

[npsimons]

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.

Answer me just one question first: is this a true port or did they "port" it using WINE? All due respect to developers who even acknowledge Linux (then again, in this day and age, how can you *not* acknowledge Linux?), and to the WINE developers, but I'm not willing to run some half-assed, DirectX laden, emulated "port" of a game. If I were, I'd still be playing Windows games. As it is, the game industry has never really given Linux the time of day, so I stopped paying attention to them. Don't get me wrong, I still run Jagged Alliance 2 on my N900, and plenty of emulated games that I bought before Linux existed, not to mention the myriad of open source and indie studio games that actually run on Linux and not WINE.

Years ago, I used to play games a lot; used to have a number of consoles, a decent PC gaming rig to run Windows and DOS games. But that was years ago, and as time has gone by, and I've found the only thing I need Windows for is games, I've found better things to do with my time. Like write my own software, or go hiking or climbing, or play my saxophone. I'd *love* to support developers who support Linux, but it costs money, and if they're not really supporting Linux, I'm definitely not going to give them money that I could better spend elsewhere.

I bought *multiple* copies of Savage, one for me and one for each of my friends because S2 had the three major platform clients on one CD. I bought them all through a Linux gaming shop (http://tuxgames.com), and told my friends "here, you can run it on Windows *and* Linux!". Then S2 made the sequel for Windows and "ported" it using WINE, and that was around the same time I stopped playing games seriously.

Re:Mod parent UP

[Korin43]

Was I wrong about it? The thing I thought about after I wrote that was that certain games (FPS genre) need the kind of optimization you can't do in a cross-platform way, but that would just be optimization within certain methods.