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Valve Announces Dota 2
RulerOf writes "Just over a year after hiring IceFrog, the lead developer of the wildly popular DotA Allstars mod for Warcraft III, and the speculation surrounding Valve's recent trademark filing for the 'DotA' name, Valve has officially announced Dota 2. Gameplay of Dota 2 is being ported 'exactly' from the current DotA Allstars and includes every hero, but vast improvements are being made to the game including VoIP, a coaching system, in-game rewards, and AI that takes over for disconnected players. Lastly, it all runs on top of the Source engine. (GameInformer's website appears to be struggling right now though, as they had an exclusive on this story.)"
They may have to, much of the content in dota has been built up over the years through mutliple developers of dota (icefrog wasn't the first), through community submissions and such. And even then some characters are taken from other copyrighted works, Lina for example is from a Japanese anime slayers.
http://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/2010/10/truth.html
Seems valve may have known a little more than they let on when they hired Mr frog.
What the hell is a DotA?
Please, if you are going to use an acronym in a news post, especially one that may be a mod many are not familiar with, follow common courtesy and spell it out the first time it is used.
I had to click on the link and visit a page with information about a mod for a game I haven't played in YEARS.
Wouldn't a better title be: Valve doesn't announce episode three after years of delays.
DotA is dying, and it's dying because there are already next generation replacements for it. A few years ago, the entire custom game list on Warcraft III would have been almost full of DotA and maybe a couple other games hosted here and there. These days it can take several minutes just to get a full game setup.
For those who actually enjoyed the way DotA played and the associated content there is already a complete replacement with Heroes of Newerth. Which pretty much is what Valve is talking about making here. And for those who were actually looking for something different than a straight DotA clone, League of Legends actually makes an effort to change the game up in meaningful ways. Most significantly by throwing out the Warcraft III stat system.
So despite Valve's track record, I'm not optimistic in their approach on this. I really doubt people want DotA yet again with a few enhancements. I think a 3rd generation sequel would have a lot more chance than a 1st generation remake. Unless they make more than trivial improvements in infrastructure this is not going to draw the players who are already in this market. Maybe they stand a chance for getting some new players, those not already involved in the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games. It would have been nice to see Valve actually do some research before trying to jump blindly into this.
Fear is the mind killer.
I've never heard of Dota or played Warhammer III; I do, however, have Steam installed and own all of Valve's games. It's not just existing Dota players who this will be aimed at, it's people like me.
Skill based matching? Shades of SC2. Everything you do is tied back to your one true identity? Uh oh. I've been playing dota for something like six or seven years now. I *like* the fact that anyone can host a game (especially now that bots have made this process hassle-free) and I *like* the fact that anyone can roll up a new bnet account in a few seconds. I've never been banned for anything, so it's not ban avoidance or dodging a bad reputation that I'm after. I like not always being the same person in every game. I like getting in to games with people far more skilled than I am! Yes, I lose badly, but I always learn something about play techniques that goes on to improve my game. How much can you learn if you can always compete with those you play against? All that teaches you is that you don't have to change anything and you'll do fine.
I love getting in to games with the skilled players, the ones who can read your mind and are always up for a gank. Will I be relegated to the equivalent of pub mashups because of that one game where I fed like thanksgiving?
I've played LoL and HoN so I know what can happen when you try to clone DoTA. Little things being different can make a large difference in gameplay: towers in HoN don't act quite right, nor is the right click interaction the same. When cloning the cloners are never content to just copy a good thing, they always *ALWAYS* try to 'fix' things they think are broken... usually with unintentionally awful side effects. Part of what I, and other dota players, like about dota is going to be lost if it becomes a hosted by a single central authority, requires a monthly fee to play, subjects you to "reputation" requirements before you can enter good games, or any one of a dozen other things that seem like good ideas from the outside.
I like the idea of an updated dota client (war3 is a bit cumbersome!) but I worry about any big change. One nice thing about icefrog is that he doesn't change a lot of things at once, even when there's a big, sweeping change it's incremental. Since this is valve-based I'm presuming that means steam, and I hate steam in general. Will there be LAN play? Will we be able to host our own servers?
How will things like OMG mode be supported? This is by far the most popular sub-mode of DoTA at the moment and with the keys to the kingdom locked up in a non-user-editable valve proprietary game I don't think OMG would ever have been developed. I certainly hope valve plans to support this in dota2, along with the built in but less common modes (id, sc, hell even wtf).
tl;dr I'm worried by this, but I'd like to be happy about it. I just hope it's as good in every way as the existing dota.
I want my Cowboyneal
The DotA community on Battlenet was killed by Blizzard, when they began banning people with no possibility for appeal for using the 3rd party tools necessary to making a decent game on battle.net possible. Tools like visual custom kick and banlist became bannable offenses, but they were pretty much necessary to have a game on battlenet that wasn't full of laggers, leavers, and griefers. The more serious players moved to 3rd party services/leagues, and the casual players quit or moved to League of Legends or Heroes of Newerth. I haven't played Heroes of Newerth since beta, but to call it a drop in replacement for Dota was pretty far fetched, Dota relies on extremely fine tuned RTS and pathing mechanics, that wc3 provides, and that simply didn't exist in HoN when I played.
What the hell is a DotA?
Please, if you are going to use an acronym in a news post, especially one that may be a mod many are not familiar with, follow common courtesy and spell it out the first time it is used.
While you raise a good question (plenty of people don't know what DotA is, of course!), concerns like this are the reason that I included a link to the Wikipedia article upon the first mention of DotA in the submission, as well as some context around said link for those too lazy to click through.
DotA Allstars (DotA is short for Defense of the Ancients) is the world's most popular, most well balanced, and most refined incarnation of a very popular genre of RTS custom maps that began with a Starcraft map called Aeon of Strife that can collectively be referred to as the "AoS genre." However, though AoS was quite popular in its day (and I remember seeing the games on Battle.net, but never played them!), it was plagued with balance issues, particularly in the first Warcraft III incarnations by the same name; those maps were basically won by padding your hero's agility stat and adding a lifestealing attack.... they were kinda stupid, but very fun nonetheless.
Where AoS variants such as DotA differ from traditional RTS games is that instead of building and commanding a base and an army and its leaders (or heroes) and assaulting the opposite team to destroy its base, players instead control only the hero characters and the rest of the army that fights alongside you is completely controlled by the computer. You and your teammates then fight in this battle, killing enemy units and teaming up to gank (i.e. surprise and kill by abusing superior numbers, powerups, skills, whatever) enemy heroes for gold and experience, buying items and equipment to enhance your hero's stats, buff your team, or counter your opponents. The back and forth struggle is extremely teamwork oriented and incredibly fun, and playing the game with people who are all of a high skill level is quite possibly one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had in gaming, even when I've lost!
I could go on and on about the awesomeness that the game is, but if you like games that require teamwork and skill (and don't involve any of the pervasive bullshit that has saturated FPS games since Counter-Strike became popular... "You aim at the chest and pull down on the mouse when you start shooting and get a HEADSHOT errrytime! CROUCH, CROUCH!") that are constantly improving, then you ought to give it a try. Bringing true DotA out of the Warcraft III engine and into modern times has been a dream of mine for a very long time, and though a game like Heroes of Newerth is a faithful clone, it's still not perfect from a gameplay perspective. It behaves considerably differently and the action is considerably faster, which I don't consider a good thing, though it is a great game itself.
If you found any of that interesting, I do recommend giving it a try. You'll get wtfpwned for a while, but once you get your first triple kill, you'll never look back.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I've never... played Warhammer III
I think they skipped 3 and went straight to 40000.