Lead Dev On DotA: Allstars Joins Valve

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."

Valve is S.M.A.R.T...

[locallyunscene]

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 ar

How do you play this game?

[tieTYT]

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

Re:

[nuclearpenguins]

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. [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[chrysrobyn]

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. Wi