Valve Announces Dota 2 128
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.)"
Re:Acronym courtesy missing... (Score:4, Informative)
What the hell is a DotA?
It stands for Defense of the Ancients. Basically the game consists of two teams of player-controlled heroes defending their own team's base while attacking the other's.
Re:What players want? I think not. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Acronym courtesy missing... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Acronym courtesy missing... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What players want? I think not. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Icefrog (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Acronym courtesy missing... (Score:4, Informative)
As much using acronyms in situations like this annoys me, the acronym is more known than the full name.
Or you insist calling it "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"? ;)
I'll tell you what DotA is... (Score:5, Informative)
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.