All rumours and speculation are at an end. Valve is making Dota 2, and we’ve played It, and it looks great right now, even though it’s not scheduled for release until next year. We failed to get a look at the main innovation of the second part: a radical approach to re-immersing the gaming community in gameplay.
“Dota 2” owes its name to a mod for “Warcraft III” called “Defense of the Ancients,” which brings radical changes to this real-time strategy. In this fashion, two teams of five players compete. All matches are highly permeated with the spirit of competition and the time can take from 40 minutes or more. Unlike other RTS in “DotA” each player controls one hero who is pumped and collects gold reserves for acquisition of powerful equipment, and also expendables. As computer-controlled armies continue to continuously appear and attack the enemy base, players with the help of their powerful heroes must decide the outcome of the battle in their favor.
“DotA” quickly gained huge popularity on the service “Battle.Net” Blizzard ” thanks to the growing gaming community, using user-created channels, as well as a simple game browser, with which you can join the game. Thanks to mods over time, the game has divided into several branches. Ultimately, one of them took the honorable first place – “DotA-Allstars” – originally developed by Steve Fick (Steve “Guinsoo” Feak), who is now working under the wing of “Riot Games” on the project “League of Legends”. Allstars is currently maintained and updated thanks to the efforts of IceFrog-a (his real name he chose not to disclose), who was hired by Valve in 2009, and is now working on the project “Dota 2”.
DotA enjoys such unprecedented success due to a number of interrelated reasons. The game has an element of skill honing, as extensive as in “Counter-Strike” or “Starcraft”. Expert players dominate matches with less skilled individuals solely through sleight of hand and in-game knowledge gained at the cost of great effort. Extensive upgrade options allow players to combine items into more powerful artifacts that give heroes thousands of extra health points or powerful attacks that suck the life out of the enemy. Group play is also highly encouraged. The game map is large enough for ten players, here everyone can spread out on the territory and independently kill neutral monsters without direct contact with enemies. When the game gets to a late stage, almost invariably all fights are reduced to opposing titans in 3-on-3 (or even 5-on-5) group battles.
The mod only benefited from the introduction of first-class long-term technical support, which manifested itself in the form of constant updates, adding new content or fixing problems in the balance. The balance in the game is at a height: no team with the selected composition, as well as no strategy has been able to hold out for a long period. All heroes are so different from each other that in a match with different lineups can take a completely different character in contrast to your last game.
The grandiosity of the deep gameplay created by this project simply has no precedents. Today, years after the release, the download count of add-ons on some third-party site can exceed six million downloads per day. This mod spawned a new subgenre, which is usually referred to as “Action-RTS”. Bright successful representatives of this genre are such games as “League of Legends” and ” Heroes of Newerth “(as well as the failed “Demigod”) plus the “DotA-Allstars”. Corporation “Valve” all adore for such series as “Half-Life”, “Counter-Strike”, “Team Fortress” and “Left 4 Dead”, not to mention “Steam-e” – the famous digital distribution system and platform for the selection of players. And it is this company that next year will open the door to this developing genre with the help of the “Dota 2” project.
The Dota 2 Game 