REVIEw
History
Defence of the Ancients (DotA)
was originally a mod created by Icefrog for the game of Warcraft 3 which was
published by Blizzard Entertainment; this mod became very popular very quickly.
After a few years Valve Corporation employed Icefrog to help them create the
game of DOTA 2, both Valve and
Blizzard had been working on the game of Dota 2 in secret, so when Valve
released their version of the game, Blizzard took them to court, it is because
of this that Valve had to name the game DOTA
2 using all Capitals as Blizzard had Copyrighted the name DotA, on top of all this Valve had to
change any content in the game that was Copyrighted by Blizzard, so some of the
content had names changed and what not but otherwise remained the same. So
there’s a bit of a background to the game that is DOTA 2, which is currently the most popular game with over 6.5
million unique users each month, other than League
of Legends out there. League of Legends is traditionally DOTA 2’s main
competitor in the sense that the games are very similar but are still
distinctly unique to each other, as the game mechanics are noticeably different
Description
DOTA 2 is a team
based Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game or MOBA for short, the game consists of having 5 players per side,
with over 100 heroes to pick from. This game is heavily team orientated so it
is a great game to get into with your friends. I’ll just clear up some in game
terms to make reading this a bit easier, farm is the gold that you collect
while playing the game, you can get this by either killing creeps or the other
teams heroes, laning is when you are in 1 of the 3 lanes, this is generally
early to mid-game, pushing is where you attack and attempt to destroy an enemy’s
tower with your own creep wave. There are a multitude of roles a person can
play on their team to make it effective, the following are the roles of a
standard team with a brief description, note that there are many different team
line ups and no game will ever be the same;
Hard Carry: This role is a very farm intensive role, and generally needs to be supported in the early game by a hard support, as they require a significant gold advantage to be effective in terms of winning team fights and pushing towers, and generally becomes key to winning the late game stage of a game.
Solo Mid Lane: This role is very important, as performing badly in this role and lane can result in your team having a severe disadvantage in the early to mid-game as the other team’s Solo Mid will generally go to the top and bottom lanes and gank (surprise attack) your team mates, and this results in them losing their lanes too. This role requires farm to be effective but is less farm intensive compared to the Hard Carry.
Off Lane: This is the name of the role that plays in the non-safe lane, which is where they generally don’t have the tower advantage in the early game and are usually fighting close to or under the enemy’s tower. This role is able to solo the lane or can have a support with them, it doesn’t really matter.
Jungler: A jungler is the role performed by a hero that is able to farm off of the neutral creeps in the early stages of the game, this is beneficial to the team as it leaves someone in lane by themselves which means they can gain experience and gold faster than what they would be able to if they were sharing a lane.
Support: This role is less farm intensive than the other roles and can generally use their abilities effectively without items, this means that they build items to support the team as opposed to increasing their own damage output and will usually help the hard support in terms of buying wards if the hard support cannot afford them.
Hard Support: This role focuses less on amassing gold and items and more on supporting the team and protecting the hard carry and their farm in the early stages of the game, this role is perhaps the most crucial role to a successful DOTA 2 team.
Hard Carry: This role is a very farm intensive role, and generally needs to be supported in the early game by a hard support, as they require a significant gold advantage to be effective in terms of winning team fights and pushing towers, and generally becomes key to winning the late game stage of a game.
Solo Mid Lane: This role is very important, as performing badly in this role and lane can result in your team having a severe disadvantage in the early to mid-game as the other team’s Solo Mid will generally go to the top and bottom lanes and gank (surprise attack) your team mates, and this results in them losing their lanes too. This role requires farm to be effective but is less farm intensive compared to the Hard Carry.
Off Lane: This is the name of the role that plays in the non-safe lane, which is where they generally don’t have the tower advantage in the early game and are usually fighting close to or under the enemy’s tower. This role is able to solo the lane or can have a support with them, it doesn’t really matter.
Jungler: A jungler is the role performed by a hero that is able to farm off of the neutral creeps in the early stages of the game, this is beneficial to the team as it leaves someone in lane by themselves which means they can gain experience and gold faster than what they would be able to if they were sharing a lane.
Support: This role is less farm intensive than the other roles and can generally use their abilities effectively without items, this means that they build items to support the team as opposed to increasing their own damage output and will usually help the hard support in terms of buying wards if the hard support cannot afford them.
Hard Support: This role focuses less on amassing gold and items and more on supporting the team and protecting the hard carry and their farm in the early stages of the game, this role is perhaps the most crucial role to a successful DOTA 2 team.
While these are the standard roles generally used by teams
and players in DOTA 2, you are not restricted to them; you can play the game in
whatever way and style that you choose.
The Game
Play
Everybody’s hero
starts out at level 1 at the beginning of each game and can achieve a maximum
level of 25, throughout levelling; your stats will increase as well as
receiving 1 skill point per level to upgrade your abilities or to increase your
stats further. The shop system in the game is very user friendly as it will
suggest items for you to buy depending on the hero you are playing, or if you
could even use player created guides to assist you when buying items or what
skill to put your skill points in. The items of the game vary from supporting
items which assist your whole team in general, to items that increase an
individual’s damage output.
Every hero with the exception of a few will have 4 abilities, 3 standard abilities and an ultimate ability. Depending on the type of hero that you are playing, your abilities will vary from support type abilities, to initiation abilities all the way through to nuking abilities.
The camera angle of the game is positioned in a bird’s eye view or top down on a slight angle, so that you control your hero from above and can get a better sense of the events happening around you. You move your hero around using the right mouse click, and your abilities can be used by either left clicking them with the mouth or by pressing hotkeys. Items with active abilities can also be used in exactly the same way. In terms of the Heads Up Display or HUD, there are many different skins that can be obtained that change it aesthetically so it’s really personal preference to what HUD you use as there is no difference in the set out, just the aesthetic qualities of it.
Every hero with the exception of a few will have 4 abilities, 3 standard abilities and an ultimate ability. Depending on the type of hero that you are playing, your abilities will vary from support type abilities, to initiation abilities all the way through to nuking abilities.
The camera angle of the game is positioned in a bird’s eye view or top down on a slight angle, so that you control your hero from above and can get a better sense of the events happening around you. You move your hero around using the right mouse click, and your abilities can be used by either left clicking them with the mouth or by pressing hotkeys. Items with active abilities can also be used in exactly the same way. In terms of the Heads Up Display or HUD, there are many different skins that can be obtained that change it aesthetically so it’s really personal preference to what HUD you use as there is no difference in the set out, just the aesthetic qualities of it.
Presentation
The presentation of
the game is very clean; the interface is set out nice and simple making it very
easy to use, whether you’re a new or old player, it is near impossible to get
lost while navigating the main screen. Everything is evenly distributed so
there is no confusing clutter, but at the same time it doesn’t look to empty
either resulting in a really well done system. The simplicity of it all
combined with the artwork of the main screen make it aesthetically pleasing to
the player, the in game lay out is just as easy to navigate around due to the
simplicity of it and new players will find that they are able to quickly
establish a good understanding of the layout of the whole game.
Graphics
The graphics of this game
are not even close to the graphics of some other games out there, but I find
that the cartoonish graphics sort of suit the game, as the game’s selling point
is not it’s graphics but more so it’s game play, the game is more about being
aesthetically pleasing as a whole as opposed to having super detail on each
individual hero as it would slow the entire game down and there isn’t really
any point having super detailed graphics because players view the heroes from
far above them so they don’t get a close look anyway. Although graphics do play
a significant role in terms of hero customisation, from playing the game or
from purchasing from the in-game store, players are able to equip their heroes
with unique items, which have no effect in game other than the changing of
their aesthetic appearance, which can be seen in game, but less so as opposed
to viewing these items on your heroes in your player profile.
The Animation
The Animation
The animation of DOTA
2 is quite nice, everything moves fluidly, in terms of heroes moving around
their running animations look natural, their idle animations are also quite
pleasing, some item sets for changing your heroes’ appearance also come with
custom animation for some abilities, and items from the Arcana category change
the animation of the actual hero. There are also items called Taunts, which can
be used by certain heroes, where you can bind the taunt action to a hotkey and
in the middle of the game you can press this animation and your hero will start
doing a taunt animation. This adds to the humour of the game as it allows
players to have a bit of fun with each other in the form of taunting.
Character
Speech
Every character in the game has their own dialogue, which I
think is a really neat feature, that for all intents and purposes doesn’t need
to be there, but it just, adds a bit more humour to the game as most of what
they say is humorous. I also like that every character has a background story
and some of the characters are connected via their background stories, this
results in some heroes having unique dialogue with certain other heroes which
is also a really cool feature.
Community Contributions
Another unique feature about this game is that the community
is helping to shape it, with the community workshop available through Steam,
the community is able to create custom cosmetics for heroes in game, and if the
community wants to see that item in the game, they simply vote for it. If an
item receives enough votes it will eventually be added into the game, and the
creator will receive a percentage of whatever profits that particular item
makes. I just think this feature really sets it apart from its competitor games
like League of Legends. As League of Legends doesn’t have a community
contribution system as involving as DOTA 2 does.
The Good
Overall this game is doing a lot of things right, the game
runs nice and smooth, has nice animations that you can really appreciate nice
character dialogue and in general is just a really good game which you can
become quite attached to, especially if you’re playing it with friends. The
game is free to play, and there is no pay to win feature, the only in game
purchasing available is cosmetic items and tournament tickets, so that you may
view professional team compete against each other for tournament titles.
The Bad
As the game is still fairly new only just recently out of beta
testing, there are still a few bugs and hiccups with this game, a lot of which
used to be exploited by a lot of the player base, although the majority of them
have been fixed in the latest patch ‘First Blood’. So there isn't really any
bugs that I can think of off the top of my head now, since the majority if not
all of the major ones have been patched. The other problem I find with the game
is the queue times for matchmaking, sometimes I can find a game almost
instantaneously, while other times I can be waiting for over 10 minutes, this
can be shortened by playing on all the servers around the world, but I would
rather just stick to my own server as playing on other countries servers
results in latency which is horrible in this type of game as half a second
latency could be the difference between you winning or losing a team fight,
which is a major part of this game.
Overall
This game is spectacular and I personally prefer it in
comparison to League of Legends, as this game focuses less on making you pay
for stuff and rather lets you focus on the game, a key notion of this is that
every hero is available for use from the moment you start, as opposed to League
of Legends where only a select few are available for use and the rest have to
be purchased which in game currency that you gain through playing, which leads
to the other benefit of DOTA 2 which is that you get cosmetic items for just
playing the game, where as in League of Legends the only way to obtain cosmetic
items is through the purchase of them using real money. Other than that I
believe DOTA 2 to hold a lot more depth and complexity to that of League of
Legends making it a much more immersive game overall. I rate this game an 8/10
By Ryan Peterson
Gaming Name: Rylos
Bibliography
http://thedesigninspiration.com/illustrations/crystal-maiden/
http://www.team-dignitas.net/articles/Blogs/DotA%202/2771/A-comparison-of-Eastern-vs-Western-picks-and-bans/
http://2befine.deviantart.com/art/Dota2-Lina-245236469
