Valve Is Making DotA 2

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But first some of you might be thinking, “What is Dota 2?” Dota began as a user-made modification for Warcraft 3 and has grown into one of the most played online games in the world. Following in the tradition of Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Portal, and Alien Swarm, Dota 2 is the result of Valve hiring the community developers who built the mod and giving them the chance to finally build a full product out of their idea with the help of a professional team of developers and artists at Valve.

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Now personally, I never played the original. That being said, that list of games they mentioned is pretty fucking good and this is Valve we're talking about.

I'm interested to see how this game goes.

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Blizzard is making it too.

I'm kind of rooting for Valve's version though, they saw talent and hired it. Blizzard doesn't do that shit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAgUx...yer_embedded#!

I already like the game Valve is making better. Also, I like that Blizzard tried to make it sound, in some interviews I found, like it was wrong of Valve to try and take this game away from Blizzard when any logical person can see how it's wrong of Blizzard to try to take this away from the modder who actually made it. Valve looked at a guy that made a good mod and said "we should hire him and give him the tools he needs to make something even better" and Blizzard saw the same thing and thought "oh, we should take that guys idea and do it ourselves."

DOTA is one of the most noob-unfriendly games of all time. It has a horrible community due to how a single player playing badly can ruin everything for his team. A lot of people figured Valve would do something like a Team Fortress 2 streamlining but they didn't do that at all.

Valve is keeping the complexity intact and is instead focusing on the end-user community stuff. They're implementing some kind of coaching system to help new players. Also: matchmaking.

Those character pieces are rad as hell. What's this exactly?

That Blizzard nerd rep guy is horrible.

They are attempting to make a matchmaking system that will group people based on skill, so you're not that guy who ruin it for your team every time. That could ease the gap into play if done correctly.

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Originally Posted by YellerDog

What's this exactly?

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Think Warcraft 3 but you only control the Hero class and you have a bunch of barracks that continually spawn knights that run up a set path towards another Hero and his set of barracks that you're supposed to destroy. And there's three heroes on each side, I think.

Oh boy, DOTA. Pretty cool mod, terrible community. This thing was like a haven for people that played WoW but needed a new outlet for trying to feel elitist.

I'm pretty sure my brother has been addicted to DotA for fucking months now. It's pretty fun but very similar to WoW's battlegrounds, except since they designed it for multi the balance is much better than WoW's combat. But yeah, you need a good team to do anything.

I never thought of it as anything more than a throwaway WC3 mod that was simple, addictive and fun.

But yeah, definitely a haven for people that love to get really angry and yell-type shit like "OMG NOOB YOU FUCKING NOOB YOU PICKED THE PIT LORD NOW WE LOSE FAGGOT"

Anything to keep us from asking about Half Life Episode 3, eh?

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

Anything to keep us from asking about Half Life Episode 3, eh?

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By the time that comes out I'm going to forget the few things I remember from the previous Episodes.

So much for episodic content shortening the gap between new material.

there can't be a Dota thread without this song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OzWIFX8M-Y

When I first woke up in the morning, I briefly thought I saw DotT 2 (Day of the Tentacle 2) in the thread title and got excited.

I thought I saw DoA 2, which confused me greatly.

Half-Life Episode 3 is not a real thing, people need to stop making up stories about it coming.

the story of that video is hilarious. Especially because it ends with the UK single release which has nothing to do with DotA

I think the original designers are the ones who made LoL...., I may be wrong though.

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Originally Posted by Anthony

I think the original designers are the ones who made LoL...., I may be wrong though.

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Some of them, yeah. The guys working on DotA2 are NOT the original developers. Just the last guy in charge of it (Icefrog)

That said, this looks pretty terrible honestly. They're not doing anything new at all. It's been specifically stated that all they are doing is just porting DotA to a new engine and directly porting over all characters and the map. The entire game is going to be EXACTLY the same, it will just look better. That's not DotA2, it's DotA 1.5 if anything and I would expect better from Valve.

Just play LoL, it's quite fun and actually does something to advance the game style.

Actually, does anyone here play LoL at all? I play the shit out of it and would love to play with anyone.

The game Joe's addicted to is actually League of Legends, so there you go. He's been trying desperately to get me into it.

Joe?

My brother, Joey. The one I mentioned two posts ago.

The DOTA diaspora is pretty strange but I guess that can be attributed to the nature of the game's evolution. Anyway, it's hard to get excited about this when it is intentionally being made to stick as closely to the mod as possible. I also hear the community is quite repellant and unfriendly to newcomers so I wonder just what will really allow this fledgling genre to grow. Eventually it will suffocate from lack of oxygen.

LoL actually does a good job of simplifying it and the community is the best of all the DotA type games.

That said there's still a good number of horrible people playing it as well, but nowhere near as bad as DotA or HoN.

I play LoL a little, amumu when I do. It's apparently a little less hardcore than dota because you can't deny creep kills, but fuck that.

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Originally Posted by bbobb

Actually, does anyone here play LoL at all? I play the shit out of it and would love to play with anyone.

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I'm fluxrad21 on there. Hit me up if you got the balls. I play a decent amount of the weekends.

Sweet, I'm bbobb on there as well, I'll throw you a friend request when I get home tonight.

no ep3, don't care

I played it a bit way back in the day, maybe I will hop on someday and play with you bbobb when I am stuck in maryland or something (thanksgiving perhaps?). I think my name was ziggy stardust, but I will just find you if i do play.

Can someone explain to me how they have a tournament going on for this game when the beta hasn't even hit yet? What the fuck am I missing?

This was the way Valve chose to show the game off to the world. They are targeting it to the hardcore players, and it's a direct port of the the Warcraft III mod. If you know the mod you know this game.

I'm still kind of confused that Valve threw all their weight behind a mod port.

This is all so weird.

I'm disappointed to learn they're just re-skinning DOTA. HoN almost does that already, and after playing LoL so much (just about to hit 30), I don't feel the need to learn another game like this unless there's something new to mess with. Heck, LoL is about to release a Dominion mode (essentially Arathi Basin from WoW), and while it may be unbalanced and crappy, at least it's something new, and might be fun.

Granted, as DOTA is so janky, and HoN (especially after the UI revision) has a huge barrier to entry, if I was going to play any version of DOTA it would be Valve's, especially if my friends get in to it. The art and designs are a lot nicer than the competition, at least.

I'm FuryFox on LoL, btw. Main Morgana, haven't burnt out yet.

I'm more interested in the peripheral stuff than the mechanics. DOTA, from what I've heard, is pretty much balanced and solid. What will interest me is how Valve positions the game for the non-hardcore like myself. The largest barriers to entry, from my point of view, are the absolutely noxious communities that have sprung up around every DOTA derivative. Valve needs to figure out a way to convince hardcore players to not be total dicks to newbies in order for this game to have any success outside of the group that already plays it.

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

I'm still kind of confused that Valve threw all their weight behind a mod port.

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You act as if they haven't done that a couple times already. Counter Strike Source and Day of Defeat Source ring any bells?

Besides, I think this game is going to be free to play. It's just a way to sell hats.

They picked up both when they were still mods, and kept both of the mods around. They did no such thing here. DotA is not a mod to their own game. They just hired the one guy and spent years remaking the exact same game in Source.

Hell with CS they released the mod in a box, and a semi sequel, and an Xbox port, before moving it to Source.

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Originally Posted by bVork

DOTA, from what I've heard, is pretty much balanced and solid. .

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Fuck no they aren't. They are all embarrassingly bad. Their balance is like the equivalent of high school theater. You literally cannot play the hero you want at mid upper to high level on, period. They become non factors in the game.

Blizzard can fuck off. I hope they not only lose but are forced to pick up Valve's tab for the legal bullshit. A mod, especially its name, should be not the IP of the game's developer, unless they buy it. That should be cut and dry.

I don't see why Valve should be allowed to trademark it. I don't think Blizzard should be able to either but I can't say they're wrong for opposing Valve on this.

So the developers that created DOTA moved on to create League of Legends and the guy who they passed DOTA on to and really made the game great was hired by Valve to do DOTA2? I'd say Blizzard has the least claim to the name out of everyone involved. I don't know if the law would agree though.

ALSO: Sent LoL friend requests to Furyfox and flux=rad. No clue if either of you still plays

The creator should own the name. Assuming he is supportive, Valve has the only corporate claim to the name. The key obviously is the creator's wishes to me.

Yeah but didn't he make this game utilizing Blizzard's map maker? I don't know if it was the case for that, but a lot of the times you'll see specific legal disclosure saying that Blizzard would own the content you generate with their map maker.

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Originally Posted by Thief Silver

Yeah but didn't he make this game utilizing Blizzard's map maker? I don't know if it was the case for that, but a lot of the times you'll see specific legal disclosure saying that Blizzard would own the content you generate with their map maker.

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EULA/Terms of Service aren't legally binding

Yeah, they can say lots.

I'm pretty sure EA claims your immortal soul in the Origin EULA so I'm very interested in this legal action!

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Originally Posted by Yoshi

The creator should own the name. Assuming he is supportive, Valve has the only corporate claim to the name. The key obviously is the creator's wishes to me.

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That's the thing, IceFrog (the guy that works at Valve) isn't the creator. If anyone can be considered the creator it would be Guinsoo who went on to make League of Legends.

Valve has Eul too, who was on DOTA back when Guinsoo was. That muddies the chain of title a bit

Yep. And there were quite a few other people involved in DOTA's creation. In all honestly I think Guinsoo is right in saying that no one should have the rights to the name.

I honestly can't believe that Blizzard isn't trying to sue Valve over the designs in DOTA 2. Sure, Valve made new models for the characters, but some of the character designs are very, very close to the original Warcraft III ones. HoN had the decency to change up the character designs quite a bit. In DOTA 2, you're basically playing as characters from the Warcraft universe.

http://www.dotawallpaper.info/wp-con.../12/invoke.jpg

http://oyster.ignimgs.com/ve3d/image...600_normal.jpg

What do you mean? Nothing alike

Both those character designs are appallingly crap. The only other similarity is in being a blonde elf spellcaster who just can't stop accessorizing his shoulders.

James