f13.net

http://gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/10/13/dota-2-announced-details.aspx

(mirror for a lot of stuff at http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=410094 - GI is being hammered)

Basic gist of it - original WC3 map, mechanics intact, making the leap to the Source engine. All 100+ heroes currently in DotA Allstars are making the jump. Most community features integrated into the game, such as hero-specific guides, which can link into doing things such as highlighting specific item builds or in-game tips. Participating in those guides and the communtiy leads to in-game bonuses such as skins. There is also a mentor/pupil system for helping another player learn a hero.

Oh interesting. Valve are full of surprises at the moment.

Wish they'd surprise me with Episode 3 though...

If they remove Denial, I hereby announce the death and rebirth of the genre. If they keep denial, I and I expect most people will just stick with LoL.

HoN stands to lose out big time over this, LoL should do okay.

I'm pleased that they're able to more or less directly port in all the original heroes. Ah, morphling, I missed you so.

HON is fucked... League of Legend will face some collateral if only because this game is Valve.


I don't recall if I've asked before but I know I've seen you post about this before.  Why the hatred for denial?

I kind of thought the whole creep deny system in DotA was a limitation of the WC3 engine.  I wonder why they'd want to keep that.

Not a make or break detail though.  Especially if they can make the community less hostile which looks to be what they're trying to do.

Does anyone know how Valve is planning to get around DOTA's massive trademark violations?  Half the characters and items are named after other fantasy IPs.  Maybe "drow" and "Khadgar" and so on aren't actually trademarks?

We'll have to see when they add more characters how they go about it.

Characters like the Nerubian Weaver and the Nerubian Assassin are straight up based on WC3 races, so I'm assuming those will just have to be redesigned. The concept art for the Bloodseeker is probably the best way to kind of get info on how they're going to redesign the characters, since that was basically just a WC3 Orc Shaman before.

I'd be curious how much voice work is going to go into this game to voice all of those characters. You'd think the dialog can't be more than 10-12 lines per hero, so I would expect some heroes to sound alike, but then they mention the line where if you have two heroes who are tied via lore in the same lane, they'll bark things at each other.

As much as I loved DoTA, and currently enjoy HoN, I would LOVE to see the removal of denial also. It's nothing but an additional layer of work that makes no sense lorewise (killing own army) and benefits poopsock tryhards.

Yes, I can do it. Yes, I've had 50+ denies in a game. It's an arbitrary hold-over from a game engine limitation. It's similar to bunny hopping/strafe jumping.

I guess we'll have to wait until the Q&A that IceFrog does for more info.

As far as denials, I'm on the fence. I'm happy without it, but I won't throw my hands up in disgust if it is there.

http://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/

With this and the Mythic thing, I guess today's become Anonymously Bitch About Game Developers Day.

LoL proved that mobas can, and should, exist without denial. I say this as a person who is massively proud of his ability to brutalize lanes with 100+ denial counts and render many heroes (mostly melee) defunct in the mid-game.

I'm not asking wether or not anyone likes the mechanic or wether or not you can make a game about it.  Why the hate for denial?  It takes the exact same skill to last hit as to deny so its not a matter of difficulty.  I think it opens the door for making a serious tactical choice.  For instance you might be laning against a strong midgame carry.  Are you better off going for farm yourself by getting in last hits?  Or would it be better to focus your efforts on denying thus removing xp and gold from that hero.

I'm not tied to the mechanic by any means I'm just looking for some explanation as to why people hate it so much?

Well, from the GameInformer article (bold is mine):

LoL will do just fine. DOTA is late to the party.

Well then, don't care. LoL it is. IceFrog makes a stupid decision, news at 11.

I can't speak for everyone, but personally, I'm not even that fond of the whole "last hit" mechanic, and denying is everything that's wrong with "last hitting" times twenty.  It just feels awkward, like you're playing some weird economic minigame rather than having a battle.  The best analogy I can think of offhand is the GBA game Yggdra Union, which presents itself as a fantasy TBS (swordsmen and archers, equipping items, leveling up, etc.) but just has so much ancilliary bullshit stapled to it (characters in a 2-tile radius X formation attack together if the initiator is male, or a + formation if it's a female, with each participating unit contributing it's own sub-union depending on it's own gender, with unit attack order starting at the northmost character and moving in a clockwise inward spiral against an enemy which is defending with it's own union etc. etc. etc.) that it ceases to feel like a medival wargame and becomes more like some kind of weird tile moving puzzle as you arrange your units into formations and arrangements which only make any kind of sense because of the counterintuitive battle mechanics.

Also, it slows down the game, increases the emphasis on farming, and fucks over melee champs even harder than they already are.

This sucks. I was really hoping for something new/better out of valve. Not a reskin.

As much as I like some of the kooky heroes of DotA, LoL is twice the game DotA ever was.

Now the question is, how much would I pay for a game that was free, I already have, and got bored of years ago...

Denial makes no logical sense. That's the problem with it. It breaks the illusion and turns it into a game about gaming the mechanics instead of heroes fighting.

Under no circumstances does it make logical sense to kill your own guy. It's a logical bug that results from the way different rules interact. It's like when a fighting game maker makes a move with too much hit stun and another move that closes distance and now you have a 2-hit infinite loop, they intended both moves to work the way they do but the way they combine was not intended.

Edit: As far as DOTA 2...I don't get it. Instead of DOTA-style games being a genre it seems that they all strive to be nearly exact replicas of DOTA. Similar mechanics, similar heroes, similar maps. It's like if Sonic the Hedgehog was exactly the same game as Super Mario World only with Sonic instead of Mario.

It sounds like this DOTA 2 is just DOTA 1. Nothing about it warrants a 2, it's supposed to be literally the same game - a game that is already free.

You might figure that if Valve was going to hire a guy who worked on DOTA it would be to take those games to the "next level", not to exactly replicate a free game.

Well, pretty much every game that has a competitive scene is about the mechanics instead of the hypothetical story/scenario.  Is anyone playing Starcraft 2 multiplayer really viewing their 1v1 match as the heroic terran wiping the scourge of the zerg from the map?

Yes!  :drill:

I know some people that are pretty diehard DotA players and I was expecting the announcement of this to send people crazy...but the response seems to be a resounding "meh".  :oh_i_see:

Well, DotA is free to play, has a well developed tournament scene, a very well developed metagame, a development team that constantly works to bring the game to the most balanced state possible and a skill-set that rewards inordinate repetition.

If Valve decide to charge for this version, the response will probably be about the same as LoL and HoN - some will go over, most will stay.

I bet it's free to play with purchasable skins and the such.

Or they bundle it ala Orange Box.

It's exactly why I didn't play the game.

Thats fine, but I guess I just don't see the objection.  Has any multiplayer game EVER really been about the scenario?  Maybe specific co-op games.   All PvP is about Player v. Player though, and mechanics should exist to that end.  If the mechanic sucks thats fine, argue that the mechanic sucks, but

" It breaks the illusion and turns it into a game about gaming the mechanics instead of heroes fighting."

Is a silly argument to make about a game like this.  You may as well argue understanding how to use the mechanics of how guns shoot in Counter Strike makes it about "gaming the mechanics" instead of counter terrorists fighting terrorists, or that in Quake 3 using the plasma gun to boost you up a wall is "gaming the mechanics" instead of about fighting.... I dunno, it just seems like an incredibly naive argument to make about the nature of a PvP oriented game.  Hell, you may as well argue that a Quarterback in american football is "gaming the mechanics" when he does a hard count to get his opponent to jump offsides.

There are plenty of good arguments you can make, but that particular one just rubs me the wrong way.

 :grin:

I hope more people take the liberty to spill dirt, so far this week is awesome.

I think it's decent argument.  I think the better games will have game mechanics that are gameable in a way that fosters (or is neutral) to suspension of disbelief.

Good:  Sking in Tribes was taking advantage of the game mechanics in a good way - it lends itself to thinking that the merc is taking advantage of a ground-effect.

Bad: bunny hopping in any FPS - it detracts from the game because it looks fucking stupid, it forces repetitive behavior on the part of the player and it breaks immersion from a, "people jumping around like morons get themselves killed on a battlefield" perspective.

Of course Good/Bad is pretty subjective, you might have hated skiing in Tribes. 

It seems to me that you have a very high threshold on what it takes to be "bad" - that doesn't mean that the conversation isn't worth having.

Skiing in tribes and bunny hopping seem pretty much equivalent to me.  I'm fine with both.

If I play PvP, I want to play against skill, not mechanics.  Mechanics should define the physics of the world, not be the best method of exploitation.

Any appearance of heroes and villains is just window dressing, and not about what I said at all.  So, uh, stop rubbing yourself.

Strafe jumping is an analogue for freedom of movement. Real people don't move in only four directions or can spin like a gyro. To compensate for the much, much more detailed control one has of one's physical body, movement is exaggerated in a way that makes it possible to achieve a degree of movement that is similar to one's real capability, relative to the game's general scale of things. In Quake, being able to run and jump extraordinarily well is just a response to carrying rocket launchers. In Modern Warfare, you don't get to strafe jump because the overall scale of the game is much smaller - you carry firearms, not cannons - and so on.

All FPSes look "fucking stupid" if viewed from a realistic viewpoint. People in combat don't run at constant speed, can only stand or crouch or ever really jump to avoid being hit.

Bottom line: Strafe jumping isn't a mechanical consideration at all. It's very much an organic one.

/derail

Isn't skill a measure of how good a player is at the mechanics of a game?

That's #1 in the exploiter excuse book.

I agree with the general principle, but I don't think it's so much the mechanics themselves as a combination of the mechanics and the dressing (graphics, story, etc).  For example, the mechanic of denial might not be so weird-looking if the "creeps" were represented as boars or something that it might make sense for you to slaughter to deny your opponent their delicious flesh.  Same mechanics but different dressing.

Wow, I guess I didn't realize I was exploiting all these years by understanding how to play games.

Edit: Let me also say, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, this isn't even about exploitation of game mechanics really, like unintended buggy stuff.   This is about, from my perspective, that I play PvP games to be competitive with other people playing them, not to be immersed in the game as if it were real. 

I was thinking the same thing, I just used shorthand to try keep my post from becoming a thesis paper.

Specific to denial: If there was a chance that killing your own creeps could cause a creep uprising I think it would be better received.

Also specific to denial: I think window dressing is only half the problem in the case of denial - game mechanisms that focus on cock-blocking an opponent just tend to be a good way to generate rage.  I think that game designers should have learned in the last 5 years that game mechanics that generate rage amongst your player population are a bad idea to foster player retention.

My word choice was perhaps poor.  I don't mean exploiting as in hacking, but rather using the the extreme situations many of these games encourage.  Basically the difference in mindset of "playing for fun" and "playing to win".

I'm not interested in a PvP game where knowing the intricacies of the base mechanics provides a huge advantage.  "If I do X while Y then a quick A B when L is active, I can ruin their day.  Hahaha, I'm awesome."

Some things are just stupid though. Bunny-hopping qualifies. It's not that it's "not real" as much as it's ridiculously tedious and eye-rollingly silly. Players will always find an unintended use of game mechanics for an edge, but sometimes it just makes the game worse when it proliferates.

To start with, there is no metaphor to break in football, so the Quarterback analogy doesn't exactly match up.  You need something with a backstory on it.

Second of all, it's a question of degree, not "ALL REALISM ALL THE TIME OR GTFO."  I can deal with characters being able to carry ten rocket launchers or heal themselves instantly by stepping on first aid kits.  It's when the game mechanics incorporate elements that go against their own metaphor that I get pissy.  I'm not sure what you're talking about with relation to Counter-strike, but the game is basically coherent in that it's about shooting people with machine guns.  Imagine if it became score based, and the team with the most kills would win, but it doesn't "count" if someone TKs their own guy.  So now the strategy is to allow your own team to kill you if you get wounded, so that it doesn't count as a point for the other team.  Suddenly it's not a game about shooting the other team, now it's about dicking around with the idiotic scoring mechanics (or at least that part of it is).

I think I get what you're saying, but if someone wants to make their game divorced from reality, then they can do that.  If you want to have blue whirlygigs moving in patterns around green squares to earn points, then you can make a game around that.  But the second you start dressing it up as space marines and fighter jets you start bringing in certain assumptions about the way things behave.

To put it another way, imagine if in the next Starcraft II patch, Blizzard swapped the models for the Space Marine and the Carrier (and rescaled them to stay consistent with the original unit sizes).  So now the game has forty foot tall space marines flying through the sky farting out interceptors while I can train Carriers at my barracks, little blobby things which clip into the ground and fire chaingun bursts from the space where their gun would be if they had one.  No mechanics are changed, though, just the models.  According to your argument, if I understand it right, this would be totally fine, and there's no reason not do do it, because the mechanics haven't been changed, correct?

Many folks here have probably read/heard Valve talking about how they designed the TF2 characters to "tell" you with their appearances what their role was, so that even a new player can intuit from a Heavy's appearance that he's going to be hard to kill in a toe-to-toe shootout but might be easy to outmaneuver. 

I think that'd be a good example of a game's dressing complementing its mechanics and thereby making it easier to pick up.  Note that if you get a lot of satisfaction from finding and exploiting counterintuitive mechanics, you might actually not see that as a plus.

It would obviously be silly, but it wouldn't be the deciding factor as to whether I'm going to play the game or not.  I mean "totally fine" might be going too far, but insofar as the gameplay wasn't changed it would really change whether or not I wanted to play the game or not.   But even then, my real problems with it would be with the gameplay changing in subtle ways (like easy of identifying whats going on), not with the fact that its breaking my starcraft immersion.

I think the counter-intuitive bit is the one that a lot of us are hung up on.  Half here seem to see an advantage which is illogical or inconsistent with the terms that the rest of the game functions inside to be ill gained, while the rest see it as just another demonstration of gaming skill.  

I have to admit that I'm on the fence here when I think of specific examples, largely based off whether I can master whatever the tricky mechanic is ( :oh_i_see: ).  In theory I would say every game should be self consistent regarding how to gain an advantage, or just in every way, but I'm not sure that's possible in every case without compromising balance or fun.

Regarding it being counter intuitive, I dont think you can expect every tiny little detail (denying only happens for about the first 5-10 min) of a game to be easily grasped by any new player.  Even a game like team fortress 2 which has pretty straightforward gameplay had to implement a tutorial to cover advanced techniques (rocket jumping for example).

Personally I find DOTA / HON to be a significantly less intimidating environment for a new player than LOL.  The core gameplay is basically the same but the Rune/Talent system can significantly sway the power of the enemy player.  From what i remember there is no easy way to see how someone had specced their summoner prior to a match.  At least with Dota i know after playing a few games what Zeus or Lina are capable of whereas in LOL i might know what a particular champion can do but i have zero idea of what Jimbob32 is capable of because of how he specced his summoner.

There's a bit of a difference between saying that you should convey all the information about the game at a first glance and saying that what you do convey should not be misleading.

He can do the exact same thing except maybe a little bit better.

DOTA has a relputation of having a terrible terrible community for new players coming in, obviously Valve is aware of this and trying to address it with some of the things they are planning to implement.

LoL is, in my experience, the most newbie friendly experience of any of the games, by a wide margin. No denies is a big part of that, but the largest part is LoL's battle display. Enemy heroes are very clearly demarcated with red life bars, friendly heroes are very clearly demarcated with green life bars. The benefit this provides new players cannot be understated.

Red bad, green good is a bragging point for LoL's UI? I never played DoTA or HoN, but that's just amazing.

No cut on you samprimary, because I get your point, but to say that LoL is the better newbie experience is like saying Flight 93 is the better 9/11 experience. LoL doesn't have a learning curve as much as it has a learning chasm.

LoL does have the better newbie experience though. I've tried on multiple occasions to learn HoN and DotA and was never able to, at least not in any effective way. And even then, by the time I learned about denying, my designer sense decided that was too retarded to ever have in any game.

LoL however I picked up in like one game. Everything about the newbie experience is better and the GUI has only gotten more superb since launch minus a few hiccups in the shop menu which they were tweaking a lot for a while.

Red bad, green good, is a great example of "little things go a long way."

For me, the largest part of LoL being more friendly was the consolidated shop, updated item buying menu and item suggestions (yes, I realize that often there are better things to buy than the suggested items).

Having fewer/easier champs as your only option also streamlines things a bit.

The shop was my favorite "newbie friendly" feature in LoL; I liked how you could find an advanced item then directly buy it's parts from the same screen.

It's not difficult to understand. LoL's UI gives direct and easy friend/foe identification that supersedes and eases the cognitive attentive requirement that players use for determining, during play, which characters are targetable, hostile heroes and which are allies. The effect of LoL's pronounced UI friend/foe differentiation is profoundly and immediately helpful for players new to the game, and especially for players new to the moba genre. They have the compounded learning cliff level difficulty of trying to differentiate friends from foes in combat situations when they don't have the hero lineup memorized ("Rexxxolar Loxsxnarl, the Bloodfeaster is one of my enemies? Great! Hey sam! What does Rexxxolar Loxsxnarl, the Bloodfeaster look like!") but that's merely a compound of the issue.

LoL's ui is excellently designed in that it not only severely assists new players, but is also a cognitive aide with benefits for players of all skill levels. If you could hack HoN to use the same life-bar schema, it would make you straight-out a better player to the extent that it would be considered cheating.

Are you practicing thesis writing on f13?

Skiing in tribes was a bug, technically.

and fans raged when it was going to be "fixed" in Tribes 2.  :awesome_for_real:

It was only a bug insofar as they didn't mean for it to be that easy to negate friction.  If you imagine that the player is wearing roller skates to go with his jetpack (as I always envisioned) it makes perfect sense as a feature.   :awesome_for_real:

Might of not been so broken if you couldn't do it as heavy just as well.  FLYING MORTAR DEATH FROM ABOVE AT 100MPH!  :ye_gods:

Except, you can set the team colours in DotA to be grouped by team, and you can also enable hp bars to be shown all the time (instead of just when you press Alt), in the options menu.

You kind of made his point for him, there.

You sure could. It was, in fact, so preferable that we used a third party program to keep the life bars permanently visible prior to wc3 incorporating that option into the game. And you usually had to keep individual player colors on so that you could differentiate which ally/enemy was which on the minimap. Onscreen, the color differentiation was shit; all heroes lifebars are the same, and many heroes had little or no color differentiation in their models (void was always blue no matter what, for instance)

All great examples of what lol took and improved.

To great effect!

If you say so. At this point you're just arguing that you couldn't tell the difference, therefore LoL is better. Not everyone wants to play with always-on lifebars, you know.

No, he's pretty much arguing the same thing that he's been arguing all along - LoL is easier than DotA for a beginner.  Having played both I'd say that I'd think someone was mentally challenged or just being contrary if they were to say otherwise.

But by all means feel free to continue nitpicking about health bars.

Yep, i sure am. Go hard son.

That's .. pretty remarkably far from what I'm arguing. :/

Well fair enough. It just seemed to me, that you picked out two things to use as examples which (once again) to me, and to the reasonably broad number of people i've played DotA with, were never a issue.

 

* Edit: ah, i see where the confusion lies. You were responding to Dtrain being smarmy, and talking about the ui being broadly "better", rather then the aforementioned specifics. As i said, fair enough, but i suspect you'll find that the player base (along with the unforgiving nature of losing a team game) plays a far bigger role in turning people away, rather then the technical specifics of the ui.

But that's just the thing, right? Those sound like people that "passed the test" already and bought into the game. In any event, I don't think it has to be any one (or two,) things that make the game newbie unfriendly, but a combination of many factors that can each be understood for what it is. How about the fact that mod communities tend to self-excluding almost by definition?

Strangely, we even had an anecdotal control for that — inhouse games. HoN still just couldn't get enough purchase into moba conversion. Then, everyone turned pretty suddenly from HoN to LoL, and everyone started being part of inhouse games.

Just though I'd chime in to point out that this isn't the case. The ability to deny creeps is intentional, and not an engine limitation. It started as such, but the problem of preventing heroes attacking their own team was solved long before the competitive effects of denying creeps was discovered.

This is why you can attack creeps and towers below a health threshold, but not above it. It is trivial for Icefrog to change the deniable health % to 0.

As for gameplay, I agree that denial makes no sense and could (along with last hitting) be axed to aim for a more interesting laning experience. There are other AoS's that do this and are (in my opinion) better designed and more fun than DotA as a result.

I'm curious to play DotA and deal with denial again. I was a terrible DotA player in college and found denial really frustrating, but having played a lot of LoL the last year it actually sounds appealing. I like the idea of having another variable thrown into the laning phase. It seems like overall it could add a higher skill ceiling to the game. I don't really have an issue nuking my own dudes; if you go with the lore of LoL then they aren't real people just magical creations for the sake of the game.