Each side in Dota 2 has five heroes, picked from a pool of somewhere north of 100. Heroes are where the player gets involved. They fight any enemies they happen to meet along the way. They spawn every 30 seconds and march along the lanes from your base to the enemy. Instead of an army, you have heroes and creeps. Creeps are automated, computer-controlled units. Instead of building, the bases are predefined-there's a large structure (the "ancient," in Dota 2 terminology) at the heart of your base, and a series of defensive towers along three different paths ("lanes") that join your base with the enemy's. In a traditional RTS, you build a base, collect resources, build your army, and then attack. In a MOBA, there's no base building and no army. However, MOBAs turn RTS gameplay on its head. Dota 2 looks an awful lot better, but DotA has a few extra heroes that are still awaiting their migration. The old mod is still being developed, but the two games are essentially being developed in parallel. This time around, however, the game is a standalone, free-to-play title built using Valve's Source engine rather than as a mod to another game. DotA's mysterious and anonymous developer, known only as IceFrog, was employed by Valve to work on what is, in essence, a brand new version of the same game. The original DotA was itself inspired by a StarCraft mod, called Aeon of Strife. Know your Dota lineage Dota 2 itself is a sort of official sequel to Defense of the Ancients, a modification to Warcraft 3. It's the biggest game on Steam, boasting more concurrent players than any other title on Valve's DRM and distribution platform, regularly breaking 300,000 concurrent players. In this way, it grew organically as gamers gave keys to friends or sold them for inflated prices. Even with this limited availability and a learning curve that's almost horizontal (in that additional time doesn't actually gain you much additional skill), Dota 2 has become hugely popular. You can sign up and Valve will e-mail you when you can start playing.īefore its "official" (though still limited, see sidebar) release this week, Dota 2 has been available for the last two years as an invitation-only beta, with beta keys randomly assigned to existing players.
The game is being rolled out through a staggered launch, both to ensure that the game isn't inundated with people who don't know what they're doing and also to ensure that the matchmaking and game servers can tolerate the influx of new players.
Staggered releaseAlthough Dota 2 officially launched out of beta this week, Valve has stopped short of making it a free-for-all where new players will get slaughtered by beta veterans.
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