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Thursday 6 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
During the second play of this game I decided to play with some friends to see if the gameplay was changed at all. There were some pluses and some minuses in doing so.
Primarily, my friends all knew how to play the game well so there was a definite advantage while playing. Basically we would "pub stomp" and completely dominate every single game. Although this would be fun in the beginning it gets old very fast. The game then become very fun to play primarily but then later on became quite boring. We quickly found a solution to this problem by facing another group of five friends on the other team to evenly match our skill level.
One thing that I did notice while playing with friends is that it brought a completely new kind of gameplay. It was no longer focusing on what items to get or how good your hero is, but on what heroes to pick to work well with your friends heroes and having good combos. The teamwork aspect of gameplay was greatly increased when playing with people that you know.
This game also seemed to bring a new wave of social interactions between the players. When you play with someone you know, it is harder to "act tough" online and you start acting more or less like yourself even though there is still a slight change. Not to say there is no smack talk, but it definitely is less when playing with friends.
DESIGN:
The design of Dota is quite interesting to analyze because it is not really a commercialized game, yet it has become so popular with at least one hundred thousand players at any given time. The game was designed using WarcraftIII's custom game creator so the tools and resources were limited, but the game design was still a success. This proves that you do not need crazy graphics to make a game successful, although they do help.
The hero design was basically ripped straight off of WarcraftIII and they were given different names and different abilities, but most of them were seen already in WarcraftIII. As the game became more popular however, the creator started programming his own abilities and his own heroes in the game which attracted even more fans. It basically became a whole new game.
The items are also taken from the original WarcraftIII game but tweaked in some way to make them original and inventive. There are all types of different item designs. The three basic item types are strength, agility, and intelligence items for the respective type of hero. There are also damage items to get your hero to do more damage. But these basic items are not the main event in dota, it is the combining items that was the designing achievement. Items can combine to do things such as hex opponents, make images of yourself, heal your whole team, and to get an insane amount of damage.
With so many variables the design of the game is very difficult to keep error free, and therefore the Dota creators release a new patch almost every week. The nice thing about this is that in these new patches they are able to add more items and more heroes which make the game basically ever growing.
I have been playing Dota for years and it has still never disappointed me and is definitely a game worth playing for anyone interested in starting a new and innovative RTS.
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