Blizzard Dota

Blizzard DOTA – Blizzcon 2011

Blizzard DOTA is a new official custom game for StarCraft II, inspired by the Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) custom map for Warcraft III. Much like other DOTA-style games, Blizzard DOTA is a team-based competitive game in which each player controls a powerful hero with unique abilities, and works with his or her team to invade and destroy the enemy team’s base. They’re taking a fun approach to Blizzard DOTA and hope that players enjoy battling each other with heroes from across the various Blizzard universes.

Unveiled at Blizzcon 2011, here are a selection of screenshots from what promises to be one of the serious challengers to be top dog in the MOBA genre. Even up against the likes of League of Legends and Valve’s upcoming DOTA2 Blizzard will be expecting their own title to make up ground fast even from a standing start. But what is going to set Blizzard Dota apart from the crowd ?

The original DOTA and other DOTA-style games are known for deep and compelling team-based gameplay. One thing they’re also known for, however, is a demanding learning curve. Blizzard are obviously excited to do their own take on the genre, with the goal of applying Blizzard’s “easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master” philosophy to the overall design. they’re also adding gameplay elements to encourage more aggressive, fast-paced gameplay, as well as team fights all over the map.

One example of how Blizzard DOTA handles things differently is how towers work. The towers in the lanes are powerful entities that can quickly decimate enemy heroes that wander into their range. But unlike many other DOTA-style games, the towers in Blizzard DOTA have a limited amount of energy that slowly recharges over time. This means that a team making a concerted push against a tower can force that tower to run out of ammo, making it easier to overrun the position. This encourages more team-based aggression and reduces the amount of defensive, tower-hugging play in the early-mid game.

The “jungle” (the neutral area between lanes) is also handled a little differently in Blizzard DOTA. Many traditional DOTA-style games offer neutral creep camps that confer individual bonuses to players that clear out these camps. In Blizzard DOTA, the primary features of the jungle are power nodes, guarded by neutral creeps. Teams that take control of these nodes will add strength to their team’s creatures in the lanes. This means that gaining control of the jungle will push the battlefront in the lanes into your team’s favour, thus making the jungle nodes key points of interest on the map, ripe for team fights.

While those are just a couple features of Blizzard DOTA that we hope will encourage more aggressive gameplay and more team-based play styles, they also have an eye to making the learning curve easier. Blizzard don’t think players should feel compelled to spend an inordinate amount of time researching game guides and item builds before they’re even comfortable trying a different hero. Primarily, they’re interested in adding clarity by eliminating redundancies in hero abilities and items, and hope players will find this reflected in the design of the heroes and in-game item shop.

The version shown at BlizzCon includes 12 different heroes that fall into one of four different class types: tank, damage-dealer, support, and siege. Tanks function as advertised — they tend to be heavily armoured and are designed to soak up damage as they initiate battle and try to control fights. Damage-dealers are the hardest-hitting heroes, but they tend to be more fragile — teams will need to keep them protected. Support heroes have abilities that can do a wide range of different functions in team fights such as healing, stuns, and other methods of crowd control. Siege heroes have a unique role. They can attack from long range, making them ideal for destroying enemy towers. They also tend to have abilities that affect a wide area, making them useful for controlling space in team fights.

The development team plan to add more heroes before officially releasing Blizzard DOTA. One thing to keep in mind is that they want to ensure every hero and ability feels truly unique — they want quality over quantity. One of the pillars of the design philosophy with Blizzard DOTA is that the heroes should fit their roles very strongly and contribute from a team perspective. Not every hero needs to be a high-damage killing machine to be valuable to the team, and the game design is informed by that philosophy.

Currently the plan is to offer a way to play Blizzard DOTA for free, possibly by including it as part of the StarCraft II: Starter Edition. However, they have not yet determined what type of content restrictions would be placed on those playing for free. They’re also discussing the possibility of offering exclusive content to players, such as special heroes for owners of Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm (in regions with standard box business models, just for example), but this is also still to be determined. Blizzard will announce more details once those decisions have been finalized.