These days, it seems like everyone's trying to get in on the multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA) action. This team-versus-team genre of eclectic heroes and tactics is quite the hot item in PC gaming. In this regular column, MOBA junkie Ryan Scott offers up insight into the rapidly growing field of highly competitive (and largely free-to-play!) multiplayer action.
Let's get my bias out here right from the get-go: I'm primarily a League of Legends player. Riot Games' titanic steamroller of a MOBA is one hell of a gateway drug; it's arguably responsible for piquing all this sudden mainstream interest in MOBA-style (or Defense of the Ancients-style, if you prefer) games and for legitimizing "freemium" free-to-play models to the point where we've collectively stopped fleeing at the very mention of them. With more than 11 million active players, calling League of Legends the biggest deal in PC gaming this side of World of Warcraft isn't hyperbole -- it's the plain and simple truth.
Now, a little over two years after LoL burst onto the scene, we've got all these other MOBA options. We have Heroes of Newerth, whose creators at S2 Games shortsightedly eschewed the free-to-play model and wound up reconsidering pretty quickly when LoL trounced them in overall mindshare (and are now celebrating the addition of HoN's 100th hero). We have other bush-league MOBAs like Petroglyph's Rise of Immortals and Burda:ic's Avalon Heroes, which lack a lot of the content and polish of the big players. And on the horizon, it seems like everyone from Blizzard to Ironclad is getting in on the MOBA craze (with Blizzard DOTA and the MOBA/RTS hybrid Sins of a Dark Age, respectively) while it's still hot.
And in the middle of it all, we have the 400-pound gorilla: Valve's hotly anticipated Dota 2 (no, not "Defense of the Ancients 2" -- seemingly due to arbitrary legal semantics -- but Dota 2), currently in beta. If you're going to leave League of Legends for another MOBA anytime soon, or try one for the first time, I'm guessing this one's your most likely destination. So, from one MOBA player to another few million, here's what you need to know.
Dota 2 won't hold your hand.
No mistake goes unpunished, and -- like the original Defense of the Ancients before it -- Dota 2 is rather ruthless in this regard. Death sets you back not only in terms of time, but money as well: Every death docks a portion of your earned gold. Given how critical gold and items are, this means that an early-game death streak can quickly snowball into a nigh-unrecoverable situation, especially versus skilled players. And that's before you factor creep-denial into the equation; if your lane opponent is markedly better than you are at denial (that is, slaying his own AI minions to keep you from getting gold and experience for killing them), it can create a sizable resource gap. The moral of this story: Mistakes are much more meaningful in Dota 2, so be prepared to face the consequences!
Dota 2's community won't hold your hand, either.
I don't want to dwell on this too much, but the original DOTA player community has a reputation for being a particularly toxic one. In all fairness, I've seen some other MOBA communities get downright nasty as well, so your mileage may vary. I'm hoping that the influx of post-beta Dota 2 players (and the extremely steep penalties for leaving an in-progress game) might help to change some attitudes for the better, but -- at the very least -- prepare to deal with the usual assortment of Internet jerkasses.
The map gives you more stuff to keep track of.
Dota 2 obviously shares a lot of common traits with other MOBAs. The map consists of three lanes, each lined with turrets guarding the team bases on either side. Powerful player-controlled heroes and weak AI minions attempt to defend those lanes and break through the other team's defenses, until one side eventually destroys the other's base. A jungle area -- rich in neutral monsters and powerful buffs -- breaks up said lanes. But Dota 2 also gives you a day/night cycle to contend with, complete with severe fog-of-war distance alterations and even some heroes that are much more powerful during specific times of day (such as Night Stalker, who moves faster, hits harder, snares enemies for twice as long, and can extend the night cycle duration on top of it all). Let's not forget the neutral shopkeepers, either: These guys sell items that you won't find at your home base, and your enemies want to shop just as badly as you do. And those jungle buffs? Well, that brings me to my next point...
Neutral buffs are much more involved in this game.
League of Legends players are certainly accustomed to snatching those coveted red and blue jungle runes, and paying attention to their associated timers. Dota 2's runes spawn every two minutes -- in other words, very frequently -- and their effects are quite dramatic (two examples: +100% attack damage and complete invisibility) and have much more rigid windows of effect (30 and 45 seconds, respectively). Ultimately, this means that it takes some savvy play to consistently capitalize on them (and counter them), and players who make shrewd use of jungle runes can create very powerful advantages for themselves and their team.
Dota 2's tournament-friendly competitive features leave LoL in the dust.
As much as I love LoL, it baffles me that it still lacks replay functionality. Spectator mode technically exists, though it's currently in an open-ended beta form that you can't use to observe ranked matches. These sorts of analytical features are critical components of competitive strategy games -- just look at how robust StarCraft II's replay system is, for example -- and I think Dota 2's out-of-the-gate inclusion of these features gives it a definite leg up in eSports circles. If you're serious about your MOBA gaming, you'll really appreciate this stuff.
I'm not trying to scare you away from Dota 2.
I'm not trying to scare you away from Dota 2 -- it just so happens that its mechanics are much more hardcore than League of Legends' in a lot of ways, and I hope that knowing these things going in will help create an easier experience for you than I initially had when I first dipped my toes in the Dota 2 waters. Whichever MOBA games you prefer, they're good choices; over the next few installments of this column, I hope we can learn a lot more about our games of choice together!Ryan Scott managed GameSpy's day-to-day editorial operations until a bout of temporary insanity took him away. Nowadays -- when he's not yelling at someone for forgetting to call mid lane MIA, that is -- you can listen to his weekly ramblings on various podcasts over at Geekbox.net. And if you've never given these MOBA thingamajiggers a try, he thinks League of Legends is an excellent place to start.