When Dota Becomes Warcraft III
More than a year ago, Valve announced the upcoming release of a card editor and a lobby allowing the creation and integration of personalized cards made entirely by the community, for the community.
Unlike S2games (Heroes of Newerth), which promised the same thing a few years ago, Valve is not an amateur studio, and it took them less than a year to get a functional Beta out of the new lobby, map editor and a functional hosting system. The beta of the product named Dota 2 Reborn is currently available to any individual with a functional Steam account and having Dota 2 to install currently. Since Dota 2 is a free game, this implies that everyone has access to the so-called beta.
In less than a month, Valve released several upgrades to ensure the smooth operation of the new additions and these changes made many cards created and distributed on Reborn, not to mention the cards created by Valve themselves going under the name of Overthrow.
Overthrow’s games offer a much quicker and more arena style of EU by placing players in teams ranging from 2 to 3 players (9 or 10 players per game) in an arena offering experience and money faster than regular play, without having to kill opposing minions. This is a really interesting game mode offering a good introduction to different game modes from the classic 5v5 card.
So far, even if it is only a concise time since the beta came out, the community has already created several cards ranging from classic Warcraft 3 like Green TD to new RPG. The possibilities seem endless, and the map creation tool seems easy enough to use not to fall into the same hole as Starcraft 2, being too complicated.
Until now, Reborn had given me back that kind of feeling of nostalgia and pleasure that I had when I spent hours on Battle.Net when I was a teenager. The possibilities are endless, and I can’t wait to see what the future will bring us!
This week was marked by two great events making me quite happy! First, my session officially ended last Friday after a customer service review and then the release of a major patch for Dota2. For the good of the blog, I’m going to discuss here the second.
What did this update? Some snitch on some heroes (yay!), new tricks-micro-transactional schmu (yay?), the arrival of Legion Commander in the ranks of heroes(yay!), the ranked matchmaking(yay!) and the most crucial WRAITH-NIGHT.
So, what is the Wraith-Night? To make a long story short, it is the annual winter mode of Dota2. The mode winter last year was Frostivus, I think it was the biggest steaming pile of shit that I could participate in my life. There was no balance in a hyper-competitive game mode, and the only way to gain access to a single ounce of fun was to participate in the Halloween activity, Diretide actively. So Frostivus was canceled.),
So this year instead we get the Wraith-Night. Roughly speaking, it is a typical X hero defense that could be found in Warcraft 3 on Battle.Net. Each player has to choose a hero from a limited list, some of them have spells modified to work in the game, and the Wraith King has to be defended against increasingly difficult waves of monsters. Each wave gives Fragments and crystals which are then used to buy boxes filled with pretty cool micro-transactions objects!
On the other hand, the most important aspect of the Wraith-Night, in my opinion, is that the Wraith-Night special event is programmed and runs entirely on the same concept as a Custom Map, thus showing that a card editor should soon come to Dota 2, thus making way for many different game modes and perhaps a successor to the good old Warcraft 3, which we admit, comes quite old and graphically outmoded.
So I’m looking forward to the future of Dota2, and so I’m going to go back to doing Wraith Night in peace during my first week of vacation.