The Long Road

I know that title is currently reserved for Bioshock or Super Mario Galaxy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's Warcraft 3's custom map DOTA. Defence of the Ancients is a user created and updated map run on Warcraft 3. Like all good games, it's easy to pick up the basics, but hard to master the intricacies. I've been playing DOTA on and off since around 2004 and it's never gotten stale; each new match is a new experience with an unpredictable outcome. There are almost 90 unique characters to choose from, with 10 player matches, that's 90c10 possible game scenarios.

I love the intense high of victory and the ignominy of defeat that makes me say "We will have our revenge!" (ie "RM!!!"). There's also no feeling quite as satisfying as the successful execution of a trap or seeing your character do so well that he can go against 2-3 opponents at once. My favourite characters include Razor who can unleash endless bolts of lightning to accumulate thousands of dollars, or Mercurial who's the best character to suddenly ambush opponents running away from a fight, and Lina Inverse, the Hermione of DOTA, her incredible array of magic spells can kill an opponent in one salvo. Of course there's also the Lich King who can own your soul for just 3 cents a day.

I don't know what the total number of players worldwide is for the game, but it's surely huge. When you log onto battle.net to play a custom game, the vast majority of open games will be DOTA. It is, by far, the most played and visible map on battle.net. If you don't own warcraft 3, you should get it just to play this game. If you do own Warcraft 3 and have never played this...what the heck?! It's the best game not on a Nintendo console, Cuz those are on a seperate plane of quality that other games can't even think about. *bows*.

It randomly occured to me that Dota would make for an incredible XBOX Live game. The experience of playing it on a large screen with HD graphics would be all that and a bag of chips. The only difficulty would be in translating the mouse and keyboard controls to a dual analog scheme, but consoles have been making huge strides towards RTS feasibility so I'm sure something like DOTA could easily be done.

Replies: 2 comments

New map is out! Adds more flavour to an already amazing game.

Favourite hero = Leviathan

Posted by dAN @ 10/27/2007 04:43 PM EST

I played as sniper a couple of games in a row...always love that guy. Assassinate has to be one of the best skills in the game with its short 10 second cooldown.

Posted by Long @ 11/05/2007 11:06 AM EST