Why the fuck aren’t you playing Heroes of Newerth?
Oh right, its still in beta. Hope you can find a key!
Heroes of Newerth is a remake of Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft 3 map that you should have been playing until your fingers bled and you spoke fluent Korean. Normally I’m not a huge fan of the straight forward fantasy concept, nor am I a Warcraft 3 fanboy. But DoTA is something special. Its a game about balance and good form. You have to work with a team and think about every move you make. One player can really mean the difference between winning or losing. From the hero you pick, to the items you buy, even the order you tech your abilities, every thing you do changes how the game is played. If you can find a friend with a spare beta key, this is definitely worth checking out.
Gameplay
Lets get down to brass tacks here. For those who are not familiar how DoTA works, here are the basics. DoTA is a RTS game in which you only control a single unit and your base is prebuilt. There are two teams of 5. Each player chooses their hero before the game starts. The objective is to destroy the enemy base while defending your own. You can gain experience and gold by killing NPC units or enemy heroes. You use gold to buy items that you can consume for bonuses or increase your stats. Good so far? Cool.
Currently, the game boasts 55 different heroes, many are modifications or direct ports from the most popular DoTA heroes while others are completely original. Here is the kicker, they are releasing new heroes all the time, and plan to continue to do so long after release. Soon they will surpass DoTA’s current 70+ hero count. Each hero has 4 unique abilities that are picked every time a hero levels up. These can be anything from damage/healing spells, stuns, leaps, grabs, throws, summons, meddle, critical strikes, life steal, stealth and more. This makes picking and counter-picking heroes before the game starts that much more important. In addition to all the heroes and their skills, Items play a huge role in the game as well. There are 70+ base items which can be combined in more than 50 different ‘recipes’ to create stronger items. With so many hero, item, and skill variations, you really have to think on your feet throughout the entire game.
The thing that really makes this game great is how balanced it is. Even with all the different combinations of heroes in a game, either side has the ability to win. There are people that will disagree with this statement, but they are retarded. When S2 implements a new hero or item, they spend a lot of time making sure that it will synergize well with what has already been implemented. This gives game play a very smooth feeling and allows you to really wreck shop with a well coordinated team. Did I mention the built in voice chat?
The limitations of Warcraft 3 are gone! Well, mostly. Where Icefrog was once constrained by the limitations of the Warcraft 3, S2Games can pretty much do anything they’d like with their engine. Not to say that there were problems with the WC3 engine, it just wasn’t built for DoTA. That said, S2Games is using the Savage 2 engine for Heroes of Newerth. The new engine allows for more flexibility which makes previously impossible hero abilities a reality. It also allowed for heroes (which are largely made up of suggestions from the DoTA community) to play more like their creator imagined. Previously, good ideas were taken in, and then crammed into the WC3 engine, this left mechanical issues that made some heroes stronger or weaker. Now, every hero implemented is a viable pick.
Another thing that always sucked about DoTA was leavers, in a 5v5 game, if one person disconnects you’re fucked. Battle.net didn’t have the means to allow a player to reconnect. S2games has solved this problem by introducing a reconnect system which will allow you to come back up to 5 minutes after you dropped. After that your items and gold are distributed to your team. Is someone being an asshat? noob? feeding? kick them. Sure it sucks to play man down, but its better than having to deal with a terrible player. HoN has implemented a voting system which allows you to vote to kick a player or even concede the match if things are that bad for your team. On top of that they are putting in a matchmaking system to help you find games quickly. Heroes of Newerth keeps track of your kills, deaths, wins and losses, as well as many other things. It rolls your stats into a Player Skill Ranking or PSR, a numeric value for how well you play. While there are exceptions to the rule, I’ve found that it is pretty accurate at determining which players are going to do well in a game and which ones need to be kicked before it starts. With the addition of stat tracking and hosts can now create “no leaver” games. Basically if your leaver percentage is 10% or more, you have limited yourself severely on the games you can join. Sucks if you have a shitty internet connection I guess, good thing I don’t. And if you do, I wouldn’t want to play with you anyway, tool. Speaking of tools, map hacking is no longer an issue! Skeptical? I know I was, but their new method of tracking player locations on the server side as opposed to the client is working wonders.
It looks cool as fuck! All the new hero models and spell effects look awesome. People get thrown through the air, exploded, frozen, impaled, all kinds of cool shit. The Dynamic lighting, vivid colors, and animations all work together smoothly and produce some great effects. Some people say that the game can have ‘too many’ effects at a time, and they complain about not being able to tell where their hero is on the screen. These people are idiots and will always have a negative K:D anyway.
I know people will bitch if I don’t mention LoL, so here goes: League of Legends fucking blows.
