Higlac
Companion Cube
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2006
- Messages
- 2,483
- Reaction score
- 55
So yeah, couldn't find another Dota 2 thread, nor a more appropriate place to put it. So here goes.
First impressions:
Well, I never played the original Dota, so I couldn't compare it to that, but I have played a lot of League of Legends, and from all of two matches I've played, I think I prefer League of Legends. I do, however, like how Valve included a built in voice chat system. This does lead to the expected 12 year olds though, even before it's released, there's idiotic, unhelpful asses in games. Might just be the MOBA genre though.
As the game is still in beta, there are some bugs. Namely, alt-tab breaks the game sometimes. I haven't noticed any in game as of yet though. Unless the general unresponsiveness of my character is lag or bug induced, more on that later.
Visually, the game looks nice, though the character models look a little muddy and blocky and the colors and textures don't seem as crisp as they did in (screenshots of) the original, and it looks like the visual team was stolen from TF2.
The controls are pretty normal, right click to do everything, qwer to do anything that isn't done by right clicking, and left click to look at things/use items. Everything is remappable though, so if you absolutely must have your item backpack on left hand keys rather than the keypad, you can do that.
The gameplay is what I find most frustrating so far, Dota 2 is incredibly unforgiving when it comes to any mistakes, especially during the early game If you ever-extend at all when you're out of recovery items, the quickest way to get back into the action and experience is to die, awarding the other team gold and XP. You can walk back, but by the time you get back to the shop/spawning pool and back to the front lines, you're going to be down by two levels, and you'll stay that way for the rest of the game. From what I've seen, you can not be aggressive, or else you're punished for it. Like I said before, the casting is somewhat unresponsive (could have been my character), but it seems that you will not be able to rely on fast reactions or twitch gameplay in Dota 2, everything must be planned out ahead of time.
The item trees and shop system are not very clear, nor are they well explained, it took me a good two minutes to figure out that right clicking on an item buys it. There is no visible "buy item" button, nor is it explained anywhere. I do like how the suggested items are clearly visible for different stages of the game, though everything beyond the "core build" is almost prohibitively expensive if you're new to Dota and can't hold on to gold or get a decent farm.
The map seems absolutely enormous compared to League of Legends, it takes forever to get anywhere, and the jungle is so large that the chances of seeing any other players in there by chance is rather slim. I think that the size of the map in combination with creep denying and heavily defensive gameplay leads to a slow, boring early game, no inter-lane interaction, and long, unsatisfactory games.
One thing that League has which Dota lacks, is any system of persistent meta-game. League has the summoner system and player combat logs. The summoner system gives you rewards to keep playing and experiment by allowing you to create entirely new playstyles for each individual character, while summoner profiles can help you see how that one good player from the last match owned you so hard. I'm sure that it is possible in Dota 2, but it's just nowhere near as intuitive.
Learning about the game from within the game is fairly difficult at the moment, as the tutorial mode is not yet available, leaving you high and dry as to what the controls are, and unclear tooltips leave much to be desired. The first time you cast a spell, you won't be sure as to what it does until you actually use it. Normally the tooltips will tell you if it's meant for friend or foe, but not how the spell actually acts (again this is from experience with one champion). For example, I played my two games with Earthshaker, and his Q ability creates a wall of rock, which does damage and stuns enemies. Granted, the tooltip says just that, but the circle indicating the range, is only available when you ready the spell, and doesn't actually show how the spell is cast. In this case, it creates a wall from directly in front of the character and extends to the edge of the circle, no matter where you click to place the wall. Perhaps a straight arrow would have been a better choice of graphic. Then again, might just be that champion... Will update later after more experimentation.
One thing that I absolutely love though is how you can watch every game being played live. This, I think, and not the Combat log or actual time in-game will be the biggest source of information for anyone getting into the game. Speaking of the combat log, it seems to be a powerful tool to tell you what abilities and debuffs cause you the most trouble, however it takes too much time to go over when you're in game to be useful during the early game against new opponents.
One last note, the matchmaking engine is somewhat schizophrenic. You could be waiting for five minutes for a match, get up to use the restroom, and come back 30 seconds later, only to find that "you were too slow to respond to accepting the matchmade game, would you like to be placed back into the queue?"
Anyway, it's 2:20 A.M. here and that's all I've got to say about that.
I'm going to keep playing until I get good enough to pull a positive score, but with these first impressions, I'm not sure that Dota 2 will be able to pull me away from League of Legends.
First impressions:
Well, I never played the original Dota, so I couldn't compare it to that, but I have played a lot of League of Legends, and from all of two matches I've played, I think I prefer League of Legends. I do, however, like how Valve included a built in voice chat system. This does lead to the expected 12 year olds though, even before it's released, there's idiotic, unhelpful asses in games. Might just be the MOBA genre though.
As the game is still in beta, there are some bugs. Namely, alt-tab breaks the game sometimes. I haven't noticed any in game as of yet though. Unless the general unresponsiveness of my character is lag or bug induced, more on that later.
Visually, the game looks nice, though the character models look a little muddy and blocky and the colors and textures don't seem as crisp as they did in (screenshots of) the original, and it looks like the visual team was stolen from TF2.
The controls are pretty normal, right click to do everything, qwer to do anything that isn't done by right clicking, and left click to look at things/use items. Everything is remappable though, so if you absolutely must have your item backpack on left hand keys rather than the keypad, you can do that.
The gameplay is what I find most frustrating so far, Dota 2 is incredibly unforgiving when it comes to any mistakes, especially during the early game If you ever-extend at all when you're out of recovery items, the quickest way to get back into the action and experience is to die, awarding the other team gold and XP. You can walk back, but by the time you get back to the shop/spawning pool and back to the front lines, you're going to be down by two levels, and you'll stay that way for the rest of the game. From what I've seen, you can not be aggressive, or else you're punished for it. Like I said before, the casting is somewhat unresponsive (could have been my character), but it seems that you will not be able to rely on fast reactions or twitch gameplay in Dota 2, everything must be planned out ahead of time.
The item trees and shop system are not very clear, nor are they well explained, it took me a good two minutes to figure out that right clicking on an item buys it. There is no visible "buy item" button, nor is it explained anywhere. I do like how the suggested items are clearly visible for different stages of the game, though everything beyond the "core build" is almost prohibitively expensive if you're new to Dota and can't hold on to gold or get a decent farm.
The map seems absolutely enormous compared to League of Legends, it takes forever to get anywhere, and the jungle is so large that the chances of seeing any other players in there by chance is rather slim. I think that the size of the map in combination with creep denying and heavily defensive gameplay leads to a slow, boring early game, no inter-lane interaction, and long, unsatisfactory games.
One thing that League has which Dota lacks, is any system of persistent meta-game. League has the summoner system and player combat logs. The summoner system gives you rewards to keep playing and experiment by allowing you to create entirely new playstyles for each individual character, while summoner profiles can help you see how that one good player from the last match owned you so hard. I'm sure that it is possible in Dota 2, but it's just nowhere near as intuitive.
Learning about the game from within the game is fairly difficult at the moment, as the tutorial mode is not yet available, leaving you high and dry as to what the controls are, and unclear tooltips leave much to be desired. The first time you cast a spell, you won't be sure as to what it does until you actually use it. Normally the tooltips will tell you if it's meant for friend or foe, but not how the spell actually acts (again this is from experience with one champion). For example, I played my two games with Earthshaker, and his Q ability creates a wall of rock, which does damage and stuns enemies. Granted, the tooltip says just that, but the circle indicating the range, is only available when you ready the spell, and doesn't actually show how the spell is cast. In this case, it creates a wall from directly in front of the character and extends to the edge of the circle, no matter where you click to place the wall. Perhaps a straight arrow would have been a better choice of graphic. Then again, might just be that champion... Will update later after more experimentation.
One thing that I absolutely love though is how you can watch every game being played live. This, I think, and not the Combat log or actual time in-game will be the biggest source of information for anyone getting into the game. Speaking of the combat log, it seems to be a powerful tool to tell you what abilities and debuffs cause you the most trouble, however it takes too much time to go over when you're in game to be useful during the early game against new opponents.
One last note, the matchmaking engine is somewhat schizophrenic. You could be waiting for five minutes for a match, get up to use the restroom, and come back 30 seconds later, only to find that "you were too slow to respond to accepting the matchmade game, would you like to be placed back into the queue?"
Anyway, it's 2:20 A.M. here and that's all I've got to say about that.
I'm going to keep playing until I get good enough to pull a positive score, but with these first impressions, I'm not sure that Dota 2 will be able to pull me away from League of Legends.
