DOTA, as a genre, has seemingly come out of nowhere, but its here to stay and that's certainly not a bad thing. Blizzard DOTA, as you'll know if you were watching Blizzcon the other night, contains classic Blizzard heroes, but that's not all. They're looking at the building blocks of what makes a DOTA game and they're trying to make the core experience wholly more accessable.
Which is great for somebody like me, a useless burden, but perhaps less so for those people who have spent years and years becoming the top players.
In an interview with Eurogamer, the game's director, Chris Sigaty, went into a bit more detail:
"One of the big things is trying to remove social tension. Because all of the DOTA-style games… You almost get in this game space where your own team is angry at you because you don't know enough about it and you're holding them back.
"We've done some things that encourage you to be heroic in the beginning," he continued. "Towers are so powerful in most DOTA-style games that the way the game plays is you head out and you sit under your tower and wait for somebody to make a mistake.
"We have ammunition on towers in Blizzard DOTA, so if you do that, you'll finally run out of ammo. And they regenerate slowly. You'll actually hurt your tower if you don't push to try and keep them from even getting to the tower."
But Sigaty doesn't think longtime fans of the genre should run to their pitchfork cupboard just yet.
"We want to make sure it still has the hardcore element; easy to learn, difficult to master has been a motto that we've had for a very long time. We have that, so that depth is there from how you become better by playing. You learn subtleties to how you play but it's not because of added complexity to how you learn it. It should be easy to learn."
