This year, the game that has sparked the most hype within the e-sports community is by far Dota 2. When Valve announced that they were teaming up with Icefrog to make a sequel to the ever popular mod on Blizzard's Warcraft 3, everyone had their ears out ready to pick up any rumors. So far, there are several games that show us what can be done in this genre of 5 versus 5 arena combat.
Heroes of Newerth (HoN), a game developed by S2 Games, who also are the people behind the Savage series, launched in 2009 with a closed beta. The game quickly developed a scene for e-sports and it was praised by many for the superior engine to the rough-looking DotA. The game has since then been through a lot of changes, and many new heroes have been made original to HoN. It's been marked as the harder game compared to its counterpart League of Legends, whose gameplay is generally slower. HoN recently went Free-to-Play and has gotten many more subscriptions since then. The competitive scene has taken a hit though by losing big sponsors such as SK for the top tier teams, but it's still an action-packed community.
League of Legends (LoL) was developed by Riot Games with a simple goal: to provide a platform on which you can both play for fun and play for money as well. Riot has been launching far larger tournaments than what HoN has been able to offer, and their subscription count is up in the millions. LoL is a kind of game that is fairly easy to pick up, and so it makes for a better experience for new players.
The question now is: what will happen to these games now that Dota 2 has come out with one of the biggest tournament prize pools
ever for The International at Gamescom? From a personal perspective I think Dota 2 will come to dominate the MOBA scene, just because of the amount of support for competitive play that Valve is likely to offer. The International is just the beginning, and as more tournaments start to surface I think we'll have a lot of players coming from both HoN and LoL to try and compete for a piece of the prize pool.
I remember when I tuned in to see the first day of Dota 2 at Gamescom and I was horrified. At first glance I saw a LoL version 2, but as you get to look at it better the refinement and concept of the heroes is really great, and the spell details are very polished. Dota 2 just looks like one of those games that has a great future in front of itself. And the market for the game is
huge! We'll most likely see Valve teaming up with sponsors to get some of the biggest prizes in the world of e-sports. I can't even begin to imagine how Dota 2 will look when we get a little further out in the future, but I predict that Dota 2 will dominate anything ever called MOBA and possibly even the entire scene depending on how Starcraft 2 evolves in the next few years.
The crowd for "The International" was huuuuge!But Valve has not only been focusing on the e-sports element. It's clear that Valve wants to unite the genre using their game, giving themselves a monopoly to get a much bigger player-base on a single game. This is much like Starcraft, which is the only real competitive RTS out there (I will take a beating for that but I'll take it like a man), hopefully Dota 2 will be the best MOBA game to date. With only half the game actually shown, there are many heroes yet to be played, and a lot of spells to watch out for.
All this talk about uniting is really what the genre needs. It's certainly better than the current: "LoL is better" vs. "No, HoN is better". We need unity. It's no shock that Dota 2 developers have taken more from HoN than from LoL, but let's face it: HoN is a better game. At least so I've heard. All jokes aside, it appears to everyone that Valve attempted to bring in the casual and fun aspect from LoL, and the "rawness" and speed from HoN.
The only thing that worries me is causing me to make a general cry out to the public: STOP THE FLAMEWARS! A bit of trolling here and there is fine, sometimes even quite funny. But what the community is doing to the genre is something I personally am very scared of. If the community in general acts poorly, so will the players playing in the big tournaments. We cannot have a big e-sports game before people realize that manners are necessary. Hopefully with this new game, we will be able to have a fresh look at things, and perhaps in the end get to a place where we can come out and say: "We created E-Sports!"
