DotA: Summary

Current loading screen for DotA

     I'm going to take a short break from Forza 3 and talk about some other games i spend time playing. DotA is one of my favorite games on the computer and I've spent countless hours playing it. This is a popular game map within the game Warcraft 3. There are many other "clones" of it such as HoN(Heroes of Newerth) or LoL(League of Legends) which is free to play. The downside of being embedded into Warcraft 3 is that the graphics are kind of dated and there's no way to update the graphics. But to me, graphics are no where near as important as gameplay. The goal of this game is to destroy the enemy's ancient which is a heavily guarded structure while protecting your own ancient as well. It supports a maximum of ten players (five versus five) and each player is given a hero which are supported by AI (Artificial Intelligence) units.

An in-game screenshot

     The two teams start off on opposite ends of the map; bottom left for Sentinel and top right for Scourge. There are 103 unique heroes to choose from, each one with 4 abilities that can be obtained through leveling. Leveling is done by either killing AI units or other heroes and the higher the level, the stronger the hero. Gold is the currency in this game used to buy items to enhance your hero and it is also obtained by killing AI units and heroes. Teamwork is crucial in this game as it is almost impossible to win alone. This game is a lot more fun if you play with people you know because random people on your team may not always cooperate with you. There are three lanes that lead to each others ancient, commonly referred to as: Top, Middle, Bottom. This is the path the AI units take and where the battle takes place. There are many types of game modes which affect the scenario such as -ap which allows everyone to choose their hero and -ar which gives everyone a random hero. This game is not easy to learn if you haven't played Warcraft 3 at all but some heroes are easier than others to make beginners more competitive. I'm not particularly good at this game but I still enjoy playing it and will probably do so for a long time.