Blizzard DOTA "completely rebooted"

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 22 August, 2011

Blizzard making it more user friendly.

Blizzard has completely rebooted its StarCraft 2 mod Blizzard DOTA.

The version of the game shown at BlizzCon last year has been "flattened", senior game designer Jonny Ebbert told Eurogamer.

Blizzard DOTA is one of four internally-developed mods for StarCraft II, and intended for release on or near the launch of StarCraft 2 expansion Heart of the Swarm.

It's a variation on the ever-popular Defense of the Ancients, which began life as a Warcraft III mod.

Fans had hoped it would launch this year, but it now looks a dead cert for 2012.

"Getting it right and just meeting the Blizzard quality bar, and questioning a lot of the assumptions behind the genre, which is what we do at Blizzard," Ebbert said of the challenges Blizzard has faced creating the game.

"What we showed at the original BlizzCon, we've completely flattened it since then and completely rebooted it because we just thought, there's more we can question on this.

"Outside of that I really can't dive into details."

Going slightly further, Executive Vice President, Product Development and Co-Founder Frank Pearce explained that Blizzard hopes to make its DOTA mod more accessible to newcomers.

"One of the important things to note with that space is the DOTA everyone plays on Warcraft 3 is not particularly accessible to the novice," he said. "One of the game development philosophies we have at Blizzard is, easy to learn and difficult to master. That mod for Warcraft 3 doesn't really fit that description.

"That's a big challenge for us: taking this concept that doesn't really fit that philosophy and adapting it to a philosophy that's important for us."

Ebbert agreed: "DOTA's a very addictive game that chases the vast majority of people off because their team mates are screaming at them. We've always felt DOTA has a very accessible, easy to approach fun game deep down inside that's just waiting to come out.

"We've just been basically carving around that and trying to knock off all the rough edges and really make it more user friendly."

More details on Blizzard DOTA are expected at BlizzCon later this year. Valve's competing effort, DOTA 2, debuted at Gamescom last week and is due to launch next year.

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (15) Latest comment 6 months ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • the_dudefather #1 6 months ago

    A 3rd company needs to step in and make another game called DOTA, just to ensure things get really confusing

  • KDR_11k #2 6 months ago

    Isn't the user unfriendliness of DOTA mostly coming from the community, not the game?

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #3 6 months ago

    Blizzard, modders, Valve, Blizzard... what, who now?

  • SnoppleMonster #4 6 months ago

    I never played DOTA during the Warcraft III days, completely passed me by, but League of Legends and it's "free to play" model grabbed me, it's awesome. Heroes of Newerth was ok, however the pricing model was all wrong (until they changed it), and now I'm already settled into LoL.

    DOTA2 is interesting to see what a big publisher does with it.

    Blizzard seems a bit late to its own game. Not sure they're firing on all cylinders here.

    Edited by 1 at 22/08/11 @ 09:56

  • syra #5 6 months ago

    DOTA is a genre now not a game name, everyone's gone mad there are so many games like this. Why not just make an FPS and call it FPS...

  • abigsmurf #6 6 months ago

    "One of the game development philosophies we have at Blizzard is, easy to learn and difficult to master."

    Gotta lol at that. A newcomer to Starcraft 2 will get steamrolled dozens of times by cheese tactic using bronze players before he's able to learn how to put up a decent fight. Losing that many times against the worst players the matchmaking will put you up against doesn't exactly scream "easy to learn".

    That's just the experience someone who's played through the single player campaign and was a (very rusty) SC1 player. SC2 is a fine game but playing it's an incredibly harsh game for newcomers online.

    As for DotA, the big shake up the game needs to make it accessible is to try and fix the problem of new/rubbish players acting as feeders. Balance should run at all levels of the game, not just for experienced gamers. Regular players won't have games spoilt in the first 5 minutes, new players won't have to experience (as much) venom from gaming's worst community.

  • KDR_11k #7 6 months ago

    The genre name is MOBA, DOTA is still the brand.

  • Lemming81 #8 6 months ago

    Everyone keeps mentioning how user-unfriendly DOTA is 'for the novice'. Is it really that difficult to grasp compared to any other RPG/RTS or whatever? I really can't see why.

  • abigsmurf #9 6 months ago

    Lemming81:

    It's not too hard, especially compared to Starcraft 2. However you only really get proper practice in online matches and a novice playing DotA online gets an experience not entirely unlike being laid into by the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket (only less creative).

    Lots of people want to play games for fun and simply stop playing after a couple of games. Even when you get experienced, you still have to deal with these rants (although not always directed at you).

  • srpiccoro #10 6 months ago

    Every time a developer says user friendly, a fairy loses its wings. When will they learn?!??!?!?!?!?

  • Buran #11 6 months ago

    Blizzard screw the mod community so bad with Starcraft II/Battle.net 2.0 that no one is working on mods and they have to do themselves the Starcraft OTA.

    Even worse: most of the competitors, as League Of Leguends, Heroes Of Newerth (recently), Bloodline Champions and surely Dota 2 from Valve are FREE, which means that Starcrat DOTA has no chance to competa against. To make the things even worse, Valve put 1.6 million dollars in the Dota 2 championship at the GamesCon, making it more vaulable in terms of price rewards than all the current year Starcraft II tournament combined.

    ...Seriously, I used to love Blizzard and hate Valve, but at this moment Newell is wipping the floor with Blizzard in terms of his MOBA approach.

  • hiddenranbir #12 6 months ago

    I'm actually more interested in Blizzard's; partly because it is like a smash bro's compilation and I have confidence in their flattening of making it an experience that is more inviting. That is why I've enjoyed LoL more than HoN. LoL got rid of a few of the unfun stuff and really made it encouraging to be more aggressive. HoN kept it typically confusing and long.

  • xuiton #13 6 months ago

    will be a long time before I buy a blizzard product again. This company has gone from great to shit. Seriously SC2 released as 3 full priced games.

  • ubergine #14 6 months ago

    It's interesting the way Blizzard have gone from being the model of customer freedom and generosity - before Valve was even a twinkle in Gabe Newell's... well, whatever he's got anyway - and now that they are finally releasing new games again for the first time in a decade they have evolved into, well, Activision. "How can we monetise this micro-transaction - make that your Priority One action-item."

    In other news, I've been having a protracted argument about whether Valve/Steam are actually cunts or not. Doesn't their making a sequel to a mod of someone else's game (DOTA 2) qualify as a majorly cuntish thing to do?

  • Der_tolle_Emil #15 6 months ago

    @xuiton: The campaign is well worth the money, it's very well done and more than long enough. Just because you only play one race does not mean that something is missing. Dawn of War II has 'just' one campaign as well until the addons arrived. Both games are very meaty and are far from ripping off customers.

    On topic: Battle.net 2.0 needs to be enhanced dramatically if this should work. One of the biggest problem with Dota was leaving/disconnecting during a game and if Battle.net does not have a method to rejoin games you dropped out of it will be inferior and far more unfriendly than LoL, Dota2 or any of the other games of this genre.