What to do in Dota 2 - Part 3

I was scared again. I had managed to score my first Dota 2 victory, but it was only against computer controlled bots. Now I was joining a game against real life humans, who had most likely played a lot more of this game than I had. What if I messed up and they made fun of me? Oh, I remember, I couldn't care less what people on the Internet type in text chat to me. Although one time a guy said my story was cool, and then called me bro. He was nice.

Windrunner was my hero of choice this time. She's a feisty redhead with a bow and arrow with shots that can shackle enemies to each other or to trees, and an ultimate ability which increases the rate at which she fires at a target for a period of time. Within the first five minutes I had gotten my first enemy hero kill, FIRST BLOOD. I got an extra bit of gold and experience for getting the first kill. Either I was getting better, or this hero was good for the way I played.

I was paying more attention to the minimap this time, seeing where the enemy heroes were, and where my allies were. If an enemy hero was all on their own and a few of us were nearby, we could go and kill it, and it was working well. A couple of us got caught out though, and a group of enemy heroes made quick work of us.

"Stop dat feed."

Clearly someone on our team wasn't pleased with us for dying. Feeding is where you needlessly die to enemy heroes, thereby granting them extra gold and experience with no gain for your team. That's bad. Woops.

It was a close game. We were trading kills and towers were getting destroyed on both sides. Some barracks on opposing sides of the map had been destroyed, which meant that "Mega" Creeps had started spawning, which can sometimes even pose a threat to heroes if there's a large enough group of them. The game was nearing an end, probably all it would take was a big hero battle to decide it.

That battle soon came. I didn't feel like my ultimate ability was as powerful as a lot of heroes', who do massive area of effect damage. Mine simply allowed me to focus fire on one hero, which wasn't doing the battle as a whole much good. We lost all of our heroes, and three of theirs were left standing, this meant trouble for our remaining structures. Since most of us had a fairly lengthy respawn timer by that point, the enemies were able to destroy the towers surrounding our Ancient and start attacking it. We all managed to spawn just in time to drive them back with our Ancient barely standing on around 15% health.

While all this was going on, it became apparent that our creeps were making some headway on the other side of the map, unbeknownst to us, and more importantly the enemy. They had managed to destroy the towers surrounding the enemy ancient and were beginning to attack it! And the enemy heroes were either dead or halfway across the map.

Radiant Victory!

We had won the battle, and man was it close. Our team had all assumed defeat, and yet with no help from us, our creeps had won us the game. I was beginning to really enjoy this game now, and couldn't wait to join some more games and try some new heroes out.

Thanks for reading, have a good one.

What to do in Dota 2 - Part 2

If you haven't read the first part I posted yesterday, go and read it now. It's fine, I'll wait.

Surprisingly, considering the stories I had heard, there wasn't a lot of hostility towards me as a new player. Maybe I had learnt enough about the game before going in, or maybe the people I was playing with were just being nice.

Sadly, it turns out the latter was true.

I started my second game, this time as the Dark Seer. He has abilities like being able to suck all the units in an area into a vacuum for a short time, dealing damage to them, and a handy support ability which cloaks the target in an ion shell, which does damage to nearby enemies. His ultimate ability creates a huge light wall, which, if crossed by an enemy hero, will create a copy of that hero which serves under the Dark Seer's will. Not only is it handy, it looks REALLY cool.

So, the game loaded. Apparently that day Blizzard had added a new class, the Brewmaster into the game.

"I'm just playing against bots to try and Brewmaster, why are you all here, lol?"

Oh good, some know it all veteran come to test a new hero amongst the plebs.

The game went much the same way as the first one, we were all levelling up, getting new items and so on, and at about level six or seven our resident expert piped up again.

"DS why don't you help?"

I checked all of the heroes that people on my team were playing, DS could only stand for Dark Seer, my hero. I had no idea what he meant... it seemed that everyone on my team had suddenly decided without any communication to group up on one side of the map and were engaged in a battle with a group of enemy heroes. Had I missed something? Perhaps there's a certain time when everyone groups up and starts the "team battle" phase, but I sure as hell didn't know when that was.

I trudged across the map to go and help, laid down my "Wall of Replica", and helped kill a hero or two. But then I got sniped, by the aptly named "Sniper". Two of the people on my team spoke this time.

"Omg seriously?"
"Got killed by a bot LOL"

Okay, maybe they're right, maybe I need to step up my game a bit. I decided to start following the more veteran players to see what they were doing.

The trick when the creeps are fighting each other in the middle of the map is to try and get the killing blow on enemy units, whilst also trying to scare away enemy heroes so they don't get the bonus experience and gold from killing friendly units. Sometimes an enemy hero would stray too close to our group, and everyone would use their stunning effects to give time for the gankers to deal the massive damage. I felt proud of myself for using my Vacuum ability to suck a few heroes in before they got finished off by our melee units. Clearly my allies weren't as impressed, maybe it's something they see every game, or maybe they just don't speak unless they're insulting you, who knows?

"I'm going for two Daedalus, lol"

Professor Dota was talking again. The Daedalus is one of the better weapons in the game, with +81 damage and a giving you a 25% chance to critical strike, which does 2.5x normal damage. They're fairly expensive, so getting two of them is no mean feat. This player was clearly good enough to rack up enough cash to do it though.

This game was a lot easier than the first. I reckon that there were a lot more new players in the first game than this one, and it definitely showed. We were destroying enemy structures like nobody's business, and eventually we were able to just walk up to the opposing Ancient and hack it to pieces.

My first Dota 2 victory! It felt good.

I figured it was time to do away with the bots, and start going against human opponents, that's where the real competition was to be had after all.

And indeed, it turned out to be the most exciting game yet, but that's a story for another day.

Thanks for reading, see you next time

What to do in Dota 2 - Part 1

Hey all, this is a mini series I'm going to do describing my experiences with the Dota 2 beta. I've never seriously got into playing games like this, so it's from the perspective of a relative noob... that'll probably come across...


Anyway, here's the first instalment: 

Signups for the Dota 2 Beta began all the way back in August 2011, at a time where Valve were targeting a release later that year for the follow up to Defence of the Ancients, a multiplayer online battle arena game which started life as a Warcraft 3 custom game. The wave of MOBAmania hadn’t quite swept me up at that point, so I thought I’d sign up and see what all the fuss was about. You had to complete a short questionnaire describing your experiences with the previous game. Alright, I thought, standard stuff... but there was no option in any of the questions for “I haven’t played the previous game”, so I just kinda...lied. “How many hours a week did you play Defence of the Ancients?” 1-2 hours, sure, that’ll do. There were only a few beta spots open at the time, so I wasn’t expecting to be receiving anything.

Now it’s April 2012, the game still isn’t out, and I had all but forgotten that I had signed up. Yesterday however, I received an email: “Congratulations! You have been selected to play Dota 2”. Great, a spam email telling me I had won a beta invite, similar to the ones I receive inviting me to play the beta for a WoW expansion that was released two years ago. But sure enough, I went to my games folder in Steam and there it was, Dota 2 just waiting to be installed.

If anyone has no idea what I’m even talking about, MOBAs are RPG based real time strategy games, where players on teams of five each pick a hero and do battle on a large map where the goal is to destroy the other team’s main structure. You level up your hero and earn gold by killing creeps, small weak enemies, which are constantly spawned and will run to the enemy base, meeting up in the middle with enemy creeps and fighting there. When you level up, you can upgrade your stats or unlock new abilities. The gold you accumulate can be used to buy special items which will improve your numbers or give you special powers.

I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive of joining a game straight away. I had heard multiple horror stories from people saying that the MOBA community is notoriously unwelcoming to newbies like myself. There was a tab on the start screen saying ‘Learn’, so I thought I’d click that and there might be some tutorials or something which would help me on my way. All that was on this page were pictures of the dozens of possible heroes you could choose, outlining what abilities they had. This was no help at all! All I was learning was that I was even more overwhelmed now than I was before. Oh well, there was no use putting it off any longer, it was time to jump into a game.

Luckily there was an option to play a game with people against computer controlled characters, as well as an option to team up with people who were also new to the game. Now to pick a character to play as. Each character has a ‘role’, such as ‘Ganker’ and ‘Support’, which I kind of understood, but there were also unhelpfully named roles such as ‘Carry’ and ‘Initiator’. I have since found out that a ‘Carry’ hero is one that usually sits on the sidelines for much of the first part of the game, accumulating experience and gold and will then be able to tons of damage later on.

I chose Enigma, because he looked cool and had an interesting name, and it turned out he was an ‘Initiator’, which means that he is good at teaming up with other heroes to take on groups of enemies in what are called ‘Team Fights’. Initiators have skills which affect large areas, and are good at getting the first blow in to disable enemies while your teammates do the rest of the work. I had no idea of any of that going into the game, maybe I should’ve spent more time on the Dota 2 Wiki beforehand.

So the game loaded up, and straight away someone said in the chat: “Sorry for any noob moves, this is my first game, lol xD”. Phew, at least someone else won’t know what they’re doing. I knew the basics. I had been told at the start of the game that you should buy regeneration items, which will help you survive and will allow you to gain mana quicker, which is used for your abilities. There are three ‘lanes’ which the creeps will run down, top, middle and bottom. Usually two heroes take each of the top and bottom lanes and one hero will go up the middle for the early part of the game, where the focus is on levelling your character. It looked like everyone had already chosen which lanes they were going in, so I took the remaining space at the bottom. The match began, and it was time to kill some creeps!

Thing seemed to be going well, everyone on my team was levelling up, unlocking new abilities and earning gold and buying new items. I decided to record some footage so I wouldn’t forget anything for writing it up later, so I quickly loaded up the capture software and hit F9 to begin recording. The game froze. Wait, people are spamming the chat with question marks. Oh, F9 is the key to pause the game. Great. Sorry guys.

Everyone on my team was around level five or six by that point. Level six is where you can unlock the first rank of your ultimate ability. I had just unlocked mine when suddenly, BANG, someone on my team got killed by Zeus, an enemy hero. How embarrassing, to be killed by a computer controlled he- BANG. Oh, I’m dead.

Zeus’ ultimate ability allows him to send a thunderbolt straight onto the head of all of the enemy heroes, no matter where they are on the map. I mean sure, my ultimate ability with Enigma creates a black hole, but I have to channel it, and unlimited range thunderbolts just seem unfair. He was getting kills left, right and centre without even having to see anyone, and every time he did get a kill, he would gain a whole bunch of experience, quickly making him the most powerful hero in the game.

My team got a few kills here and there, and managed to destroy a few enemy structures, but in the end the computer controlled team scored a fairly easy victory. A little disappointing for my first game. I had fun though, I can certainly see why people spend many hours in this game. It seems simple to get into, but has a real depth to it making it ideal for competitive play, and indeed, there are tournaments with hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars on the line. I’m not quite there yet, I probably need a bit more practice, so I jumped into another game.

The tale from my second game will be coming soon. It contains a lot more people complaining that I wasn't good at the game, so at least that will be entertaining.

Thanks for reading, have a good one.

PAX East + Alan Wake

The Penny Arcade Expo in Boston, abbreviated to PAEX East happened at the tail end of last week. It's pretty much the gamers' E3, where the atmosphere is a lot less "shut up and tell me about video games", and more, "hey guys, we love video games!"

Also I picked up Alan Wake when it was cheap on Steam a couple of weeks ago, and had more fun with it than I thought I would. Maybe that's because I got it cheap, and usually when I play a game I'm left thinking "damn I wish I held off on getting this til when it was cheap."

On an unrelated note, Giantbomb co-founder Ryan Davis just retweeted me, so basically I'm a big player in the video game journalism industry now.

PAX East
Borderlands 2

I wrote a preview for this game a few months ago, but they've come out with some new information about it this weekend. There's a new class called the 'Mechromancer', which is this female cyborg who can control this big robot called D374-TP (can you work out what that's supposed to mean?). There was also a demo that people could play where you shot things, you know, like in Borderlands.

Assassin's Creed 3

I was hoping they'd spend an extra year on this game, but it's coming out this Autumn, like it or not. Although, what Ubisoft showed off at PAX made me a lot more excited for it than I was. It seems as though the tree free running is going to be great, with Connor adapting to the tree shape rather than in previous games where there were obvious paths you had to take over buildings. 

There's a human shield mechanic, helping the up close and personal nature of the assassin against the more modern firearms, and they also showed off the "rope dart". Connor can fire this rope at an enemy, grabbing him round the neck with it, and then jump off a tree branch to hang him from it, oh sh-

Far Cry 3

The last Far Cry for me quickly went from a pretty cool game to just a beautiful fire and tree simulator. Somewhere where I could come to take a new screenshot for my desktop and occasionally set a fire in a bush and watch it spread through an enemy camp.

They were only showing off the multiplayer for the new game at PAX, but it looks kinda fun, especially the aptly named "inferno mode", where the action takes place on an island which is slowly engulfed in flames throughout the course of the match.

Alan Wake

So as I said, I bought this because I was bored and it was cheap, thinking I'd probably play a few hours of it and then get bored and never play it again (much like the vast majority of my Steam collection). 

But it turned out it was exactly what I was looking for in a horror game. I'm more into psychological thrillers than straight up, in your face, "I'm a monster and I'm going to eat your flesh" type deals, and Alan Wake is the former in abundance. 

The combat is a little fidgety, you have to shine your flashlight (which has a boost button for some reason) onto enemies to fight away "the darkness" before you can shoot them, and it works fine, just the mechanics remain the same throughout the game, so it gets a bit old after a while. 

What really keeps you going is the story, which is actually quite compelling, in a "this could never happen but is kinda interesting" kind of way. In classic horror story fashion, bad things start happening, no one believes you, then REALLY bad things start happening and everyone is like "oh, Alan, I'm sorry, what do we do??". Also Alan has never fired a gun before, but he's pretty damn good with them. He also manages to find light sources wherever he goes, which is quite handy considering the type of enemy he's facing. 

The game's use of light and shadows is fantastic though, and during the daytime, it looks effing GORGEOUS.

Anyway, it's fun, if you see it's cheap again, I recommend you getting it.

By the way, I did a video last week, but then the file got corrupted and I was too demoralised to start again.

Thanks for reading, have a good week.