I can describe it in words, and you might even get an idea of what I mean.
Thing is, you'll never actually get it until you try it. Once you do it makes perfect sense and once you learn how to do it the muscle memory will be burnt in, like riding a bike. Perhaps it's less conceptually intuitive, and I'll grant that with so few PC fps around the concepts behind strafe jumping aren't prevalent anymore. To someone who grew up with Quake, and even Unreal and Half-Life 1, it wasn't nearly as hard to get, since everyone did it.
As an aside, the perfect rocket jump does involve jumping. The idea is to take as little damage as possible while still getting the right height, so you jump first and then shoot the rocket in the right point of your arc to get the distance you need.
The reason rocket jump scripts were never disabled in Quake was because though you could easily make a script to get near the maximum height every time, it wasn't always what you wanted. So even people who had good rocket jump scripts still had to make many manual rocket jumps, and max height jumps weren't very difficult to pull off to begin with.
However, years ago someone (I want to say Rat or Toxic, but I'm probably wrong) came up with the perfect forward rocket jump script. He could get maximum speed with a single key press and lose ~20 health for the trouble -- which was a ridiculously low price to pay. Even after it was known he kept the secret well, and even when it got out only a few people got it and didn't spread it around too much. But it was obvious to everyone that it was just too strong, and the only way to disable it would be to disable all rocket jump scripts, and that's why the newer Quake mods and QuakeLive don't have them.
I think a simple description is a good rule of thumb for separating good game mechanics from bad ones, "exploit" or not. Whether or not the developer intended it is relevant in deciding whether or not to punish players who do it, but it's not relevant at all for arguing about including it in a game. Techniques that make no sense in theory without a thorough understanding of game physics should not be used for adding depth IMO.
Sounds nice, but falls apart in the face of most competitive games. Even when things can be explained, you still have to have a thorough understanding of the game's mechanics to use them properly (or well). Understanding a game's mechanics is pretty much the most important thing you can do if you want to play it seriously and the first thing most good players -- and every community -- do.
Besides that, who are you describing it to and why? Have they ever played that type of game before, or a game in the series, or a game on that medium, or a game at all? Have they played competitively, are they able to, do they want to? I can explain concepts in fighting games to people I play in tournaments and they'll understand easily, but if I explain them to someone who doesn't they'll have a much harder time, and if I explained them to my grandmother she wouldn't even care.
Exploit is such a muddy term anyway. Most devs make their games and then sell them as-is, so the players have to do all the real work when it comes to figuring them out and making them viable for competitive play. Nine times out of ten if it's in the game it's legal, and that's been the general rule for every competitive game. Almost every time something in the game is banned is because it is so overpowered that it makes all other options obsolete. At that point the game will become stagnant and people will stop playing.
If Valves dota clone doesn't have stat tracking besides the like of leaves and all that I'll be jumping ship to that. HoN's fun and all but getting yelled at for you kdr when you play 90% support heroes is dumb. Oh no I'm doing my characters job I must be terrible at the game!
Well, part of a support heroes job is to not die. But I can see the point. The trouble is that it takes a stronger player to play a good carry, and not everyone knows how to play them. You should have at least 2 or 3 carries that you can win a game with, or else you're going to have a lot of trouble keeping even your w/l record up.
But yes, stat tracking was not executed very well in hon.
1) The game tries to lock velocity in a given direction to an arbitrary value (320 units per second, by default?).
2) But the way it does this is flawed. Instead of actually limiting acceleration past 320, it checks to see if your velocity on your current vector is above 320, and if so, it caps it at 320.
3) So the goal is to push your velocity as high as possible slightly to one side of your intended direction of travel, and then, before that gets capped at 320....
4) You change your vector to the opposite side of the intended direction of travel, so that the side-to-side braking effect of switching from left to right (or vice versa) outweighs the increase in acceleration along the intended vector. Thus, your overall velocity along the new vector stays the same or goes down, never hitting the 320 cap, but the component in the intended direction of travel can keep increasing.
==
I don't really care about the competitive argument. Generally I think that ends up being a way for people to lord themselves over the newbies, but whatever. You can still play with friends.
But I think it was flat-out wrong to say (assuming my summary is accurate or even similar to the reality) that strafe jumping is just as intuitive as rocket jumping, and that people only think the latter is easier to grasp because of exposure. It's not about muscle memory, it's about understanding the how and why, and the knowledge of the mechanics of a game's flawed acceleration cap is, I think, clearly less visible and therefore harder to grasp than "explosions make things go flying wheeee."
Yeah if you see someone block someone else or explode himself up you can figure out what's happening just from watching that in-game and copy it. You may not have had the idea of inventing it or trying it out yourself but it's easy enough to grasp once you see it.
Strafe jumping? heh.
My point in all this was that I expect Valve to change everything to fit the above description. If they specifically code in a veteran DOTA exploit they'll streamline it.
That would have been the link I'd use to show the math behind it.
There's a lot of bias in this discussion. Like I said, strafe jumping is impossible with a pad, so if you don't play fps on a PC there is no way to ever know about it.
I, and everyone I know, learnt it just by seeing and doing. There were no tutorials or videos, or even a decent explanation, let alone a working mechanical theory, when I started playing. Everyone did it, and you kept trying until you did it too.
It was the same way with rocket jumping, circle jumping, double jumping, bunny hopping, and any number of other advanced techniques -- all of which were blatant exploits of the game's mechanics, and all of which made the games about a billion times more interesting than they could have been. There's a reason people still play Quake 3, and it's not because of the weapon balance or the maps, just like there's a reason a whole mod and community was built around making Quake 3 a puzzle-platformer using advanced movement.
So yes, for most people these days I'd guess that rocket jumping is more intuitive.
It's the same thing with dota. What goes on in the game is hard to grasp at a basic level because it isn't like any other game. It borrows aspects from many genres, but it doesn't play like they do. There are so many examples of things that can be explained and shown and easily done, but require explanation and examples and practice before people can do them. The game is deep, and that's what the people who play it enjoy. There are dozens over other games that a person could play without having to put the work in to learn dota. I don't see why it can't exist like that. You can say it's full of exploits and unintuitive actions and whatever else, but people learnt how to play it.
Nothing that happens in the game is difficult or obtuse, there just happens to be a lot of it and it takes a lot of work to get good.
I have nothing pertinent to add but every time you post something Page I replace DotA, Quake, whatever in my mind with VF and the MvC2 vs. MvC3 debate, although depending on how familiar one is with the particular game/engine, any fighting game would do really. Just now thought of Virtual-On, it's deep enough to apply to the gist of what you're getting at if reading how crazy the movement is at high-level play is any indicator. Amusing that similar discussions pop up amongst pretty much every genre.
How deep are you willing to go with this? You want to take out blocking, where a person deliberately moves their hero into the pathing of another unit or hero to keep them from moving? Because that's pretty unintuitive as well, but also really, really important to the game. Are all the juke spots added to the map to manipulate how line of sight works also exploits? Putting wards in the creep camps to stop them from spawning; spawning illusions to remove debuffs and abuse the invulnerability window; using orb attacks to avoid creep aggro; using spells that break magic immunity against heroes with it; getting melee bonuses on ranged attacks with heroes that can switch between the two; or pretty much anything else that allows for creative and interesting play.
Icefrog knows about all this stuff and he encourages it. If Valve wants to make a dota clone there's a million other kids that would do it faster than Icefrog. Why would they hire him if they were just going to make him dumb the game down, and why would he agree to it with the knowledge that he'll be alienating a dedicated fanbase that he clearly values.
Or is it more likely they'll just add some tutorials to explain the mechanics that make the game fun for everyone else?
If Valve rewrote DotA from the ground up, I can't really see any of the things you mentioned staying, actually.
That may be an accurate distinction, but I wouldn't call it a relevant one. They both have the same end result: You do more damage per second.
You don't attack faster. You just are able to move slightly more than you normally would, thus allowing you to keep up better with someone who is running away from you, allowing you to get more hits in. It doesn't change your 'DPS', but it might make you deal that DPS longer (and do more damage overall).
How deep are you willing to go with this? You want to take out blocking, where a person deliberately moves their hero into the pathing of another unit or hero to keep them from moving? Because that's pretty unintuitive as well, but also really, really important to the game. Are all the juke spots added to the map to manipulate how line of sight works also exploits? Putting wards in the creep camps to stop them from spawning; spawning illusions to remove debuffs and abuse the invulnerability window; using orb attacks to avoid creep aggro; using spells that break magic immunity against heroes with it; getting melee bonuses on ranged attacks with heroes that can switch between the two; or pretty much anything else that allows for creative and interesting play.
Icefrog knows about all this stuff and he encourages it. If Valve wants to make a dota clone there's a million other kids that would do it faster than Icefrog. Why would they hire him if they were just going to make him dumb the game down, and why would he agree to it with the knowledge that he'll be alienating a dedicated fanbase that he clearly values.
Or is it more likely they'll just add some tutorials to explain the mechanics that make the game fun for everyone else?
If Valve rewrote DotA from the ground up, I can't really see any of the things you mentioned staying, actually.
As I said, why would Valve hire Icefrog when he's been designing the type of game that apparently they'd want to never make? They could get any number of other guys to work on this project.
Maybe Icefrog was only designing around the limitations of the W3 engine? I recall that there was some indecision over whether to accept some of the things you mentioned over the iterations of DotA.
5.84c used to hex people who friendly-attacked anything, including denying creeps. Didn't 6.xx under Icefrog simply remove denying for a while?
Icefrog's regime pretty much just picked up all the engine-specific issues which people used to exploit and then endorse and transform it into a central game feature. Spawning illusions to remove debuffs wasn't a deliberate feature, for instance. Neither was having some spells pierce magic immunity and others not. Icefrog just picked it up and ran with it. But that may not mean that it would have been implemented to begin with, had there been power to alter the underlying engine.
Why Icefrog - well, he does seem like a pretty skilled dev.
ronya on
0
Options
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited August 2010
It seems a little silly for Page- to suggest that they hired Icefrog to replicate Warcraft 3 engine specific exploits, instead of his experience with the map design, item balance and such things.
Of course some balance choices were made because of the way the engine works, and of course some ideas also came from that. But that doesn't mean they don't work the way they do on purpose. For instance, there's more than one way to spawn illusions, and you can fiddle with the time it takes for them to spawn. Some heroes get slow and deliberate spawn times with an obvious invulnerability window that can be used to dodge spells and attacks, other spawn them instantly and don't get the chance. The spawn time has been changed before and it could be changed again if Icefrog felt like it.
Same goes with spells that go through immunity. There are a dozen different spells that would give him the same effect as the spell that goes through immunity, except they wouldn't go through it. He could change them so they didn't, but he doesn't.
I'm not saying those specific things will, or should, make it into dota 2.0, but I also don't see a single thing wrong with them. They're also not that big of a deal when it comes to learning the game, unlike creep blocking or orb walking.
But there's just as much, and maybe more, involved in the game that's just theory and would translate into any engine. Thing is, the only way to learn the game is to sit down and read about it and play it a lot. There's no getting around that, and it's the only real learning curve dota has. None of the individual actions are that hard or that unintuitive, but the overall strategy, feel, and skill involved in a game has to be acquired through hard work. That's the design element that I think is up for grabs here, and I would like to see it stay as rich as it is, just with much better and more thorough documentation and some nice tutorials to get people going.
There are some things, animation cancelling and orb walking for example, that if removed would drastically change the way the game works and is balanced.
I have nothing pertinent to add but every time you post something Page I replace DotA, Quake, whatever in my mind with VF and the MvC2 vs. MvC3 debate, although depending on how familiar one is with the particular game/engine, any fighting game would do really. Just now thought of Virtual-On, it's deep enough to apply to the gist of what you're getting at if reading how crazy the movement is at high-level play is any indicator. Amusing that similar discussions pop up amongst pretty much every genre.
Virtua Fighter in particular is an odd one that helps illustrate a point.
See, Virtua Fighter is seen to be too complex and involving even by many other fighting game players. It's not really; it's just got a really bland presentation.
The problem with the comparison to dota is that, unlike Virtua Fighter, dota is a really popular game with both a strong casual and tournament scene. Less so now that LoL, SC2, and hon are out, and the engine is 10 years old, but it's still there. If just the people who currently play WC3 dota bought dota 2.0 then I'd bet Valve would make a profit.
Now Virtua Fighter is a deep game with a lot of things that need to be learnt and understood before a player can really do much. Because the presentation is so lacklustre most people don't get past the initial period of playing a game because it's new. However, Virtua Fighter's complexities and intricacies are all time worn and built straight into the game. There are no real glitches that separate high level play from normal play, just knowledge and skill.
Compare it to Tekken. Tekken is about a million times more popular than Virtua Fighter. As a basic game it's possibly as easy to get into as Virtua Fighter. However, major aspects of high level Tekken play involve manipulating the game engine in ways that could easily be considered glitches. The movement involved in high level Tekken is completely dependant on exploiting cancels and needs to be learnt because there's nothing in the game that will ever tell you about it. Same with throw escapes.
Tekken is more popular because it has flashy moves and colourful characters and minigames. Even mid-level Tekken play requires more work, on an input and memorization level, than Virtua Fighter, as well as access to knowledge that you could never get from just playing the game.
I've kind of lost the original point I was going to make about dota here. I guess Valve should spend more money on art assets and flavour text, because that'll push more copies of the game than just taking out everything people think they don't like about dota and the wc3 engine.
Of course some balance choices were made because of the way the engine works, and of course some ideas also came from that. But that doesn't mean they don't work the way they do on purpose. For instance, there's more than one way to spawn illusions, and you can fiddle with the time it takes for them to spawn. Some heroes get slow and deliberate spawn times with an obvious invulnerability window that can be used to dodge spells and attacks, other spawn them instantly and don't get the chance. The spawn time has been changed before and it could be changed again if Icefrog felt like it.
Same goes with spells that go through immunity. There are a dozen different spells that would give him the same effect as the spell that goes through immunity, except they wouldn't go through it. He could change them so they didn't, but he doesn't.
I'm not saying those specific things will, or should, make it into dota 2.0, but I also don't see a single thing wrong with them. They're also not that big of a deal when it comes to learning the game, unlike creep blocking or orb walking.
But there's just as much, and maybe more, involved in the game that's just theory and would translate into any engine. Thing is, the only way to learn the game is to sit down and read about it and play it a lot. There's no getting around that, and it's the only real learning curve dota has. None of the individual actions are that hard or that unintuitive, but the overall strategy, feel, and skill involved in a game has to be acquired through hard work. That's the design element that I think is up for grabs here, and I would like to see it stay as rich as it is, just with much better and more thorough documentation and some nice tutorials to get people going.
There are some things, animation cancelling and orb walking for example, that if removed would drastically change the way the game works and is balanced.
Eh, animation cancelling and orbwalking only became widespread well after it was technically possible to carry out. But 5.84c and earlier versions placed a lot more emphasis on other parts of gameplay.
The reason why illusions come with invulnerability at all is because that's how the original vanilla Warcraft III Mirror Image skill worked. After people start abusing it, Icefrog just picked it up and ran with it, making it a strategic feature for other heroes. It wasn't a deliberate feature from the ground up.
Likewise, the reason Avatar didn't block some spells is because some spells were actual engine-based spells, while others were elaborate trigger effects. As mapmaking techniques improved over time it became possible to alter some spells to make them pierce immunity and some not - basically by replicating effects using triggers - but likewise the engine has played a larger role in influencing how things work now than any actual gameplay design decisions.
If you don't see why having to memorize which spells pierce immunity and which don't or the quirks of each spell effect and how they interact raise the learning curve and intimidate new players, well... it's true, it isn't a problem provided players sit down and just start studying it and suffer through the initial period of dying over and over again. But I doubt Valve is inclined to demand this of players, especially for a new game.
As for those specific examples, they're just that: examples. I don't expect everything from wc3 dota to carry over, not would I want that. It's more the idea of nuance in the games. I do think that a person who knows more about the game should have an advantage, but that's built in from the ground floor. There are a dozen really important things that go on at every moment in the game that have to be learnt before they can be understood. It comes down to dota being a different game than other games, but it can also be played on different levels and since there are already different gametypes built in there's no reason dota 2.0 couldn't ship with an easy mode.
I still think it comes down to proper education and tutorials, not getting rid of valid, proven, and workable mechanics just because.
It figures that he still had to be goaded into letting some info slip. I bet it's still just a bunch of concept art, and I doubt Game Informer will be asking any interesting questions. But it's better than nothing.
out 2011, literally dota 2.0.
all those arguments about denying, heh.
Fuga on
0
Options
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited October 2010
Who was Bloodseeker again? Was he the dude who got increased movement speed when wounded enemies were nearby and had an ultimate that dealt damage whenever the target moved? Because that guy was hilarious.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited October 2010
The game will also feature a ton of custom voice work. You'll get amusing lines from heroes as they deny the enemy team last hits on creeps, and champions who have backstory connections will trade quips when nearby.
I like the sound of that. It'll be a bit like L4D with the Survivor chatter. Makes thing feel a bit livelier.
I guess this isn't much of a surprise by now. I wonder if it'll draw people away from HoN and LoL.
Because it's Valve, I somewhat feel I have to get it, despite being absolutely terrible at DotA and HoN.
Yeah, I'm awful at DotA, and the community around that game is worse than hardcore StarCraft players, but it's a Valve game, so it'll probably be pretty awesome
when it's a remake of a mod which had the worst community of any game ever, and not Half-Life Episode 3, this is a true statement
Look I want Episode 3 more than anyone on Earth but this is dumb
I remember those days when Valve didn't make anything but Half-Life 2 and we waited like five goddamn years for it and then it got delayed because some hacker asshole stole the source code and we were all like "fuckkkkkkk"
Whereas if they had been releasing other games in that time period I might not have been driven to the brink of madness
Valve is developing and releasing games almost as much as a normal developer now. That's not something anyone should be complaining about
Posts
Thing is, you'll never actually get it until you try it. Once you do it makes perfect sense and once you learn how to do it the muscle memory will be burnt in, like riding a bike. Perhaps it's less conceptually intuitive, and I'll grant that with so few PC fps around the concepts behind strafe jumping aren't prevalent anymore. To someone who grew up with Quake, and even Unreal and Half-Life 1, it wasn't nearly as hard to get, since everyone did it.
As an aside, the perfect rocket jump does involve jumping. The idea is to take as little damage as possible while still getting the right height, so you jump first and then shoot the rocket in the right point of your arc to get the distance you need.
The reason rocket jump scripts were never disabled in Quake was because though you could easily make a script to get near the maximum height every time, it wasn't always what you wanted. So even people who had good rocket jump scripts still had to make many manual rocket jumps, and max height jumps weren't very difficult to pull off to begin with.
However, years ago someone (I want to say Rat or Toxic, but I'm probably wrong) came up with the perfect forward rocket jump script. He could get maximum speed with a single key press and lose ~20 health for the trouble -- which was a ridiculously low price to pay. Even after it was known he kept the secret well, and even when it got out only a few people got it and didn't spread it around too much. But it was obvious to everyone that it was just too strong, and the only way to disable it would be to disable all rocket jump scripts, and that's why the newer Quake mods and QuakeLive don't have them.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Besides that, who are you describing it to and why? Have they ever played that type of game before, or a game in the series, or a game on that medium, or a game at all? Have they played competitively, are they able to, do they want to? I can explain concepts in fighting games to people I play in tournaments and they'll understand easily, but if I explain them to someone who doesn't they'll have a much harder time, and if I explained them to my grandmother she wouldn't even care.
Exploit is such a muddy term anyway. Most devs make their games and then sell them as-is, so the players have to do all the real work when it comes to figuring them out and making them viable for competitive play. Nine times out of ten if it's in the game it's legal, and that's been the general rule for every competitive game. Almost every time something in the game is banned is because it is so overpowered that it makes all other options obsolete. At that point the game will become stagnant and people will stop playing.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Handmade Jewelry by me on EtsyGames for sale
Me on Twitch!
But yes, stat tracking was not executed very well in hon.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
http://www.funender.com/quake/articles/strafing_theory.html
If I understand this correctly, the idea is that
1) The game tries to lock velocity in a given direction to an arbitrary value (320 units per second, by default?).
2) But the way it does this is flawed. Instead of actually limiting acceleration past 320, it checks to see if your velocity on your current vector is above 320, and if so, it caps it at 320.
3) So the goal is to push your velocity as high as possible slightly to one side of your intended direction of travel, and then, before that gets capped at 320....
4) You change your vector to the opposite side of the intended direction of travel, so that the side-to-side braking effect of switching from left to right (or vice versa) outweighs the increase in acceleration along the intended vector. Thus, your overall velocity along the new vector stays the same or goes down, never hitting the 320 cap, but the component in the intended direction of travel can keep increasing.
==
I don't really care about the competitive argument. Generally I think that ends up being a way for people to lord themselves over the newbies, but whatever. You can still play with friends.
But I think it was flat-out wrong to say (assuming my summary is accurate or even similar to the reality) that strafe jumping is just as intuitive as rocket jumping, and that people only think the latter is easier to grasp because of exposure. It's not about muscle memory, it's about understanding the how and why, and the knowledge of the mechanics of a game's flawed acceleration cap is, I think, clearly less visible and therefore harder to grasp than "explosions make things go flying wheeee."
Strafe jumping? heh.
My point in all this was that I expect Valve to change everything to fit the above description. If they specifically code in a veteran DOTA exploit they'll streamline it.
There's a lot of bias in this discussion. Like I said, strafe jumping is impossible with a pad, so if you don't play fps on a PC there is no way to ever know about it.
I, and everyone I know, learnt it just by seeing and doing. There were no tutorials or videos, or even a decent explanation, let alone a working mechanical theory, when I started playing. Everyone did it, and you kept trying until you did it too.
It was the same way with rocket jumping, circle jumping, double jumping, bunny hopping, and any number of other advanced techniques -- all of which were blatant exploits of the game's mechanics, and all of which made the games about a billion times more interesting than they could have been. There's a reason people still play Quake 3, and it's not because of the weapon balance or the maps, just like there's a reason a whole mod and community was built around making Quake 3 a puzzle-platformer using advanced movement.
So yes, for most people these days I'd guess that rocket jumping is more intuitive.
It's the same thing with dota. What goes on in the game is hard to grasp at a basic level because it isn't like any other game. It borrows aspects from many genres, but it doesn't play like they do. There are so many examples of things that can be explained and shown and easily done, but require explanation and examples and practice before people can do them. The game is deep, and that's what the people who play it enjoy. There are dozens over other games that a person could play without having to put the work in to learn dota. I don't see why it can't exist like that. You can say it's full of exploits and unintuitive actions and whatever else, but people learnt how to play it.
Nothing that happens in the game is difficult or obtuse, there just happens to be a lot of it and it takes a lot of work to get good.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
I have nothing pertinent to add but every time you post something Page I replace DotA, Quake, whatever in my mind with VF and the MvC2 vs. MvC3 debate, although depending on how familiar one is with the particular game/engine, any fighting game would do really. Just now thought of Virtual-On, it's deep enough to apply to the gist of what you're getting at if reading how crazy the movement is at high-level play is any indicator. Amusing that similar discussions pop up amongst pretty much every genre.
If Valve rewrote DotA from the ground up, I can't really see any of the things you mentioned staying, actually.
As I said, why would Valve hire Icefrog when he's been designing the type of game that apparently they'd want to never make? They could get any number of other guys to work on this project.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
5.84c used to hex people who friendly-attacked anything, including denying creeps. Didn't 6.xx under Icefrog simply remove denying for a while?
Icefrog's regime pretty much just picked up all the engine-specific issues which people used to exploit and then endorse and transform it into a central game feature. Spawning illusions to remove debuffs wasn't a deliberate feature, for instance. Neither was having some spells pierce magic immunity and others not. Icefrog just picked it up and ran with it. But that may not mean that it would have been implemented to begin with, had there been power to alter the underlying engine.
Why Icefrog - well, he does seem like a pretty skilled dev.
Same goes with spells that go through immunity. There are a dozen different spells that would give him the same effect as the spell that goes through immunity, except they wouldn't go through it. He could change them so they didn't, but he doesn't.
I'm not saying those specific things will, or should, make it into dota 2.0, but I also don't see a single thing wrong with them. They're also not that big of a deal when it comes to learning the game, unlike creep blocking or orb walking.
But there's just as much, and maybe more, involved in the game that's just theory and would translate into any engine. Thing is, the only way to learn the game is to sit down and read about it and play it a lot. There's no getting around that, and it's the only real learning curve dota has. None of the individual actions are that hard or that unintuitive, but the overall strategy, feel, and skill involved in a game has to be acquired through hard work. That's the design element that I think is up for grabs here, and I would like to see it stay as rich as it is, just with much better and more thorough documentation and some nice tutorials to get people going.
There are some things, animation cancelling and orb walking for example, that if removed would drastically change the way the game works and is balanced.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Virtua Fighter in particular is an odd one that helps illustrate a point.
See, Virtua Fighter is seen to be too complex and involving even by many other fighting game players. It's not really; it's just got a really bland presentation.
The problem with the comparison to dota is that, unlike Virtua Fighter, dota is a really popular game with both a strong casual and tournament scene. Less so now that LoL, SC2, and hon are out, and the engine is 10 years old, but it's still there. If just the people who currently play WC3 dota bought dota 2.0 then I'd bet Valve would make a profit.
Now Virtua Fighter is a deep game with a lot of things that need to be learnt and understood before a player can really do much. Because the presentation is so lacklustre most people don't get past the initial period of playing a game because it's new. However, Virtua Fighter's complexities and intricacies are all time worn and built straight into the game. There are no real glitches that separate high level play from normal play, just knowledge and skill.
Compare it to Tekken. Tekken is about a million times more popular than Virtua Fighter. As a basic game it's possibly as easy to get into as Virtua Fighter. However, major aspects of high level Tekken play involve manipulating the game engine in ways that could easily be considered glitches. The movement involved in high level Tekken is completely dependant on exploiting cancels and needs to be learnt because there's nothing in the game that will ever tell you about it. Same with throw escapes.
Tekken is more popular because it has flashy moves and colourful characters and minigames. Even mid-level Tekken play requires more work, on an input and memorization level, than Virtua Fighter, as well as access to knowledge that you could never get from just playing the game.
I've kind of lost the original point I was going to make about dota here. I guess Valve should spend more money on art assets and flavour text, because that'll push more copies of the game than just taking out everything people think they don't like about dota and the wc3 engine.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Eh, animation cancelling and orbwalking only became widespread well after it was technically possible to carry out. But 5.84c and earlier versions placed a lot more emphasis on other parts of gameplay.
The reason why illusions come with invulnerability at all is because that's how the original vanilla Warcraft III Mirror Image skill worked. After people start abusing it, Icefrog just picked it up and ran with it, making it a strategic feature for other heroes. It wasn't a deliberate feature from the ground up.
Likewise, the reason Avatar didn't block some spells is because some spells were actual engine-based spells, while others were elaborate trigger effects. As mapmaking techniques improved over time it became possible to alter some spells to make them pierce immunity and some not - basically by replicating effects using triggers - but likewise the engine has played a larger role in influencing how things work now than any actual gameplay design decisions.
If you don't see why having to memorize which spells pierce immunity and which don't or the quirks of each spell effect and how they interact raise the learning curve and intimidate new players, well... it's true, it isn't a problem provided players sit down and just start studying it and suffer through the initial period of dying over and over again. But I doubt Valve is inclined to demand this of players, especially for a new game.
As for those specific examples, they're just that: examples. I don't expect everything from wc3 dota to carry over, not would I want that. It's more the idea of nuance in the games. I do think that a person who knows more about the game should have an advantage, but that's built in from the ground floor. There are a dozen really important things that go on at every moment in the game that have to be learnt before they can be understood. It comes down to dota being a different game than other games, but it can also be played on different levels and since there are already different gametypes built in there's no reason dota 2.0 couldn't ship with an easy mode.
I still think it comes down to proper education and tutorials, not getting rid of valid, proven, and workable mechanics just because.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Any news yet from valve about the announcement? I really hope they do announce something. IF you hear anything please post it on the thread
You'll probably have to wait quite a while though.
Or am I just making that up in my head?
I mean, I don't imagine Icefrog will be there, but I guess Valve will. Hopefully someone can at least pester them into letting some info slip.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Of that I am sure.
They've already said the TF2 in-game store was one of the surprises.
http://gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/10/13/dota-2-announced-details.aspx
out 2011, literally dota 2.0.
all those arguments about denying, heh.
Yeah
Releasing video games
How dare they
e: god damn it Fuga
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
I like the sound of that. It'll be a bit like L4D with the Survivor chatter. Makes thing feel a bit livelier.
I guess this isn't much of a surprise by now. I wonder if it'll draw people away from HoN and LoL.
Because it's Valve, I somewhat feel I have to get it, despite being absolutely terrible at DotA and HoN.
when it's a remake of a mod which had the worst community of any game ever, and not Half-Life Episode 3, this is a true statement
Yeah, I'm awful at DotA, and the community around that game is worse than hardcore StarCraft players, but it's a Valve game, so it'll probably be pretty awesome
Look I want Episode 3 more than anyone on Earth but this is dumb
I remember those days when Valve didn't make anything but Half-Life 2 and we waited like five goddamn years for it and then it got delayed because some hacker asshole stole the source code and we were all like "fuckkkkkkk"
Whereas if they had been releasing other games in that time period I might not have been driven to the brink of madness
Valve is developing and releasing games almost as much as a normal developer now. That's not something anyone should be complaining about
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET