Since showing it off at BlizzCon last year, Blizzard’s worker drones have been hard at work with its StarCraft Defense of the Ancients adaptation, Blizzard DOTA. In fact, they basically binned it and started over.<\/p>\n
“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,” senior game designer Jonny Ebbert tells Eurogamer.<\/a><\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Most significantly, perhaps, is the mod and its community’s somewhat, um, sorry reputation for noob-unfriendliness.<\/p>\n “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,” explains Ebbert.<\/p>\n “We’ve just been basically carving around that and trying to knock off all the rough edges and really make it more user friendly.”
The mod is expected to launch on or around the same time as the next StarCraft II installment, Heart of the Swarm, due sometime early next year.<\/p>\n