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<\/p>\nBlizzard’s DOTA mod which they’re currently working on may seem like just another attempt to cash in on the wildly popular gameplay, but production director Chris Sigaty has been talking to Eurogamer about their plans to make some drastic changes to the typical DOTA game.<\/p>\n
Their plan is to make the whole game a lot simpler, with the game being more accessible to new players and the games being shorter, about 20-25 minutes. Blizzard wants to try and remove “social tension” – a nice way of describing the tirade of profanity and insults most new players undergo in a typical DOTA game.<\/p>\n
According to Sigaty, they’re trying to “drive it down to the core fun of the gameplay”. Their plan is to remove the individual achievements and make every reward shared between the team. Kills and assists will be replaced by “takedowns”, with all players contributing to a single kill getting an equal split of gold, experience and credit.<\/p>\n
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Towers have also been weakened, to encourage more active gameplay. Sigaty explains, “We’ve done some things that encourage you to be heroic in the beginning. Towers are so powerful in most DOTA-style games that the way the game plays is you head out and you sit under your tower and wait for somebody to make a mistake.”<\/p>\n
“We have ammunition on towers in Blizzard DOTA, so if you do that, you’ll finally run out of ammo. And they regenerate slowly. You’ll actually hurt your tower if you don’t push to try and keep them from even getting to the tower.”<\/p>\n
The team has big changes in mind for the skills and item system as well – again the goal of making things easier to understand.<\/p>\n
“The item systems in many of the DOTA-style games are extremely complex. Some people love it. We feel like reading wikis to understand your build for your particular hero, how you should play it, is too complex,” Sigaty said. “So we’ve come up with a much more simplified item system that we feel still gives lots of different options to you… but is much simpler to understand.”<\/p>\n
“The abilities too, same thing. There are some very complex abilities in DOTA-style games we’ve tried to do away with too much complexity there so you can pick it up.”<\/p>\n
“You know, you’ve got 20 minutes for a game. You need to be able to look at a tooltip and get it pretty quickly… rather than having to think. You’ll still have to play more to gain more. But if you look at some of the games today, they’re as complex of World of Warcraft, which has many, many hours of gameplay to familiarise yourself.”<\/p>\n
Despite all these simplification techniques, Blizzard assures us that the mantra “easy to learn, difficult to master” has been guiding their design from the beginning.<\/p>\n
One has to wonder if it’s a good idea to make such drastic changes to a system that’s proven very successful for a number of developers. While Blizzard has good intentions, changes such as splitting kill gold between all players are a bit worrying. Common team strategy is to allow the highly item-dependent “carry” heroes to secure the kills, as the extra gold will allow them to carry the team to victory.<\/p>\n
Blizzard has also revealed that the game will be free-to-play, and available to those who don’t own Starcraft 2. However, Blizzard says these players “will definitely have to pay” in some way, but there are no firm plans on how to monetize the game just yet.<\/span><\/p>\n Source: Eurogamer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n