From Warcraft III mod to Valve-developed sequel: Defense Of The Ancients is now standing on its own two feet. This new installment (simply "DOTA 2") made its public debut at Cologne's 2011 Gamescom with a huge tournment -- where historical DOTA teams that have been together for years competed for a $1.6 million prize. During the event, we asked project director Erik Johnson and Valve co-founder Gabe Newell a few questions about the game.
Valve -- explains Newell -- got into this project because several staff members were playing the original DOTA and got obsessed with it to the point that people such as Robin Walker (Team Fortress 2 guru), Adrian Finol (software developer), and Johnson actually formed a team and got into a league -- ending up badly stomped, he confesses. At some point, they decided to contact DOTA developer IceFrog under the pretense that they were game developers, but in fact it was just an excuse to send him fan mail.
It didn't take long before they started talking about how IceFrog wanted to evolve his game: By building a sequel that didn't have the constraints and limitations of continuing the development the way he had been (as a mod to an existing game). So Valve said: "Hey, we've got a great idea! Why don't you come here?"
"IceFrog was the catalyst; he's the main reason why we're making DOTA 2" -- says Johnson. "A lot of us are DOTA fans also from a game-design perspective, and at Valve we already have the original creator of DOTA, Eul." "So," continues Newell, "Adrian made sure that the Source engine could support this kind of game, and then more and more people got into the project." He notes, "It grew out of the same enthusiast fan-spirit that brought Rob Walker and John Cook to build the original Team Fortress out of their love for Quake."
Nothing was really "converted" from the previous version DOTA; this sequel has been built completely from scratch. Valve simply took all the work IceFrog had done in the original Warcraft III mod and and re-imagined it for the sequel. The game mechanics, heroes, and core gameplay are basically the same but, as Johnson emphasizes, the team is working hard on the art style -- after all, IceFrog never really had an art team.
Valve is also focusing on the experience outside of the product itself. Johnson explains their main objective is taking all of the rough edges that the original DOTA players had to deal with -- many of which were outside of the game -- and fixing them, providing the same experience but making it more easy to get into thanks to features such as spectator mode, matchmaking options allowing playing with friends, tutorials to learn the basics, bots to practice with and supportive UI for newcomers.
"Simplifying the game would have not been the right thing to do. DOTA has this perception of being very hardcore. It has millions of people ready to play a product with an annual marketing budget of zero. It's never been advertised. It's a product that propagates from player to player, from friend to friend," states Johnson. He continues, "IceFrog's been the sole builder of the project. The community has grown a lot during the time he's been working on it. DOTA 2 is a very long-term product for us, it's going to continue growing while new feature will be added."
"On top of that we're re-imagining the whole world." Newell clarifies that the approach will have more than a few things in common with TF2. As previewed in the DOTA2 trailer, Valve will release several videos similar to Team Fortress's "Meet the Team." "There are a lot of heroes in DOTA2 -- 105 so far, and we're gonna continue producing these videos. There's definitely something with this world," affirms Johnson.
When asked if he or the team had a favorite hero, Johnson replies, "It's funny, we talked about it, it's pretty hard, It's like asking someone to pick their favorite sports team. Everyone has different answers. In DOTA it's not about one hero. It's about all of them. We definitely have stories that we're going to tell in DOTA, there's even a comic that's gonna be released."
Characterization of the heroes already sounds promising. There's a huge amount of dialogue in the game and the team also added a system that allows characters to have specific dialogue, so for instance, if Crystal Maiden and Lina, who have a really natural adversarial relationship, are in opposite teams they will be bickering and saying things based on what they're doing. "We've been testing the game for quite a while and worked on characters' individuality," confirms Johnson.
"While building the game we have been working with about two or three hundred people -- including a lot of IceFrog's original testers from DOTA -- and we tried out many ideas and hero designs on them. We also added all these professional to make the game a hard place to play, but we like to bring new people in the game all the time, both DOTA experts and newbies. The tournament players, for instance, have been playing for about six weeks on a beta build. It's sort of fun and sort of terrifying to see how pro they are at the game."
Newell confirmed that DOTA 2 probably won't ship before 2012, and the business model is still being evaluated. The tournament -- known as The International -- was a critical step in the game development and tuning, and the next step, beta testing, is just starting. It's only natural to expect the game to follow his role model Team Fortress 2's steps, but no announcements in this regard will be made until the game is tuned some more, as result of the public beta test started right after the tournament ended. Valve Time, as they say.
