Defense of the Ancients or DotA as most gamers would know it. It started off as a mere custom map or a mod for the very successful game of Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft III : Frozen Throne. Now it is one of the most popular games in the international gaming scene. It generated games that are very similar to its gameplay mechanics. These “DotA Clone games” like League of Legends (LoL), Heroes of Newearth (HoN) and Demigod are some of the more well known games. Even though the goal of all the games are similar to DotA, they still have their own unique way of playing the game. LoL and HoN are both stand-alone, online multiplayer games. Since they are both free-to-play, one would expect that a player would be buying, with in-game credits/gold, a lot of things.
DotA is one of those games that even the developers themselves would not expect the huge success of the game. It was first developed by a person under the alias “Eul” back in 2003. Like most Blizzard games, Warcraft III came with a free “map maker” program which allows a user to create maps that can be used in the game, sometimes map makers customize the attributes of the game ( heroes, items, units, etc. ) in order to create a very unique map with a unique gameplay. Eul did just that. He did this during the time where the expansion of the game, Frozen Throne, has not yet been released. When it was finally released there were a lot of new features to the map maker of the game but Eul did not update his map.
There are a lot of spin-offs with the map. The most famous of them was developed by Steve “Guinsoo” Feak. He made DotA Allstars and that would become the most dominant map among all the spin-offs. He continued in developing the map more, he added a recipe system and added more heroes and mechanics. After some time, he passed on the map to another developer under the alias IceFrog. Not much is known about this person. There is already an official website for the game. Over the course of its success, it has such a huge influence in the gaming community. It is now part of the World Cyber Games (WCG) tournament. The latest map made right now is 6.77b. It now has over 100 heroes for players to choose from. With its success, Valve hired IceFrog and a development team in order to create DotA 2 on Steam. Now it is still in the beta phase since not all the heroes have been integrated into the game. IceFrog is till continuing to develop the original map with the help of others.
DotA is a very unique game. It is a combination of real-time strategy and a tower defense kind of game. It took the whole gaming world by storm. In playing this game, it really has a huge learning curve. The recipe system can be confusing for first timers but with a little practice and patience, and of course someone to teach you, one can learn the basics of the game. It has a very simple concept yet from there people can create strategies and plays to help their team win ( e.g. roaming, ganking, jungling). It is a very good game and addicting to others.
