DotA, Demigod and League of Legends

[Posh-Tim]

This may have been commented on before but I'm gonna go ahead and do this anyway.

I played Warcraft III and loved the online scenarios and player created content. Especially Vampires and DotA (Defence of the Ancients, this I only found out whilst reading the Demigod review. Until now I had no idea what the game was called)

And having just read a review of Demigod and played on the Beta of League of Legends I was set to pondering; why these clones of DotA have suddenly reared their not so ugly heads? And what do they have to offer?

I haven't played Demigod so i can't comment on that, but certainlty in league of legends there is a pretty exact duplication of DotA with some improvements to graphics and controls.

With this in mind why not get a set of Warcraft III and expansion for somewhere around £5 and play the free original?

Also as a side note, has anyone else played the beta of League of Legends? The online community was ferociously hostile. There was no forgiving for me playing badly and I was expected to be a relative expert from my first game. Essentially given no slack at all for having never played before. Did anyone else find similar problems?

 

[teisjm]

I play DotA and Demigod (DG), haven't tried LoL (and u thought WoW was bad shortened) or Heroes of Newetrh (which i've heard should be the same genre as well)

As for the differences between DG and DotA
DG has the better graphics ofc, seeing as it's a much newer game.

Dota has 93 heroes, with new hereos coming every now and then.
DG has 8 hereos, with 2 more coming soming in september as far as i've red in a dev blog (occulus and demon assasin)
( http://forums.demigodthegame.com/361225 )( http://forums.demigodthegame.com/362184)
Both games will recieve new heroes, though DotA will prolly get heroes faster than DG, due to the difference in hero depth, which leads me to my next point.

A DotA hero has 5 skills, 3 normal skills which you can take up to 4 levels in, an ulti which you can take 3 levels in, and a stats skill which gives you a passive boost to str, agi and int, which you can take 10 times. Since the level cap is 25, you end up with every skill maxed, so it's only a choice of which one to take first.

A DG hero has a much deeper skill-tree as shown here:

Spoiler: Demigod skill tree example

The level cap in DG is 20, and as you can see, you cannot max everything, only about half. That means there's more room for customization of your hero. Most DG heroes are more versitle and can fill mmroe different roles than a DotA hero.

The differences are not so big here, except for the fact that DG's items prolyl aren't as balanced as DotA's yet.
Theres plenty in each game, and theres prolly more to come in both games.
You can carry more items in DG than you can in DotA.

Dota has one map, demigod has 8 (really beautiful) maps of different size, so you can always get a well-sized map whether you're 1v1, 5v5 or anything in between.

In DotA, you have to worry about your hero, nothing else.
In DG everyone from the team can buy team upgrades, which can be upgrades for your teams buildings, your AI mobs, new better AI mobs, or upgrades fro your heroes like faster XP gain, less death penalty and faster gold income.
While both games want you to crush your enemies towers in order to get to their base, DG has flags positioned around the map which you can capture battlefield style. Each flag gives a bonus to your team while it's udner your controll, like faster mana/hp regen, more unit damage (AI units) or faster XP gain.
These things (team upgrades and flags) adds a new level of strategy.
Dota has Neutral creeps and Roshan ("boss" neutral creep), Dg doesn't. Everything in DG is either your team or the other team.

DotA has been around much longer than DG, this means it's more balanced, and has a bigger user-base. It also has more of those arrogant self-proclaimed "pro's" who will think of your errors and mistakes as if you had butt-fucked his mom while his dad was passed out drunk.

(Rage-)quitting is a huge problem in DotA, while it's been partially fixed by IceFrog when he implemended the option to let players switch team after the game has started, it's still the bane of most public games. various 3'rd party Banlists are used, but not as effectively as we (the players) would've wanted.
In DG, a leavers hero is taken over by AI, which can be both good and bad.
A good thing is that DG is planning on implemending a leave-statistic tracker thingy, that'll let you see how often a player has left games mid-game( http://forums.demigodthegame.com/354814 )
Hopefully this will make it easy to avoid fucktards who screws over everyone and rage-quits cause they weren't tEH überschnitzel of the match, or just got pissed off and had to rage for some other reason.

In Dota you have a host, and the game usually ends if he leaves. DG is P2P, which means that the game can go on if the host leaves, it also means that everyone lags if one person does.

Both games have single player AI, IMO DG has the best AI by far.
Demigod is also goign to get an SP mode which should be "something special" according to dev blogs, while this is only read in a dev blog it prolyl means that we can excpect something mroe than just a series of normal games vs Ai. ( http://forums.demigodthegame.com/313497 )

DotA's game-speed is higher than the standart game-speed in DG, you can adjust the speed in DG (even mid-game) but most public online games use standard speed. If you're used to DotA (like me) it can be a serious piss-off. the solution is simple though, just host the game yourself and set game-speed to +1 or +2, I find those to be close enough to the speed im used to from DotA.

While I play and enjoy both games, I still play DotA more than DG, and i still think DotA is the better game for the moment (my personal oppinion), but DG is prolly going to be better with time, if the developers continue to support it, and add to it.

/ Wall of text