[In a Gamasutra-exclusive postmortem, some of the key figures behind seminal Warcraft III mod Defense Of The Ancients, now working on the DoTA-influenced League Of Legends for Riot Games, provide a look at the creation of the original title.]
Introduction
Having touched the
hands of more than 10 million people worldwide since its inception nearly 5
years ago, Defense
of the Ancients, (DotA)
is arguably one of the most popular game mods of all time.
Created primarily
with the free "World Editor" packaged with Blizzard's amazingly popular
RTS game Warcraft
III: The Frozen Throne, each new version of DotA is the culmination of tens of thousands of
man-hours of work by hundreds of community volunteers.
DotA is an online
session-based game where each of up to 10 players chooses a "hero" to play during
a 5v5 match. Assisted by computer-controlled units, (known as "creeps"), you
can kill enemy heroes and creeps to gain resources and levels that allow you to
purchase items and train new abilities for your hero.
The game is won by
destroying your opponent's primary structure (Ancient), before yours falls.
DotA is typically played online or over LAN in sessions that last about an hour
on average.
Drawing inspiration
from a popular Starcraft mod known as
Aeon of Strife, the first version of
DotA was released in the middle of 2003 by an individual known only by his
pseudonym "Eul".
In Eul's original DotA, players could choose one of 32 heroes,
and hold up to six items simultaneously from a pool of 39 available options.
This rudimentary predecessor of the current DotA paved the way for the
future innovations that have led to the success it is today.
On May 29,
2003, Blizzard
officially released the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne expansion pack which
added a breadth of new features to Warcraft III, including a new and improved
World Editor.
This new tool provided map-makers far more options for
customizing items, skills, models, tiles, etc. Utilizing these newly released
tools, many spinoffs of the original DotA were created with vastly superior
sets of features, including the first versions of Steve "Guinsoo" Feak's Defense of the Ancients: Allstars which
is the focus of this postmortem.
Guinsoo originally
began development on DotA Allstars because he was frustrated with bugs and
balance issues in the version of DotA that was most prominent at the time.
His
original intent was not to begin a large-scale project, but simply to create a
more fun version for himself and his friends.
After finding success with these initial changes, he started to enjoy
map development more and more, and began expanding his releases.
What Went Right
1.
Diversity
of content
It was quickly realized that replayability
would be the key to DotA's success; it was necessary for Guinsoo to make the
game as deep as possible while still working within the limitations of the
engine and tools to which he was bound.
This was executed by examining the
"fun" elements of gameplay, and expanding on the game simply by adding more
choices (and therefore more possible combinations of gameplay). Guinsoo began adding content at an extremely
rapid pace, with each individual hero or item increasing the replay value of
the game exponentially.
Heroes - By the time Guinsoo released his final
version of DotA, there were 69 completely unique and diverse hero options for a
person to choose from -- creating over 300 million possible 5v5 matchups.
With
every new hero added to the game increasing the number of possible unique
matchups, adding heroes was a simple way to enhance the gameplay depth and
longevity without having big-company resources. Ideas for new heroes came from
Guinsoo's group of close friends, the community forums, volunteer beta testers,
etc. Hero names have been influenced by many popular anime, Magic: The Gathering, comics, and so on.
Items - In DotA, items were originally added to
create additional ways for you to customize your hero during a session. In the
original version of DotA, however, a single gameplay session lasted long enough
that most players could get the "best" items for their character in every item
slot and still have lots of unused gold left over by the time the game ended.
Guinsoo felt that it was necessary for items to be able to scale with the
character, so players had cheap options for the beginning of the game,
mid-priced options for the middle of the game, and high-priced options for the
end of the game.
Unfortunately, simply adding lots of items
for each tier would mean that if you wanted to replace the items in your
inventory with more powerful ones, you would have to sell your items back to
the shop losing half the gold that you paid for them.
Since having to sell and
replace your items was not a desirable option, Guinsoo created an item
combination system as a solution to this problem. This allowed players to buy
cheap items early in the game, combine multiple cheap items into mid-priced
items for the middle of the game, and combine multiple mid-priced items to
create expensive and powerful items for the end of the game.
Doing so meant
that the resources players were gathering throughout the game had consistent
usefulness, and created a persistent goal of trying to get to the next tier of
items.
Roshan - In version 4.0a, Guinsoo added Roshan.
Roshan was a computer controlled "boss mob" which required an entire team to
kill.
Defeating Roshan rewarded your team with experience and items, but left
your defenses exposed during the fight. As such, choosing to battle him was a
potentially risky endeavor.
If the other team became aware that you were
fighting him, they could either try to kill you, (and steal Roshan), or push
into your base to destroy key structures.
As an attestation of the fact that
many sources have influenced the progress of DotA, Roshan was actually named
after Guinsoo's bowling ball.
The
addition of such a substantial amount of gameplay diversity led to balancing
issues. Due to the limitations of the tools that Guinsoo had available to him,
balancing decisions had to be made through direct observations and direct
player feedback.
Balance was tuned each version, and the only way for him to
know if he got it right was to see if the players stopped complaining.
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I always look at DotA for success elements, like always. Its a source of motivation for me too, having see it grow from the small fish to its today size.
Great job guys! Thanks for sharing this priceless knowledge. :D
As stated in the article…
"Utilizing these newly released tools, many spinoffs of the original DotA were created with vastly superior sets of features, including the first versions of Steve "Guinsoo" Feak's Defense of the Ancients: Allstars which is the focus of this postmortem.”
This means that this postmortem was written specifically about Guinsoo's versions of DotA, as stated multiple times. Since neither I nor Guinsoo are Icefrog, and since Icefrog's DotA is still in development, it would have been rather inappropriate for us to write a postmortem on versions of DotA after Guinsoo’s.
Also - credit where credit’s due? Since the vast majority of all DotA content was created in the map editor, (Icefrog’s early versions, and all of Guinsoo’s versions), we thought it quite worthy of mention.
To summarize: Thanks for anonymously replying to an article to tell everyone something we already said in the article itself.
With love,
Pendragon_