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Valve Close To Announcing Next Game?
The studio behind Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal might be on the verge of adding another title to its stable. The company recently trademarked the acronym DOTA, giving yet another clue that it has a Defense of the Ancients game in the works.
Valve hired DOTA originator IceFrog last year, and a now-deleted Twitter from voice actor Jon St. John indicated that he was working on a DOTA game for Valve. Nothing is official yet, but there's an awful lot of smoke here for there not to be any fire.
Defense of the Ancients, if you're not familiar, began as a Warcraft III mod by IceFrog. The 5-on-5 game puts each player in control of a single hero character, who can level up and earn gold to buy items to further increase his power. AI-controlled armies continually spawn at both teams' bases and train-wreck in the middle of the map, and it's up to the player characters to turn the tide of battle.
After IceFrog moved on from DOTA, a variant called DOTA Allstars took over the multiplayer community. Maintained and updated by Guinsoo, who since took a position at Riot Games making DOTA-like free-to-play title League of Legends, DOTA Allstars is generally the specific game that people are referring to when they bring DOTA up.
Several DOTA clones have been made since its inception in the Warcraft III mod scene. The aforementioned League of Legends has been successful by all accounts, and has been picked up by Major League Gaming as a tournament event. Much of the hardcore DOTA community migrated to S2 Games' Heroes of Newerth, also free-to-play, which is an unabashed direct copy of the original Warcraft III mod. Finally, Stardock and Gas Powered Games released Demigod, an interesting game that was utterly sunk by a broken multiplayer implementation at launch that made it nearly unplayable online and took weeks to fix.
If you're still not understanding what DOTA is about, let Swedish musician Basshunter explain it better than I ever could with this music video:
If and when Valve makes an official announcement, we'll be all over it. Until then, let your imagination run wild with what one of gaming's most talented studios could do with the action/RTS subgenre.
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