It's definitely worth $20-30. You could easily get 30-50 hours of play out of it and that's assuming you never enter the tournaments and etc. It's a great game, really the only true successor to DotA. I had high hopes for League of Legends but it hasn't turned out well in beta. People paid $40 for that turd Demigod and it had half of the gameplay, heroes and looks worse graphically than this.

This comment was edited on Aug 31, 2009, 08:53.

Well considering Heroes of Newerth won't be free (it's gonna cost $30 or so according to S2) I doubt it'll get huge like DotA. Then again, maybe it will.

Depends on how you define free. You do have to own War3+TFT to play DoTA after all, and I know people who bought those two purely because of DoTA. In that respect, and with the improvements put in, $30 doesn't seem bad at all. I'll definitely pick it up once it's out even though I doubt I'll play very much. The DoTA/War3 community always seemed to have about the same maturity level as CS, and I doubt that will change very much in HoN, what with the main playerbase obviously being DoTA-converts.

As for other DoTA clones, anyone know how Demigod is doing? My impression is it seems to have tanked pretty badly.

Well considering Heroes of Newerth won't be free (it's gonna cost $30 or so according to S2) I doubt it'll get huge like DotA. Then again, maybe it will.

League of Legends on the other hand, made by one of the main DotA guys originally, will be free and I see more people going to that one. But then again, HoN is way more polished and LoL (lol?) needs plenty of polish work.

This is relevant to my interests...

I've only barely tried the beta, and hadn't played dota in some time prior to that, but it's pretty good. Less hassle than the real DoTA. No need for third party addons to remap your inventory keys or reduce in-game delay

Most important of all though, one profile and one profile only, with persistent stats. Hopefully, the need to use IRC channels due to leavers/griefers will be, if not totally removed then at least significantly reduced.

I wonder how it will pan out though. Will people migrate to HoN or stay with DoTA? I also assume the DoTA team may move to SC2 in the not so distant future.. They probably have access to the editor already. Will HoN try to copy DoTA every step of the way and always stay one move behind, or will they diverge and add new heroes? Since there are a few non-dota heroes in already, I'm guessing the latter, but this may make some people all the more eager to stay with the "original" for now..

This comment was edited on Aug 30, 2009, 18:55.

A lot of people seem to get DotA and TD mixed up for some reason.

but the heroes were unbalanced, and the stealth abilities of a few of the heroes are completely overpowered

Ahh I love you guys that claim everything is overpowered. Especially since it's always wrong, stealth abilites ovpowered you say?

Like scout that noobs pick that is 100% useless?

I was in beta also. It was always a DoTA game. I don't recall ever hearing them mention tower defense. Really good graphics and fun gameplay, but I never played War3's dota, so I don't know how it compares.

Yeah, I don't think they know what tower defense games are.

Also, I tried the beta of the game. It's fairly well done and fairly polished, but the heroes were unbalanced, and the stealth abilities of a few of the heroes are completely overpowered.

"S2 Games' upcoming tower defense-style project"? Is this a joke?

The game is a faithful remake of the insanely popular Defense of the Ancients Warcraft 3 mod, DOTA isn't "tower defense", it's like a PvP action RPG played in matches sort of dealie. Just call it a DOTA-like.