this game rocks i’m really happily surprised by it, i didn’t really have any expectations at first and sort of figured it’d just make me want to play dota again instead but it has its own merits and a lot of depth and is like a very promising start for a game that’s only in alpha or whatever. learning the game had last hitting and crucially denying too made me instantly go oh this isn’t some hokey half baked bullshit, and then realizing after several games that unreliable gold of all things is also in the game in some form made me go like oh this is actually worth my time. the whole thing is very well considered and manages to capture a lot of the depth and nuance of dota in particular or i guess the moba genre as a whole and adapt it into a shooter without either half of the equation suffering for it
i’ve taught like eight different people how to play dota and it can take a long time for people to wrap their head around basic concepts like for instance, last hitting and denying and lane control and map rotation and stuff, but just make it a shooter and suddenly after only a few games a bunch of my friends who have never played dota or any moba ever are crushing their lanes and putting up like 20 denies in the other team’s face and shit, it’s been really crazy to observe and like instantly made me recognize the whole point of making a game like this. like on the surface it may seem like just a cynical idea “what if we combined tf2 and dota 2” and i guess like, it’s not totally not that, but just seeing all my friends instantly grasp all these core concepts and like actually execute on them to some degree because it’s a shooter instead of controlling like an rts justifies the whole thing i think
from the opposite perspective of like, why make my shooter into a moba as opposed to why make my moba a shooter, it like adds so much to what would otherwise be just another push the payload game. the idea of like having a kind of power curve in a shooting game isn’t a new or novel thing really, counter strike and battle royale games both have a kind of economy element to them and i think we’re all like pretty accustomed to that, but having a relatively orthodox moba structure in a shooting game is actually kind of novel i think? the closest thing to it is monday night combat maybe and that game iirc shed a lot of mechanics typical to the genre to make it work and deadlock has managed to keep a surprising amount of them; there’s no day/night cycle like in dota and there’s no stacking and pulling and there’s no buyback and no courier and no wards but apart from that like i can’t think of much it doesn’t have that’s like, actually important, and all of those things it left out make sense and all the ways it compromises on certain things are really smart like how gold and xp are combined into souls. the result of all of this is that there’s a whole new spectrum of skill expression and creativity that’s not normally present in these push-the-payload-or-sometimes-maybe-capture-the-shape character based team shooters, and additionally there’s like a whole narrative progression and escalation of conflict that those games don’t typically have. games begin with a laning phase where you amass resources and have like a number of prolonged smaller scale encounters, then as things break down and the big teamfights start to happen the game starts to resemble other team based shooters a little more but with the added like macro level strategy considerations of the lanes and the secondary objectives and stuff and all of it feels like a lot less canned or contrived than the stock shooter game modes and objectives and instead more emergent and multilayered
visually the game has grown on me a lot, i was sort of indifferent to it at first even as someone who like, is primed to appreciate it i guess, but i never would have expected i’d become as attached to some of the characters as i am to my favorite dota characters, i really like vindicta and paradox in particular they are both miffy heroes for sure. a lot of them can sort of be understood as like reinterpretations or functions of various dota characters with like their abilities and some some visual similarities being the connective tissue; pocket has a strong mechanical similarity to puck and is fittingly fey and androgynous, paradox has vengeful spirit’s ult and is similarly purple, lady geist strongly resembles death prophet and has her spirit siphon, etc etc. it’s all very in keeping with like, what you could call the valve house style there’s a definite line you can draw from tf2 to dota 2 to this, and like it draws from a lot of obvious inspirations and points of reference but makes a lot of not obvious choices with the details that i think make it all work. i’m hoping the map gets a little bit of a makeover but the sparse details that are there already are good i think, the bits of graffiti and signage. more than anything i think it looks orders of magnitude more appealing than like overwatch for instance which makes me want to gag every time i see it and it’s not even finished yet
anyways i think we all need to collectively come up with a name for the midboss so i can stop calling it roshan it should have it’s own name like george or brittany or terry. my suggestion is josh short for joshan and the lore is that he is roshan’s cousin who fell into a vat of toxic sludge like the joker but unlike the joker he became a one eyed goo monster. valve feel free to email me for more ideas the first one is on the house
