Game Details Developer: Valve

Publisher: Valve

Platform: Windows (Mac and Linux versions are in testing)

Release Date: July 9, 2013

Price: Free-to-play (pay for cosmetic upgrades)

Links: Steam | Official website Valve: Valve: Windows (Mac and Linux versions are in testing)July 9, 2013: Free-to-play (pay for cosmetic upgrades)

Put a few hundred hours into a game and you'll normally have its mechanics down pat. You may not be the greatest player ever, but you can usually expect to be at least competent and able to make a valuable contribution to your team's efforts. Sure, some teenager all hopped up on Mountain Dew and pubertal rage is still going to have faster reactions than you, but you'll get by.

Until you pick up Dota 2. In Dota 2 you can play for a hundred hours and still be the most useless n00b to ever play the game, a let down to your team, an embarrassment to friends and family. It's a brutal game. But if you get into it—and not everyone will—it can make a full-on heroin addiction look like nothing more severe than a mild hankering.

Staggered release Although Dota 2 officially launched out of beta this week, Valve has stopped short of making it a free-for-all where new players will get slaughtered by beta veterans. The game is being rolled out through a staggered launch, both to ensure that the game isn't inundated with people who don't know what they're doing and also to ensure that the matchmaking and game servers can tolerate the influx of new players. You can Although Dota 2 officially launched out of beta this week, Valve has stopped short of making it a free-for-all where new players will get slaughtered by beta veterans. The game is being rolled out through a staggered launch, both to ensure that the game isn't inundated with people who don't know what they're doing and also to ensure that the matchmaking and game servers can tolerate the influx of new players. You can sign up and Valve will e-mail you when you can start playing.

Before its "official" (though still limited, see sidebar) release this week, Dota 2 has been available for the last two years as an invitation-only beta, with beta keys randomly assigned to existing players. In this way, it grew organically as gamers gave keys to friends or sold them for inflated prices. Even with this limited availability and a learning curve that's almost horizontal (in that additional time doesn't actually gain you much additional skill), Dota 2 has become hugely popular. It's the biggest game on Steam, boasting more concurrent players than any other title on Valve's DRM and distribution platform, regularly breaking 300,000 concurrent players.

What the heck is a MOBA?

Dota 2 is a game in a genre that has no good name. I'm going to go with "MOBA," standing for "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena," but "ARTS," for "action real time strategy" is not uncommon either. If you're not familiar with MOBAs, you're probably not alone.

Superficially, the basic MOBA setup is that of an RTS game: a top-down view of a play area, a minimap, two bases, and units that do battle, with the aim of defending their own base and destroying that of the enemy.

Know your Dota lineage Dota 2 itself is a sort of official sequel to Defense of the Ancients, a modification to Warcraft 3. The original DotA was itself inspired by a StarCraft mod, called Aeon of Strife. DotA's mysterious and anonymous developer, known only as IceFrog, was employed by Valve to work on what is, in essence, a brand new version of the same game. Dota 2 itself is a sort of official sequel to Defense of the Ancients, a modification to Warcraft 3. The original DotA was itself inspired by a StarCraft mod, called Aeon of Strife. DotA's mysterious and anonymous developer, known only as IceFrog, was employed by Valve to work on what is, in essence, a brand new version of the same game. This time around, however, the game is a standalone, free-to-play title built using Valve's Source engine rather than as a mod to another game. The old mod is still being developed, but the two games are essentially being developed in parallel. Dota 2 looks an awful lot better, but DotA has a few extra heroes that are still awaiting their migration.

However, MOBAs turn RTS gameplay on its head. In a traditional RTS, you build a base, collect resources, build your army, and then attack. In a MOBA, there's no base building and no army. Instead of building, the bases are predefined—there's a large structure (the "ancient," in Dota 2 terminology) at the heart of your base, and a series of defensive towers along three different paths ("lanes") that join your base with the enemy's.

Instead of an army, you have heroes and creeps. Creeps are automated, computer-controlled units. They spawn every 30 seconds and march along the lanes from your base to the enemy. They fight any enemies they happen to meet along the way.

Heroes are where the player gets involved. Each side in Dota 2 has five heroes, picked from a pool of somewhere north of 100. Heroes have three attributes: strength, which governs the number of hitpoints and how fast they regenerate; intelligence, which governs the amount of mana you have and how fast it regenerates; and agility, which governs how fast you fire and how much armor you have.

Heroes can have short or long-range attacks and also have active or passive abilities that differentiate them from other players. Players can also buy items with in-game gold to get anything from regenerating health to unlocking faster movement to briefly turning enemy units into pigs.

Each individual game starts from scratch; abilities and items have to be earned through strong play in that very match. There are no persistent (non-cosmetic) unlocks or anything of that ilk; everyone in a game has the same selection of heroes available, the same set of abilities, and the same set of items. The only advantage that experienced players take into a game is their knowledge and expertise; their heroes work just the same as everyone else's.

It's also important to note that death isn't permanent in Dota 2. When your character dies, you lose some gold, your positioning, and up to 100 seconds of time while you wait for a respawn. This is precious time where your opponents continue to gain experience and gold for better abilities and items, though, so early deaths can really snowball into a worse position overall.

Heroes are broadly split into a number of nuanced classifications, but the major split is between "carry" heroes and "support" heroes. Carry heroes are pretty vulnerable early on, but they can carry their team late in the game if they get a chance to reach their higher levels and items. During the end game, these characters can lay down huge amounts of damage in a short space of time and often soak up a huge amount of damage too.

Support heroes are more powerful early on, but their usefulness tends to taper off as the game continues. They have abilities that can stun or slow enemies, making it easier for others to pile on the damage, and they can often heal allies or use magic-based attacks to score early kills.

In a typical 30- to 60-minute game, the first 10 to 15 minutes is spent predominantly in the lanes, accumulating XP and trying to get the last hits and bonus gold on enemy creeps. After that, there's a phase where support characters roam around trying to pick off enemy heroes while the carries build up their gold and buy their essential items. The final phase of a match is characterized by epic five-on-five team fights where the carries really get to show their worth, killing the other team and destroying their base.

The long road to mastery

Sounds relatively simple, right? So what makes it so hard to learn? The most significant challenge is probably in the diversity of the heroes. There are more than a hundred to choose from, and they all have differences past the obvious cosmetic ones (though the backstories and well-voice-acted personalities of each one are entertaining in their own right). While some abilities are found on several heroes—for example, there's more than one hero with a "silence" spell that prevents an enemy from casting abilities of their own—they are, for the most part, remarkably diverse and differentiated.

It takes a couple of games just to get the basic hang of a hero and his abilities, but mastering a hero—knowing both how and when to use his abilities and when and what items to get—can take dozens of games, especially for one of the more micro-management-intensive heroes. Different attack animations for each hero mean you'll have to practice the crucial timing to get that last, gold-producing hit on an enemy as well.

Beyond the hero differences, there's also a great deal of teamwork to learn. Certain heroes are particularly strong at initiating a fight. For example, Magnus the Magnetaur (imagine a centaur with the physique and head of a rhinoceros) can pull all the enemies in a radius around him together using his magnetic rhino horn, temporarily disabling them. This allows other heroes with area-of-effect abilities to attack effectively and to set up some big kills.

But pulling off this combo requires skill and timing. The Magnus player has to recognize the right opportunity and pull off a series of moves in quick succession. The rest of the team then has to spring into action to take advantage of Magnus' initiation at the right time.

Then there are more nuanced and less obvious quirks, like figuring out where to stand, knowing when you're vulnerable to being killed, knowing when it's safe to go in on the attack and when it isn't, and so on. The result is a game that's easy enough to learn, at least in a basic sense, but which takes a phenomenally long time to master.

Throughout the beta, this complexity has been Dota 2's biggest issue. It's a hard game to get in to, especially without a friend to show you the ropes. A bad player can ruin the game for the others on his team, and this leads to a certain amount of hostility. The match-making system is supposed to pit you against players of a comparable skill level, but there's only so much it can do.

In the last few weeks of the beta, Valve fleshed out a tutorial mode that leads players through the basics, first in some special tutorial maps, then through matches against bots through to matches against other humans. Just playing through the tutorial's five matches against bots and 10 against humans, you'll probably put in 8-10 hours alone. At that point, you'll have a good grounding in the game but still be left with plenty to learn.

But is it any good?

So is the game itself worth the aggravation and difficulty of learning its nuances? When I first started playing back in February, I wasn't convinced. I jumped in without knowing what was going on (there was no tutorial back then), but I was fortunate enough to immediately find some friendly players who could explain the basics of the game. I also picked Windrunner as my first hero; by chance, it turns out she's a good choice for new players.

For the first month or two, I wasn't really sure if I liked the game. That sounds a bit weird, and it is. On some level, I presumably must have enjoyed the game to even stick with it for months, but I was never completely enthused by it. I just found myself wanting to play one... more... game....

If that first experience had been worse—if I'd been matched against players who were less welcoming and more abusive—I might easily have turned my back on it and never played it beyond that first handful of matches. There is a system for reporting abusive players, and I get semi-regular notifications that people I've reported have been punished, which is good, but the environment can still be quite hostile.

Instead, however, I stuck with it and started to actively enjoy it. Finding a friendly crowd to play with was key to really getting excited by the gameplay. The mechanics of every game will be the same, but the range of heroes, items, and strategies makes for a tremendously varied, entertaining experience.

Not only do I enjoy playing Dota 2, I also enjoy watching it. It has a fledgling professional e-sport scene, with the third major Valve-sponsored tournament, The International 3, taking place this August. There are countless tutorials and videos online, with Purge's "Welcome to Dota: You suck" ranking as probably the best-known and widely used.

Is it actually a good game? I am still not entirely sure. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's endless frustration. Sometimes I have a game where it all comes together as it should, and it's fantastic. There are still plenty of things that surprise me, and still plenty of heroes that I'm completely useless with, even after hundreds of hours.

The competition

As the sort-of sequel to the original MOBA (see the lineage sidebar above) Dota 2 feels like the natural choice for players who want to get into the genre. However, it's certainly not the only one; Riot Games' free-to-play League of Legends, first released in 2009, has more players and a more developed e-sports scene than Dota 2 can currently boast. Which game is better is a matter for Internet flame wars. I haven't personally played League of Legends as I'm somewhat turned off by its more cartoonish graphical style and reports of a community that's even more hostile to newcomers than Dota 2's (though Riot is making efforts to fix this).

The basic concepts are the broadly the same, but the details differ. League of Legends, for example, lacks some DotA staples such as denying (killing injured, allied creeps to prevent enemies from getting their gold). It also doesn't provide immediate zero-cost access to all the heroes. Instead, you can play a rotating set of heroes for free or purchase permanent access to favored choices. On the other hand, it adds an extra dimension with persistent rewards, such that each game isn't started from a clean slate.

If you're willing to put in the time investment, either of these games (or other MOBAs like Heroes of Newerth) is worth picking up, especially for the price of "free." It's generally agreed that whichever MOBA you play first is the one you're going to prefer. Dota 2 is the first one I played, so it's clearly the best.

Verdict: Well, you can't actually buy it, because it's free to play. But you should definitely play it.

The Good

Deep, engaging gameplay.

Diverse cast of highly differentiated heroes.

Tidehunter and Kunkka trolling each other.

The Bad

Other players can be jerks.

There's a slim chance that League of Legends is better.

The Ugly

I have somehow spent more than 800 hours in this game since February, which is utterly insane.

Listing image by Valve