History of the DotA game: from Warcraft 3 to Valve

DotA 2 –team game genre Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA)

 

The history of the DotA game began with Warcraft 3 – an RTS developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Starting from the second part, a map editor appeared in the strategy, where players could be creative and independently create terrain for confrontations. And the creation of DotA itself was led by a network game on one of the maps called Defense of the Ancients.

 

 

The ancestor of DotA can be considered the Aeon of Strife map in StarCraft, developed by a player under the nickname Gunner_4_ever. According to his idea, on the map four heroes walked along four lines. And in front of them the infantry—creeps—was launched. When all the heroes died or all the key buildings were destroyed, the game ended. With the release of the third Warcraft, the map was transferred there by enthusiasts.

 

Based on the original, other players began to make mods, one of which was Defense of the Ancients, created by a certain Eul. When the sequel to Frozen Throne to Warcraft 3 was released, Eul released a new version of DotA 2: Thirst for Gamma in TFT, but the mod was not very popular with ordinary people. Frustrated, Eul opened the card code and never returned to creation.

 

At some point, two other players, Meian and Ragn0r, decided to put the existing work together, and, having selected the best, released a version called DotA Allstars on February 3, 2004. Their brainchild was completed by a mapmaker with the nickname Guinsoo, releasing the legendary version 5.84 and making it the most stable compared to the previous ones.

 

 

His friends from the TDA clan: Neichus and IceFrog came to help Guinsoo. Soon Guinsoo abandoned work on DotA and began developing another MOBA game League of Legends. Neichus and IceFrog continued the project started by Guinsoo. Initially, IceFrog was not interested and only Neichus was involved in the development. However, Neichus soon left the project after a couple of unpopular decisions among the players. It was then that IceFrog realized that he had found a goldmine, and began releasing version after version, balancing the balance and eliminating bugs.

 

Not without some unpleasant moments. Mapmaker True.Rus has released an optimized version, reducing the battle loading time to 20 seconds. Guinsoo used these developments in subsequent versions, but there were no mentions of True.Rus in the comments to the map.

 

The creators of the MyDotA project found themselves in the same situation. His goal was to optimize the code, add mods and other improvements. They tried to negotiate a collaboration with IceFrog, but he refused. However, within two weeks they released version 6.20 with innovations from MyDotA, and again without any mention of the authors. Soon the MyDotA project stopped developing additions to the game.

 

Dozens of people participated in the development of the map, but every time the map was loaded, the same “IceFrog presents” light was displayed.

 

After some time, IceFrog began working for Valve, which bought the rights to the trademark. The studio created its own version of the game with new graphics and interface. In August 2011, Valve presented its product in beta testing, which was marked by a large number of bugs. And although in July 2013 Valve finally announced about the final release of the game, the errors and shortcomings remained.

 

 

Valve tried by hook or by crook to get rid of the bad reputation of the first DotA part. After creating DotA 2, Gabe organized the first cyber championship, The International, with a prize fund of $1.6 million. 1 million was paid to the first place winner. So he hoped to attract the attention of professional teams. In 2014, the prize fund amounted to $11 million, $9.5 of which was collected through contributions from the “doters” themselves. The last championship collected a generally non-illusory amount of $17,774,558. So professional players simply had no choice, and they had to quit the original Dota and play DotA 2, which was bugged at that time.

 

Five reasons for players to switch from the first to the second DotA:

 

• the interface is simplified, and anyone can start playing, fortunately there is a clear training;
• you can play alone or connect as a whole team, after a crash you can reconnect to the game and pause the match;
• there is sorting by rating, which in theory makes it possible to select players with the appropriate level of play;
• you can make your life more difficult by enabling auto-attack, simplified ball-shaped icons instead of hero icons on the map, or the not-so-intuitive layout of the first Dota;
• On July 11, 2013, a version of the game was released for Linux.

 

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