Unmissable Mods Month: Defence of the Ancients

Heroes – that’s what DotA is secretely about.  Hundreds upon hundreds of heroes, or perhaps more importantly, just one hero.  Yours.  There are a myriad of multifaceted legendary characters to chose from, but one, which you’ll have slaughtered hundreds of innocents little monsters with, levelled to ridiculous degrees of power and outfitted with the bestest magical bling and paraphernalia money can buy, is yours.  And he is awesome.

I could tell you about how DotA works, but if you’re reading this, I’m clinging to the hope that you’ve played either this great grandaddy, or one of it’s many bastard children – League of Legends, Demigod, or Heroes of Newerth to name but a few.  And you’ll know it’s a slightly terrifying mix of a treacherously thin slice of simplicity, on a multi-layered hive of item combining madness.

At heart, there’s nothing complicated about DotA.  You pick a hero – probably based on which has the coolest hairstyle, if you’re half as clueless as me – and then you murder creeps.  Many creeps.  They’ll come at you without a semblance of intelligent thought, simply trudging down on predetermined pathways, like muted automatons, and  you’ll crush them like the pitiful fools  they are – and hopefully, they’ll give you enough gold and experience for you to deal with the actual enemy players when they show their ugly mugs.

With that money and experience, you’ll build your hero – and with god knows how many heroes to pick from, and a dragon’s den of items to choose, you can be pretty sure that your hero will be your hero. Then he can go kill creeps again.

Enchantingly simple, but stratospherically vast, it’s not entirely surprising that DotA is as ridiculously popular as it is – it’s one of the rare mods, with Counter-Strike, that’s managed to take the world by storm, for casual and hardcore gamers alike.  Online, its community of over-zealous noob hating madmen will crush your soul, but if you’ve got a couple of friends, some spare time, and a few copies of Warcraft 3, then you could do a hell of a lot worse then boot-up DotA.  Just try to not forget to, you know, stop.  Eating and drinking and all that jazz – you might just forget if you’re in the middle of a game of DotA.

Why is it on our list?

It’s DotA.  Seriously. Stop asking ridiculous questions.

Get if from?

Ironically, GetDota.com

Easy to install?

It’s a Warcraft 3 map – just drop in in the /maps folder in your Warcraft 3 directory.

Is there a song based on this game?

Funny you should ask that incredibly convenient question!  Of course, and I’ve included it here for your convenience, and my scary love of bad techno.