inGame footage of various games. In the future I hope to add reviews. ^_^

Heroes of Newerth:


(That's an older youtube vid I found. I'm not allowed to publish new material from the beta.)


A beta-leak video review of HoN (German). Shows you much of the lobby interface and other features.

 

League of Legends:


Gametrailers preview of LoL.

 


An official trailer for LoL.


A video review of LoL (english). Not sure if leaked or sanctioned.

 

DotA (Defense of the Ancients)

 


Some DotA video. I honestly couldn't find ANY good gameplay video for Dota. Most vids are simply my-dick-is-BIG demonstrations accompanied by some shitty trash metal soundtrack or something bombastic (like, US-marine corp recruitment orchestrals or Carmina Burana). Sorry. If you can recommend a good DotA video I'll put it up.

 

 

Demigod:


Demigod showcase video featuring Lord Erebus.

Demigod showcase video featuring Queen of Thorns. Probably not office safe.

 

For those that don't know what HoN or LoL are: Both are DotA clones. If you don't know what DotA is then google it.

First HoN impressions:

  • Graphics
    Looks like Warcraft 3 (i.e. old, cheap, candy colored comic look). Seems much smoother, though. Less jerky scrolling. Any comparison to Demigod would be unfair. It's like comparing Superman to Batman - both are great in their environment but if you'd match them up against each other Superman would wipe the floor with Batmans ass from two cities away.
    Has a limited zoom (i.e. you can zoom in a bit and back, but not out) and a functional minimap.
  • Interface
    Just like DotA, i'd say. Bottom quarter of the screen is occupied by artwork, skills, hero stats and the minimap. I'd call it functional but totally ripped of from Warcraft (which isn't necessarily bad). Very small icons and text. Hard to read and the tooltips have much text. Demigod is downright minimalistic in comparison.
  • Heroes
    A large selection of heroes ... too many to grasp the gist of them in the short time I played it. Not all heroes were implemented yet but it looks like they planned for a 60 heroes cast. Each hero seems to have four different skills you can improve as you gain levels, plus the ability to simply improve your attributes. The skills are either passive or active and have a cooldown timer similar to DG. But since some heroes can have several passive skills out of a set of four, that can mean that you are left with a meager single one active skill, like the tosser I picked (Magebane or something). Kinda like Oooze UB without foul grasp.
    However the skills some heroes have do things that are not seen in Demigod. Some manipulate the map (by planting obstacles(walls) and some move the enemy against their will. Some passive skills trigger a damage effect everytime you use an active skill.
  • Maps
    Think Warcraft again. Mazes with trees and rocks marking the boundary. Or think Demigod maps with boring graphics. They ain't really that different from the DG mazes ... just more "realistic" and much larger.
  • Players
    Lot's of open games in the lobby. Some fairly large ones, too (I think 5v5 is max). If you've played DotA before then you'll have no problems finding friends. If you only played Demigod before, then you'll think the HoN community is a bag of arseholes because you'll likely be taking your first stumbling steps with dota veterant that are not exactly renowned for their forgiving attitude towards noobs. Luckily there's a fuck-filter in the chat.
  • Economy
    Killing stuff earns you XP and gold. You can buy equipment in shops. No base building, but your base starts with several buildings that don't offer any interaction, though. Creeps spawn in certain buildings and run on lanes to the enemy base, which should sound familiar.
  • Death & Dying
    You get automatically resurrected after some time. You can, however, shorten the wait time by paying a moderate amount of gold, which is actually an interesting feature. Similar to DG, there's a Healing Crystal equivalent, something that had to be pointed out to me in the Demigod forum (thanks, dude).
  • Gameplay
    Weeeeeeeeell .... I sucked in my first game and got promptly verbaly punished for being a noob. This doesn't help endear you to the game, so my perceptions may be flawed. But my first impression was: I can't zoom out (I swear, after playing Demigod I think it's impossible to enjoy RTS games without a God-Eye-Zoom)!
    In addition to the fixed camera height you have a considerably larger map and a faster movement speed than experienced in Demigod and you can't help feeling confused and disoriented. The creeps are stronger in comparison to DG creeps (but then those puny heroes are no half-gods). There is no health crystal. I think the only way to heal up is to buy potions. At least you can buy more than three per slot.
    The game is fast paced but not so fast that you'll experience instant death right from the start. You'll have plenty of time to decide that a battle is a lost cause and run for the towers.
    And your job? Easy, kill and destroy. No flags, no warscore (although there are other gamemodes that might have something similar). The only thing you can do is find creeps or heroes and kill them. And find enemy buildings and destroy them. That's it.
  • Game Modes
    There are only custom games. No skirmish or pantheon. No single player mode and (currently) no bots to solo against. Many possible options to setup a custom game. And the features the lobby offers are something to be seen. Feels like a database browser (i.e. comfortable and powerful).
  • Replays
    They work. Take that, Demigod!
  • Community
    It's a new game so you'd expect the community to be new also. But it's not. It's mostly DotA veterans that got a bit frustrated with the aged Warcraft 3 engine and wanted something, er, newish. Someone in the HoN forums summed it up pretty much: "I'm actually pretty surprised by this community. So far it's been very hard to find nice people. Most players - particularly those with Dota experience are incredibly rude to all players."
    The Demigod community certainly has it's share of unfriendlies, but as a whole it's quite amiable. Maybe this will change with the rise of competetive play.

Bottom line: Graphically it's definetly a step down when compared to Demigod. But noticably better than DotA. It's really really running smooooooothly. If you consider the small DG roster Demigod's biggest drawback, then HoN might seem attractive. The complexity and detail of each hero is lower than that of any one Demigod. It's also extremely beginner unfriendly. And even though Demigod didn't have any kind of tutorial either, you grasp the gist of DG way faster than that of HoN. HoN is clearly aimed at DotA players. It looks so similar to DotA that fanboys might as well stay there.

It's still in beta so many things will change. The strongest point of HoN is it's large hero rooster. Apart from that I don't think the Demigod has much to fear.

But since it's an early test phase, I'll certainly give it another try. I can endure the "F*CKING _NOOB" for a time, hehehehe.

 


Comments (Page 13)
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on Aug 14, 2009

AFAIK Practice == Learning, there is no difference.

on Aug 14, 2009

AFAIK Practice == Learning, there is no difference.

Perhaps I'm just playing with semantics, but learning and practice ARE two different things.

You can learn a game's rules quickly, but require practice to master. A good game is often easy to learn, and requres lots of fun practice to master.

Learning is picking up the knowledge required to play, practice will allow the player to apply said knowledge with better judgement.

on Aug 15, 2009

I'd have to agree with Daemon on this one. Again using the SSBM example, I can teach someone to play it in under 5 minutes. They can now have fun with the game and understand all the basics of it.

4 years of play later, they might hit professional level

on Aug 15, 2009

twifightDG
I agree. Being hard to master and having a steep learning curve are not the same thing.

I don't really thing online shooters are comparable. They require only one thing: practice. Practice your aim and the map. On pubs (important addition) the people that played the longest usually were the best, there was no real skill required (only if you went pro). In games like Demigod however you need to learn the game; how do you counter each demigod the best? What do spell animations look like? What items will help me best in this situation, etc. It has a learning curve. Yes, practice still is important, but also knowledge and insight into the game. And this is where the learning curve comes in. There's a difference between knowing the game 1 month and sucking, knowing it 3 months and fair pretty well, and knowing it 6 months and being skilled, as opposed to knowing it 1 month and sucking, knowing it 3 months and sucking, knowing it 6 months and sucking and then finally fair well enough to play the pros.

So the only difference between you and a pro football player is that they practice a lot more often? Avid players of such onlie shooters like quake or unreal do claim that it takes skill to master those games.  Yes, you get better with practice, but they say that there's too a skill component that you have to develop in order to be a good player.  Similar situation with fighting games.  It's easy to dismiss most of them as button-mashing competitions, but there is a level of skill needed which is not determined by the amount of hours put into the day on a daily basis.

on Aug 15, 2009

Just to clarify, learning is the acqusition of new knowledge while practice is the refinement of pre-exisiting knowledge through repetition. There is definatly some overlap, however, as while practicing you may discover something new, however this is usually accidental as if you're looking for something new, you're not practicing.

on Aug 15, 2009

Oh great. So now how are we going to define skill?

In a few years we might have all the definitions we need to collectively make a sentence.

on Aug 15, 2009

Skill, in terms of a video game, is one's perceived level of competency at whichever video game is the subject of the discussion at hand. 'Skill' at a game, such as a fighting game, is actually several skills used in unison - such as pattern recognition coupled with behavioural anticipation to determine which combo you're opponent is working on starting and where and when is best to counter it.
I don't have 'skill' at any video game, I simply have many skills which allow me to perform well at the video games I play.

on Aug 15, 2009

zndkwin

So the only difference between you and a pro football player is that they practice a lot more often? Avid players of such onlie shooters like quake or unreal do claim that it takes skill to master those games.  Yes, you get better with practice, but they say that there's too a skill component that you have to develop in order to be a good player.  Similar situation with fighting games.  It's easy to dismiss most of them as button-mashing competitions, but there is a level of skill needed which is not determined by the amount of hours put into the day on a daily basis.

You obviously failed to read one of my sentenses. I'll quote it again for you.

On pubs (important addition) the people that played the longest usually were the best, there was no real skill required (only if you went pro).

Notice the words in ()? Yes, if you go pro you need skill, and also some talent. I'm not downtalking on pros here, I'm downtalking on the people in pubs here. They don't win because they have the skill, they win because they had more practice. Note that pros rarely play on pubs. They play tournaments and on their own private server, for clan matches.

But that wasn't my point, my point is that those games need very little to learn, and very much to practice..

And my second point is that HoN/DOTA needs a lot to learn and you can only be good if you've learned it all, which is no fun for new players.

/rejoin above discussion

on Aug 15, 2009

Misfortune

I think only experienced warcraft 3-based DotA players can really get into it at this point.
And yet, last night there were almost 14.000 people online and 250+ open games.  I think HoN is already one of the most massive online strategy games!

I remember the days when competative meant good - all the best multiplayer games of age were very unfriendly to noobs.  Quake, Unreal, Warcraft, Starcraft.  They even had "glitches" that were intentionaly beeing perfected by the devs to enable hard to do powerful moves (think bunny-hopping in Quake).  Seems we have gotten lazy and instead of bettering ourselves thru practice, we're asking the game devs to cover our incompetence.

Anyway, HoN has it's downfalls too - the limited view being the one that bothers me the most.  I just hate artificial limitations like that that are introduced to promote a skill at the game (map awareness).  Last hitting and denial can also be tedious sometimes, though I must say I'm still impartial about that mechanic - it does good as much as it does bad (LoL devs have commented that they also consider last hitting a tedium so they are looking into a median solution).

However, as was previously posted - HoN just works.  And it works perfectly well with a slew of online features (with Mac OS X version being a huge bonus for me too).  Compared to the frustrations of getting a decent game going in Demigod, I just can't make myself come back to it.  At the end, I like Demigod's gameplay and setting a bit better, but the online experience havily pulls me towards HoN.

 

 

You forget the game is free. And in the most open closed beta ever.

on Aug 16, 2009

Polynomial

Quoting Misfortune, reply 177
I think only experienced warcraft 3-based DotA players can really get into it at this point.
And yet, last night there were almost 14.000 people online and 250+ open games.  I think HoN is already one of the most massive online strategy games!

I remember the days when competative meant good - all the best multiplayer games of age were very unfriendly to noobs.  Quake, Unreal, Warcraft, Starcraft.  They even had "glitches" that were intentionaly beeing perfected by the devs to enable hard to do powerful moves (think bunny-hopping in Quake).  Seems we have gotten lazy and instead of bettering ourselves thru practice, we're asking the game devs to cover our incompetence.

Anyway, HoN has it's downfalls too - the limited view being the one that bothers me the most.  I just hate artificial limitations like that that are introduced to promote a skill at the game (map awareness).  Last hitting and denial can also be tedious sometimes, though I must say I'm still impartial about that mechanic - it does good as much as it does bad (LoL devs have commented that they also consider last hitting a tedium so they are looking into a median solution).

However, as was previously posted - HoN just works.  And it works perfectly well with a slew of online features (with Mac OS X version being a huge bonus for me too).  Compared to the frustrations of getting a decent game going in Demigod, I just can't make myself come back to it.  At the end, I like Demigod's gameplay and setting a bit better, but the online experience havily pulls me towards HoN.

 
 

You forget the game is free. And in the most open closed beta ever.

HoN's going to cost money when released afaik.

As for the most open closed beta ever - Yeah, pretty much. Speaking of which I have 11 unused beta invites if anyone wants one. <<

on Aug 16, 2009

Ah. I meant the game is basically free now. So yeah, its going to have a lot of people. Its going to cost money when it retails.

on Aug 16, 2009

I wonder if the improvements of HoN over DotA are worth it in the minds of the beta testers. As far as I heard, the bulk of the improvements and changes are in the lobby - the matchmaking system. 

This sounds ... underwhelming.

 

on Aug 16, 2009

How exactly are they planning on selling HoN, out of curiosity? I know LoL wants to use micropayments, which means I'll never touch the accursed thing.

on Aug 16, 2009

I think there was a poll on it and the most favourable choice was a one time payment deal, I believe.

on Aug 17, 2009

Mmm. Then I'll have to decide between TF2, L4D2, or HoN as my game of choice to play with my brother. Kinda leaning toward L4D2 if his system can handle it. Sorry HoN.

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