Trying out MOBA games

by Gabriel Visagie Wednesday, August 05, 2015 1 comments Gaming New

Today a friend dared me to try out League of Legends. I decided to take him up on it and played a few tutorial levels. It seemed fun and very different from DotA (which I am well familiar with). I decided to quickly look up other similar games and perhaps try them out.

At the moment I have Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends and DotA 2 installed on my Qosmio laptop. I will of course not play them all (as I do still  have a life offline), but I think I'd like to get serious about one of them for a while. So I thought I'd share my views on the games so far in this post.

The history of things (kinda)

First of all, these games are considered MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) games. The term is pretty self-explanatory. Back in the day, there was a game called Warcraft III. Some guy with a frog name came along and created a mod for Warcraft III that was called Defense of the Ancients (DotA). A lot of people noticed the popularity of DotA (including the guys who made Warcraft III) and started making their own versions. Now we as the players have a few options, which is quite good for us. 

LoL versus DotA 2 versus HotS

I could write a lot about these games and maybe even publish a few books on the topic, but frankly there is no winner between these three games. Each of them has some unique features that makes them fun. I'll quickly summarize what I have noticed so far.

League of Legends

• Nice toony graphics, okay-ish sound effects  
• Many different characters (100+)
• Many competitive players
• Weekly rotation of 10 free heroes

DotA 2

• Great graphics and sound
• Many different characters (100+)
• Many competitive players
• All heroes are free
• Much of the original DotA awesomeness

Heroes of the Storm

• Nice graphics and sound
• Epic Blizzard universe (a lot of characters that are well-known)
• A few different characters (38)
• Teams share XP
• No gold or items to buy in-game
• Weekly rotation of 7 free heroes

I will now play each of these games for a few hours and choose one to continue with for a while.