HoN and teh hardcore design.
Posted by L4G | Filed under Featured, Thoughts
Where to start.. Over the past year I haven’t been surprised while watching the steady exodus from HoN towards LoL. Even with this in mind though, I was genuinely shocked by this recent HoN Newsletter detailing their planned Casual Mode. For a game and audience that has for so long touted its “hardcore” image, this surprised me..
First off, I have little sympathy for the results of HoN’s core design choices. Someone somewhere made a decision to copy DOTA and not improve on it. It’s done now. No-one who played DOTA should be surprised by its struggling design. If you simply copy DOTA, you copy all the good AND the bad stuff.. I said this over 1 year ago now. I can’t help but see most of these planned changes as being directly lifted from LoL. That’s not to say that LoL necessarily came across all of its ideas first either (although I think it did for many). Mario didn’t sue Sonic for having “jumping” in his game. But Sonic never spent ages with his head in the sand pretending that jumping wasn’t needed for his game to be more fun. Anyway, let’s look at some of the changes HoN is trying.
Denies in Casual Mode do not deny experience.
Are fans gonna whinge now about it not being “hardcore” enough? Of course. To be honest, I think many DOTA players (who eventually translated to HoN) mistook the context of denying being “hardcore” in the first place. Forced micro at periodic intervals shouldn’t be a “game defining” necessity. What if we all played Tetris and everyone had to press the START button every 10 seconds otherwise you’d lose? I wouldn’t ever win by pressing START, someone would lose by not! That’s ridiculous. If everyone is going to need to deny, just make no-one need to deny.
Assists give significant gold rewards… …support heroes will be able to get items as we look to reward those who enable their allies to own.
Premade 5v5′s are another story, but in PUG solo queues, it is rare to find selfless players. A game like DOTA which attracts literal wannabe “heroes” was in long need of an incentive mechanic for the support and tank roles. This is good.
No gold loss on death.
Less snow-balling is a good thing. Again, encouragement for more selfless team-play is only a good thing.
The doc also makes a point of mentioning at every opportunity that the new mode is for the benefit of “lowering the barrier of entry to new players” and noobs.
Casual Mode should be a different mode, not a different game, and that it should be quick, easy to pick up for new players…
As though successfully recreating the environment of LoL wouldn’t make it a better game than their Normal Mode anyway for ALL players, not just the noobs.
And finally, to “teh h4rdc0re”. HoN and its player base have long reveled in flying the banner of being “hardcore”. That denying creeps and gold loss on death represented a game the true hardcore players wanted, and not that “casual” LoL crowd. I must have missed parts of the recent Season One Championship at Dreamhack 2011 where LoL featured with their $100,000 prize pool. Or the ESL Intel Extreme Masters earlier this year where I saw Starcraft II, Quake & Counter-Strike there alongside LoL. Those 4 games are a truly definitive list of representatives for online gaming. The boiled down essence of online PC gaming in their current incarnations.
So even before HoN was bringing their “casual mode” cake to the table, I saw LoL posting a better recipe for “teh h4rdc0re” to battle with on a world stage. Now HoN is folding to what it calls “the casual”. Can they still carry on calling themselves “hardcore” now?
It will serve to be something far more than just a platform on which new players learn the great game that is Heroes of Newerth…
You’re probably right. It will become better than the Normal “DOTA” Mode. This new Casual “LoL” Mode sounds much better.
Or I could just go and play LoL right now… ^^;