One
of the most widely
recognized player created mods in the history of
the RTS genre is Defense of
the Ancients, or DotA for
short. Created as
a mod for Warcraft III multiplayer, one of the reasons it caught on
like wildfire amongst players is the fact that it cuts out most of the
redundancy of gathering supplies to create more workers to gather more
supplies to build a better base as the starting point for most
multiplayer matches. While the strategic choices players make
during these crucial phases are at the core of RTS gameplay, sometimes
it’s just nice to dive directly into combat without all the
fuss of resource management and base building.
Another defining element of
DotA is the idea that players control
individual heroes, each with unique skills they bring to the table,
while the rank and file combatants are completely AI driven units
called “creeps”. Defeating these units loosely
becomes the game’s take on resource gathering, as the
experience and gold
obtained for doing so is then used
to purchase skills and temporary upgrades.
Over the course of the last
year, we’ve seen two highly
popular iterations of the DotA style of gameplay emerge. However, while
both League of Legends
(LoL) and Heroes of Newerth
(HoN) are certainly
worthy spiritual successors to the legendary DotA, they also feel
slightly dated due to a number of reasons, perhaps the most prominent
among them being that neither title has really taken the core concept
of DotA and expanded upon it enough to be considered a wholly unique
experience.
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Enter the Land of Chaos
Much like the RTS genre that
DotA and its various imitators were born
from, that style of play inevitably begins to feel a bit too
repetitive. It’s kind of like capture the flag: no matter how
many different versions of the map you play it on, the objective is
always the same which can get a bit dull over time. I also believe that
top-down isometric cameras in this type of game ultimately dates them a
bit too much, especially when objects and characters on screen are all
rendered in 3D.
Enter
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/2693">Land
of Chaos Online
(LOCO), one of the new titles we had the
opportunity to check out this week at
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/events/gamescom/2010">gamescom
2010. Developed
by Danal
Entertainment over the past three years, on the surface LOCO may appear
to simply be another attempt at capitalizing on the success of DotA
style gameplay, but as we learned this week it’s also taken a
fairly divergent path in a number of key areas.
Perhaps the most significant of
these is the fact that LOCO is played
much more like a standard third person MMOG, using a WASD
key
movement and mouse camera and attack control setup. While this may
sound like a
small change, it’s also one that can truly
change the way you
play this style of game. Not only does it give you a much stronger
visual
connection to the heroes you control during a match, but it also tends
to make the combat far more compelling. In other words, it feels like
playing a character in an RPG rather than the unseen overlord pulling
the battlefield strings from above the treetops.
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Currently LOCO has 12 different
heroes to choose from, with plenty of
others in the works. While we didn’t get any hands-on time
with the game at the show, we did get to see one of the melee heroes,
Stella, in action. From what we saw of Land
of Chaos Online so far the
game looks to bring plenty of unique touches to the DotA formula yet
should appeal to the same type of gamer that made the original mod such
a success in the first place.
Below, we have not just one,
but two trailers for LOCO for your viewing
enjoyment. For more details on the game or to get your hands on the
open beta, be sure to head on over to the official site!
[video]http://video.tentonhammer.com/Misc/loco-gamescom-trailer-1.FLV[/video]
[video]http://video.tentonhammer.com/Misc/loco-gamescom-trailer-2.FLV[/video]
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Land of Chaos Online Game Page.
