Well, now that The International 2013 is over (and my 2 favorite teams claimed 2nd and 1st place, respectively), my time sink has abated, and I'm able to return to wasting as much time as I please on any games that I want. Aside from the same 3 titles that I've mentioned twice now in the past couple of weeks, a friend also bought me a PS3 copy of
Borderlands 2 for my birthday recently, but I haven't really ever felt the desire to play it. Honestly, and I've told him many times, I wasn't interested in the series. I heard a lot of good about it, but it never really called out to me. The most it ever did that got me intrigued were the words "Vault Hunter" (or whatever they were) which immediately reminded me of
Fallout, but I still knew that was only a knee-jerk reaction to a word, not that the games would actually BE like my beloved
Fallout. So, for now, it's sitting unused, but it was a gift from a friend, so I don't wanna be ungrateful and never play it. Anyone who HAS played it care to give some kind of synopsis of their accounts of the game to encourage me to trying it out? I can't seem to summon the bother to try it, as of yet. =/
Ausdoerrt said:
Wouldn't compare it to TF, as TF2 is different enough gameplay-wise from the long-forgotten original mod.
Ilosar said:
Yeah, TF2 changed a lot of things.
That strikes me as splitting hairs, more than anything else. TF2 was still the same core game, and the changes were very drawn-out evolutions. I find it to be EXACTLY the same as DotA and DtoA2. There are "differences" between the 2 games, but I would still call them the same game underneath the exterior. To draw a more apparent contrast with another example, let's look at FO1 versus FO2, and then look at ANY of the original trilogy compared to FO3. If you just played the games, FO2 would strike you as "the same game" as FO1. New characters, new story, new weapons, sure, but the same game at the core. No wild and drastic changes to the gameplay, and if you didn't know that the game engine was actually quite different, the similarities would fool you into thinking there hadn't been any changes at all. But compared to FO3? Now THAT'S a completely different game.
While still the same core game, DotA2 has plenty of new things absent from DotA. A built-in tutorial that acts as both an anti-smurfing buffer as well as a beginner's guide to the game, creatively styled as a single-player campaign (albeit, a brief one). Custom match variants, especially Event game modes, which act as a free reward to the players more than anything else (I, for one, am eagerly awaiting the Halloween Diretide event to return, this year). Many key mechanical interactions and restrictions are lifted in the game thanks to the engine, such as Rubick's Spell Steal limitations. The list goes on. But unlike HoN, which decided to make the same core game with a completely different hero roster and item pool, or LoL which abandoned almost everything from the original mode in favor of new ideas, DotA2 offers a newer experience, more than just being "prettier", while still being the same core game. And that's no different than the other times Valve has done the same. Only this time, it's a F2P game.
Ilosar said:
I just would have liked the game more and played it if they has fixed some stuff I personally find annoying.
But why should they do that? It's not "fixing" if it isn't broken, and it isn't broken just because you don't like it. When
Starcraft took off in Korea, Koreans utilized Terran flying structures in ways NO ONE had ever conceived of, so that when I matched up against them, I cried "CHEATER!!!!" at the sight of uplifted Engineering Bays floating above my base, distracting my turrets from their dropships, and preventing me from easily microing my units to attack their ground forces they "hid" beneath the larger targets. I hated that, and I honestly believed it to be cheating at the time, but really I was just not versed enough at the game to really compete against it. It didn't require "fixing", I was just bad. That was an ingenious player-derived strategy that wasn't intended by the game developers, but allowed to continue, because it wasn't inherently "broken".
I was also going to respond to the "Nitpicks" of
Divinity; Dragon Commander, but having not so much as heard of the game, let alone played it, I can really only take your word on it. =|
