14 DAY TRIAL // Speaking to Joystiq, Samwise Didier, who is the senior art director working on the Blizzard DOTA project, has said, “This is our Blizzard fighter. We can’t make a Street Fighter style game right now, so this is our Blizzard fighter. The Blizzard All-stars, is what I like to call it.”
Indicating that he was taking a humorous approach to how a development decision is being made Didier added, “All of that great artwork and stuff that we built made a whole new genre, and Blizzard loved it so much that we wanted to make ours too.”
The developer says that Blizzard has a history of taking existing genre and the games that the teams love in order to further develop them, saying that the original Warcraft was driven by a love of Dune 2, one of the original strategy games, while the inspiration for World of Warcraft came from a love of Everquest.
The Blizzard made DOTA will not be the same game as the Defense of the Ancients game that Valve is developing and it also aims to differentiate itself from others titles that use the same mechanics, like League of Legends.
Didier says that his team has eliminated a lot of the high level gameplay, which required extensive knowledge from the player base and made long term players very hard to beat, and has focused on creating a solid and fun experience.
The Blizzard DOTA project is strongly associated with the new Arcade initiative from Blizzard, which replaces the Marketplace and will also allow modders to get money from selling their content.
It will be launched at the same time as the Heart of the Swarm expansion for Starcraft II, which is expected next summer.
DOTA does not have a launch date but will probably arrive after the similar game from Valve.