A Comparison Between Two Video Games That Have Fueled the Imagination of Several Generations of Gamers
Warcraft is old already. Twenty-two years have passed since Blizzard published Orcs and humans, the first title of the saga. In 1997 a friend told me about a game where you could collect resources on a map, build cities and train armies to defeat your enemies. All in a world of dragons, magic, goblins, elves, and Knights, to Lord Of The Rings. Fourteen 3½ diskettes and three bicycle trips to The Hill later he was already playing Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal. I had experienced Dune 2 a few years before, but this had no comparison and fell in love.
Warcraft’s first titles were real-time strategy games (RTS), a kind of chess without the courtesy of waiting for the opponent to move a chip. The speed with the mouse, simultaneous thinking, and the ability to control many different units at once made the difference. The strategy was important, but more the tactic.
2004 would be a year of change. World of Warcraft and DotA Allstars, both related in their way to this saga, would revolutionize the world of video games. To understand the atmosphere a little, it would be necessary to go back to 2002. The fans of this saga have been waiting a long time for a new title. Blizzard deferred, for what seemed centuries, the release of Warcraft III. Even though we were entertaining –and how – Starcraft: Brood War, many of us missed an RTS of epic fantasy.
When in 2002 appears to Reign of Chaos, I expected a game that does not differentiate a lot of Warcraft II and Starcraft, the previous titles of Blizzard, but I took a great disappointment. A game completely in 3D, with graphics that were frail and very polygonal, elves who did not seem to elves, a plot that is one remove from the actual of the common scenarios of bad-good-bad and good-very-good high-fantasy and, above all, a system of upkeep that it was suicidal to employ large armies, and that took away a big part of the vibe epic that had the saga. The upkeep made the player lose some of the gold collected depending on the number of units he had.
The mass of the troops had been replaced by the” heroes”, special units that were improving from their combat experience. At the end of the game, they were able to defeat, single-handed, large numbers of troops from the normality.
Despite these shortcomings, a part of the development team had worked perfectly: the stage managers. The Warcraft III maps were beautifully designed, with details of stunning beauty and a 3D relief system far superior to anything seen before. The scenario editor was also very powerful compared to its predecessors, allowing players to create amazingly personalized maps, which diverged drastically from the original game.
Defense of the Ancients (DotA) was one of the custom maps created with the Warcraft III scenario editor. We all know this story that it is based on a Starcraft map and how Guinsoo left it for the acclaimed DotA Allstars. This new game-within-of-another-game used the idea of heroes but removed the filling of armies of common units and the need to build bases and collect resources. Each player controlled only a very powerful unit, which gained experience and gold throughout each game and bought items to become even more powerful.
We were no longer talking about a real-time strategy game, but about something new. The genre, with the appearance of the League of Legends (LOL), would come to be called Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or MOBA if you prefer the acronym. But Blizzard was not idly. They also worked in unison on a title that would change history forever: WoW.
World of Warcraft (WoW) broke with tradition, made us fans of the RTS play a Massive Role-playing Game for the first time, it came to have over 10 million subscribers and made him run a lot of gold (not only virtual) to the coffers of Blizzard. WoW, and DotA would become very strong in the esports and eclipsed the preponderance that one-day Starcraft had. But what differentiates them from each other? And, above all, a question that every competitive player always asks, Which one of us is harder?
The comparison between WoW and DotA is unfair. They are games of two different genres, although with elements in common. WoW is much more ambitious in its approach; it aims to recreate an alternative virtual world, with a history rich in nuances and ample spaces in which a player must spend a lot of time leveling its character to make it competitive.
There are two main forms of combat: Player vs Environment (PvE) and Player vs Player (PvP). In the first, the gamers fight against computer-generated monsters (MOBs) that can range from the classic Wild Boar to an all-powerful dragon that iniquity requires a raid of 40 players very well coordinated with each other. In the second, players compete against other players on various stages. Although the same characters and skills are used, both styles of play are very different. PvP is the aggressive style practiced as eSport and is more difficult to master than PvE. That’s why it’s the part of the game that we’ll somehow compare with DotA.