History of Dota Part 1: The Birth of the Ancestor of All MOBAs!
The history of Dota begins with the birth of a real time strategy game called Starcraft made by Blizzard. This game is very popular because it manages to have a real time element to the strategy genre game, instead of playing in turns like chess.
In short, Starcraft itself tells the story of the battle of three nations in outer space, namely the Protos, Terran, and Zerg. The competitive levels and exciting mechanics from Starcraft immediately appeared and successfully captivated many people. Unfortunately, Starcraft is not very friendly for new players because of the complexity of the game it has dota2 navigation.
As a solution, Blizzard adds a World Editor so players can play various custom games made with the Starcraft engine as a base. As a result, for more or less yr. 2000, a custom game made by Aeon 64 named Aeon of Strife was born.
Aeon of Strife, a custom game from Starcraft, was then the main plan for Eul’s creation of Dota. AoS has more than one element used by modern MOBA meanwhile namely the presence of three lanes, the player controls one strong hero, and the presence of items to increase the strength of the heroes played by the players. Although very innovative, AoS was not very popular in its time.
The presence of Warcraft: Reign of Chaos (ROC) in 2002 became a new chapter in the history of Dota. Just like Starcraft, ROC is a real time strategy game with better graphics and control mechanics that are simpler and easier for many players to understand. What’s also interesting, ROC is equipped with a World Editor like Starcraft. The presence of this World Editor makes custom map makers to experiment with creating various interesting games with Warcraft ROC as the base.
The history of Dota enters an important chapter with the arrival of Eul, who is trying to develop a game using the ROC World Editor and has a game plan like AoS. The next custom game he called Defense of the Ancient, which was later shortened to DotA. Eul’s Dota is very innovative because it manages to have an element of refinement from AoS, and is even still in use today!
First is the introduction of the level of the hero being played, so that it is easier to improve hero abilities by keeping track of levels. The second is the presence of neutral creeps which give additional gold and experience effects. Likewise the presence of respawn time which can provide additional benefits while one team manages to kill the opposing hero. As the title suggests, the purpose of Dota is indeed to destroy the opponent’s Ancient, but the complexity of the game presented by Eul is like killing an opponent’s hero, and tracking levels and also excess gold makes Eul’s Dota very popular at its time.