Heroes Of Newerth
Heroes of Newerth is in the late stages of 'open beta' and ripe for review. It's a tower defence game along the lines of classic Warcraft 3 mod Defence of the Ancients, and the ultra-popular game mode has a clear and far-reaching influence on Newerth. It's also enormously popular, with over a million people having signed up to the beta, brimming server populations and 50,000 people online at any one time. Even before its official release, Heroes of Newerth has become one of the great, unnoticed communities of the PC gaming world.
Just as in any other tower defence design, there are towers and creeps – the mobs of beasties that march in waves across each map – but you don't place towers here. Instead, you take the mantle of one of 62 fantasy heroes, and fight both creeps and other players. This takes place between two teams of one-vs-one through to five-vs-five server populations, and I suppose you could argue that the game is something like 'real-time tactics', since the only things you really manage are your hero and your coordination with other players on the same team.
Heroes of Newerth is a popular multiplayer online battle arena game released in 2010 by videogame developer S2 Games. It is inspired by the Warcraft 3 game mod Defense of the Ancients and can be played on computers powered by Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
All this, of course, will be familiar to players of both Defence of the Ancients and the more recent Gas Powered Games take on the concept, Demigod. I come to the game with plenty of time with Demigod and no experience of Defence of the Ancients, something that clearly puts me – and any other beginner – at a bit of a disadvantage from the start.
Key facts about Heroes of Newerth
Heroes of Newerth features heroes that are very similar to the ones available in DotA, with different abilities and features.
Individual skill is more important in this game than in any other multiplayer online battle arena videogame, including League of Legends.
Heroes of Newerth is also played on three distinct lanes and the impact of what happens on these lanes is significant.
The game is balanced and has an impressive roster of heroes that relies on team play, but not as much as Heroes of the Storm.
Heroes of Newerth appeals mostly to those who don’t have a regular team and play alone, as it has a superior matchmaking system.
Ready and waiting
Terminology, mechanics and community have all been borrowed from Defence of the Ancients, and wrapping your head around the nuances of Heroes of Newerth is far easier if you already have some familiarity with the mod that inspired it. S2 make no bones about it either; this game is very much designed to replace Defence of the Ancients and modernise it for the same dedicated community.
This approach comes with an inherent bonus for the game's developers: there's already a huge, enthusiastic group of players ready and set to fill their game. Defence of the Ancients had created such a large community that a mature offering, without the catastrophic server issues that Demigod faced on launch, has immediately created a superb environment for what is essentially an indie multiplayer title. Often, such titles fail to gain the necessary inertia to pull in a community big enough to sustain themselves. No such problem here, because refreshing the game browser pulls up hundreds of games at any time of day. There are always people to play against. It's also at this point that the problems for a beginner might start.
By the time you hit an online game, you'll already have played the tutorial, which will have explained the core concepts behind levelling up your hero and making them effective on the field. There are two variables to worry about: gold and experience. You get experience by killing creeps – which are released from the bases of both teams with increasing abundance as the game progresses, or can be found on the neutral woodland core of the map – and other heroes. You also get a regular payment of gold. However, to get it in the amounts you need, you have to master 'last hitting', which means getting the killing blow on a creep. This is one of those awkward skills a game requires you to perfect without really explaining why. It's probably the first clue you'll get as to Heroes of Newerth's high skill requirements.
The Heroes of Newerth games
The similarities between Heroes of Newerth and other multiplayer online battle arena video games are significant, but so are the differences. There are different game modes that players can choose from and the four choices are Co-op, Player Hosted, Normal and Casual. The game mechanics are the same, but the objectives are different and the level of competition also varies greatly.
The Heroes of Newerth games played in cooperative will have players pit against AI controlled bots, whereas player hosted games allow for greater degree of customization. The differences between normal and casual games are a significant and they come down to the layout and difficulty. On casual level, players collect more resources and they do so much faster, so their mission is greatly simplifies. The Match Making Rating pits players of similar skill level against each other in normal games.
What is Heroes of Newerth
Heroes of Newerth is a dynamic videogame belonging to the multiplayer online battle arena genre developed by S2 Games. Players choose a hero and join a team of five and try to complete various objectives against as many opponents. The team that destroys the opponents’ base emerges victorious and players need to work together to prevail. Compared to other MOBA games, this one rewards individual skill and single players can carry an entire team.
owers provide powerful backup in a fight
The second clue to the high barrier for entry comes with the shop. The hero you choose has four innate powers, which can be levelled up as you play with that individual – standard RPG type stuff – and you'll instinctively understand that you need to max-out particular powers depending on your play styles. The shop, however, offers dozens more items that you can fit into six slots in your inventory. Every item consists of multiple ingredients, each of which must be purchased to create any given item. It seems like a bizarrely arbitrary extra layer of detail we could have done without.
All the items have quite different effects, modifying everything from movement speed to damage output, from mana regeneration to one-use health reclamation. The complexity of Heroes of Newerth lies not in its overall model – for the team vs team tower defence concept is simple – but in learning useful builds of both skills and inventory items for a number of the 62 different heroes.
Gameplay of Heroes of Newerth
Heroes of Newerth is played between 10 players, divided into teams of five players each. One belongs to the Legion and the other to the Hellbourne. They start at opposite corners of the map and advance on three distinct lanes, destroying minions and fighting opponents. The bases consist of creep spawn points, defensive towers and this is also the place where heroes spawn after that. Players try to destroy the central building which is called World Tree or Sacrificial Shrine depending on faction.
Going public
You could do it by trial and error, but it's probably safer to simply back out of the game and watch a few more video tutorials, then read some guides online. You're going to learn about the combat across the map, how to play the waves of creeps to your advantage, how to nail that last-hitting thing and how to stay alive in a fight, simply by practice. But working out what an effective build for a given character might be is going to take homework.
It's also going to take patience. Learning in public means braving Heroes of Newerth's judgemental community. Said community is divided into 'noob' and pro servers, but even this doesn't guarantee a friendly game. Be sure that your skill rating matches that of the server before entry, or you can expect to be ruthlessly booted. Such is the dependence of a team on its members, that anyone messing about is going to find themselves apologising profusely to experts who expect more of their allies.
In the beginning of the game, players select a hero to play. Ideally they need to choose a setup that will give them a better fighting chance in the long run. Heroes of Newerth is complex and with nearly 130 heroes to choose from, there are plenty of possible combinations. Some serve the role of tanks, others act as damage dealers. Others perform support roles and heal the ones that inflict more damage.
Each hero has several abilities and an ultimate, with all of them improving as they level up. To move up the ladder, one needs to accumulate experience which is earned by killing opponents and AI controlled minions. Maximum level is capped at 25 and players collect gold when killing minions and heroes or when they destroy towers. The other way to improve the quality of heroes is by buying items corresponding to their three main stats. These are Agility, Intelligence and Strength.
This is true of almost any PC multiplayer community, of course. The problem here being that open servers are really the only way to learn a game that, I sense, is only at its strongest when people are playing organised matches of roughly similar-skilled players. The times when I've found that combination on a public HoN server have been rare: more often than not, players either quit and skew the game, or one team angrily concedes before the match is really decided.
There are some other wider issues for general play, too. One is the speed with which many of the skills can be executed – being 'ganked' (that is, killed without any real recourse for defence or escape) is all too easy, particularly if you've lagged a couple of levels behind in the vital and busy portion of the game that's focused on killing creeps and levelling up. The fact that defeated heroes lose gold and their enemy gains it on each kill can quickly skew things in favour of one side, causing a failure cascade and a collapse of one side. To HoN's credit, this often takes 20 minutes or so to become clear, but a secondary punishment of extended respawn times for the killed player only compounds what is ultimately an unfair design.
Plot of Heroes of Newerth
Heroes of Newerth doesn’t have a single player campaign per se, with action taking place exclusively in multiplayer. Players can still learn more about their heroes of choice, by going over the lore and reading the short description of the 127 characters. The game only has a brief tutorial which explains the basic concepts. Most of the experience is accumulated hands-on by playing a lot.
Development of Heroes of Newerth
Development for this game started 11 years ago. The ones working on Heroes of Newerth unveiled their project to the media in 2009. The gameplay, heroes and their abilities have changed multiple times over those four years. It was worth the effort as the end result looks very different from the initial concept. S2 Games decided to use K2 Engineand put test it in beta for one year until May 2010.
Ancient design
That design is essentially a rebuild of Defence of the Ancients that's subsequently been augmented with statistics, skill rankings, social factor records – such as whether players regularly quit servers – and then the huge cast of heroes themselves. It looks brilliant and has clearly been a Hadean task of balancing and build-tweaking. That said, the crucial problem for me is that it demands players master a set of skills that I don't find rewarding.
I understand the urge to master a traditional RTS, with layers of resources, the spread of units and the rapid build of technology, because it becomes an almost craftsman-like challenge in games such as StarCraft. Multiplayer battles that require skill in movement and aim – as you get in first-person shooters – also make sense to me. But the combined control skill of HoN's RTS heroes and memorising effective builds leaves me quite cold. The rewards inherent in the process of playing don't seem to match the demands it places on the player.
Where can I download Heroes of Newerth?
S2 Games is now owned by FrostBurn Studios, so players can download the game from both websites. Once they install it on their computer they can play without paying a registration fee. Those who choose to spend real cash to unlock heroes faster won’t get a competitive edge over those who play for free.
What are others saying about Heroes of Newerth?
Heroes of Newerth was well received by the community, despite the obvious similarities to Dota. At the time of its release, it looked like a significantly better version. It only started to lose traction after Dota 2 was unveiled. The graphics received praise by professional critics, although some players complained about the excessive special effects. During large-scale battles, it can be difficult to see what’s happening. This is particularly true for beginners who are just making their baby steps with multiplayer online battle arena games.
Heroes of Newerth tournaments
This game doesn’t have a single player campaign, but it shines brightly in multiplayer. As of the most difficult multiplayer online battle arena games, it appeals to savvy players, rather than amateurs. Heroes of Newerth tournaments bring together the best players in the world and many of them are hosted in Asia. The sheer difficulty of the game explains why it has a smaller community than both Dota 2 and League of Legends. Not surprising, the number of players competing in tournaments is also significantly smaller.
Heroes of Newerth tournaments are every bit as exciting to watch as their MOBA counterparts. Sadly they have smaller guaranteed prize pools and are also rarely featured in the eSports bookies' sections. As a result punters can only bet on the flagship competitions.
My rating of Heroes of Newerth
Dota was the first multiplayer online battle arena I played. I have to admit that I dedicated a lot of time to that Warcraft 3 mode. By the time Heroes of Newerth hit the stores, I was already hooked on League of Legends. I fell in love with its cartoonish graphics so I initially felt a bit overwhelmed by all these explosions. The vivid colors and special effects, made it difficult for me to thoroughly understand what happened on the battlefield.
Heroes of Newerth is a fine game and it had a great run, but it is now hard to recommend to beginners. Those who want a user-friendly and still competitive game will choose League of Legends. Players who emphasize the importance of team play in multiplayer online battle arena games are obviously choosing Heroes of the Storm. Those who fell in love with Dota are unlikely to choose the game developed by S2 Games over the sequel.
The bottom line is that this is a difficult game by MOBA standards and focuses too much on personal achievement. Unless you are an elitist that has something to prove, you’d probably be better off playing any of the three games listed above. Having said this, I spent a lot of quality time playing Heroes of Newerth. I don’t think that a review score of 8.5 out of 10 is wasted on it.
The game now has a dedicated community and those who play Heroes of Newerth regard themselves as highly skilled players. They take pride in playing a game that is more difficult than League of Legends and one that relies more on individual skill. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Heroes of the Storm, a Blizzard blockbuster that celebrates team play at the expense of individual performance.
That's not to say the game doesn't look good against its peers – League of Legends, Demigod and the original Defence of the Ancients – just that it's going to have a certain kind of community – one that demands much of its members, and cements that notion certain people have of PC gaming being technical and unapproachable. That's both good and bad.
Ultimately, Heroes of Newerth leaves me with similar feelings to those I experienced when I bounced off both Quake III and EVE Online the first time I played them. There's something complex and difficult here that will – and clearly does – reward persistence. Nevertheless, the combination of unpleasant individuals in public servers and the overall lack of reward in the game itself means I'm unmotivated to go back and refine my skills. Popular it may be, but I just can't recommend the experience.
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