Deadlines and timers aren’t just critical milestones for games, they’re also decisive catalysts that mold our everyday lives. They allow us to structure our habits and focus our priorities in the most efficient manners possible. Say, for example, the VP of Technical Oversight gives you a colossal presentation due Thursday at 4pm sharp. You wince and curse, but ultimately buckle down to get it done.

Zerglings on the verge of tearing you apart.
Just one more minute!

Afterwords, you chill with the guys over a brew, feeling amazingly relieved and proud. If Mr. VP of Douchebaggery simply told you he needed a “thing” completed at some undefined point, you probably wouldn’t have even finished it. And even if you did, the quality might be somewhat dubious. Furthermore, you probably wouldn’t even care if it ever saw the light of day at all; you’d simply mosey onto the next thankless task.

Now, if we shift our gaze towards the context of video games, timers and deadlines become something else, albeit familiar to the example above. They function as something to enrich the main part of the game, whilst existing as a part of it. Time limits or deadlines make them better,  more memorable experiences. They increase your enjoyment and give your accomplishments a greater sense of weight than they otherwise would.

Of course, there are several different methods of how a time limit can be implemented within a game. A strategy game might give you 30 minutes to defend yourself, as in Starcraft’s third mission “Desperate Alliance.” The Zerg attack you lightly throughout the first 20 minutes but then they begin to earn their namesake with massive assaults that bust your bunkers, mutilate your missile turrets, and maim your marines into turgid bloody stumps.

Boom-sticks: an essential tool for the survival of any climatic defensive mission.

Time limits force you to maximize what you currently have; to simply survive with the knowledge that you only need to hold out until the designated time. They’re powerfully effective, but only truly work in mission-focused games, like strategy titles. Although it’s not uncommon for a shooter to include a challenge such as this, with Half-Life 2’s best moments erupting when you’re trapped in a prison with the Combine assaulting your position.

Gimmick or set-piece deadlines can also arise, although they largely exist in blockbuster AAA titles to drive home a sense of player urgency that would otherwise not be faced.

In Borderlands:The Armory of General Knoxx, you’re given a massive loot-fest at the end of the story missions,but a timer goes off that only gives you three minutes to pilfer what you can. The traditional method of examining  all the stuff and only grabbing the best gets derailed as you frantically grab anything and everything before your ass gets nuked into orbit. Similarly, in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare you’re tasked with halting the launch of nuclear warheads. A timer shows up, and you’d best get to the switch before it’s too late, or else it’s bye-bye U.S. of A.

Sure: I could chase them around in a car. But skydiving on top of the target is better in every possible way.

In GTA or Just Cause, the set-piece time limits appear with fleeing jackasses who decide that chase missions are a great way to show off the open-world. While immediate action is required to “capture” said donkey-butt, there’s usually no explicit timer on display. Still, you know if that guy on the motorcycle gets too far away, you’re screwed. Alternatively, a mission might just task you with shooting down a missile before it reaches orbit, tossing out a nice big 60 seconds max before you fuck it all up.

You want a gun, you get a bat boot
in the face instead. Go figure.

Batman: Arkham Asylum has strict time limits in saving individuals before a certain evil-doer decides to off Commissioner Gordon, or some other bright young police officer/candy-striper. Of course, in Batman, you also find that every time a gun locker appears you have an unknown time limit to keep guards from gaining the ability to easily kill you: an emergent urgency that inadvertently forces you step up or die and be subsequently laughed at.

Alpha Protocol utilizes time limits on all of your conversation options, productively preventing you from over-thinking your dialogue options thereby avoiding the usual dialogue mining that I so voraciously indulge myself in. Then there’s of course the good old standby. Take a deep breath: the final boss triggered the doomsday device to destroy everything and everyone you love and you have X minutes to curb-stomp him into oblivion, thereby saving said day and winning over the damsel in distress. And exhale.

Naturally, we can’t possibly forget the ultimatum where you’re given a time limit to beat the entire game, or at the very least a significant portion of it. Fallout and Pikmin immediately spring to mind. Pikmin gives you 30 days to salvage your ship before you succumb to the horrors of the Planet of Mutant Plant Things. It then gives you a limit on each day to ensure that you don’t just leisurely pick flower-people all day long, effectively forcing you to play aggressively with limited resources and not simply mass hordes of ravenous man-plants to steam roll the entire the game.

Yeah, I don’t know either. Plants eating other plants.

In Fallout, you’ve got a strict and finite set of days to save your Vault. The folks inside the underground sanctuary are going to run out of water unless you can return in the nick of time with goods in hand. Of course, something else pops up later, and the game gives you a couple of options to extend your time limit. It makes for a tense first play-through as you carefully struggle to ensure that you’re making progress towards rescue and not damning your friends and family to the dreaded wasteland.

In my opinion, this is the strongest and most effective use of a time limit, as it literally forces your hand and demands that you make difficult choices possibly, and ideally, with serious repercussions. Every game should ideally give us this option. Imagine the potential for nerve-wracking tension if you only had so long in Dragon Age to recruit all the various factions.

This guy? Not gonna help you find a water chip.
Time’s a wasting! Hurry!

What if you were forced to pick between getting the Dragon Age mages or the dwarves for your noble endeavor because you just spent 6 months (game time) looking for some damned ashes, only to have a dragon eat your face? Imagine if that horde of Darkspawn were actually raping and pillaging as you were busy recruiting and leveling up to fight them? What if your very inaction against them made the hated foe all the more difficult in the end?

Inserting such deadlines would likely upset a great many perfectionists, but then, I’ve never liked the idea of a perfect playthrough. Seriously: every game deserves to make you feel tension about whether or not you’ll be able to make it in time to avoid failure, let alone be strong enough to actually stop the plans of the antagonist. Deadlines, quite simply, make games better.

Entertainment mediums, by their very nature, exist solely to entertain us. But alas: like all things made by human hands, they’ve become corrupted to their cores. These days, entertainment must not only thrill us with breath-taking car chases and explosive explosions, but also connect to our very existence within the human condition.

Some guy, I think his name was Jesse, decided the best way to do this was to build narrative experiences around believable characters; characters that could plausibly exist within the world they’re inadvertently thrust into. Games now rely upon the notion that we need believable evolved characters; they must develop throughout our time spent with them. However, there is a very difficult problem with this concept in certain titles.

He’s got a crowbar, a degree from MIT,
and that’s about it.

It’s one thing to watch a TV show and see how experiences can influence a character’s actions, it’s another thing entirely to place the development of characters into the grimy hands of your average gamer. This is principally the work of the “Freeman Effect,” although there are several different types of character developments present in games.

One might wonder why games even need bother with characters that develop over the course of your adventures with them. Games are fine without such innovative narrative experiences, and in fact games should spurn the advances that have been promulgated by the vixens of Hollywood and her misbegotten ilk.

But, whether or not you like where character development originated from (as I already stated: some dude named Jesse), it adds significantly to your enjoyment of the medium if you can somehow relate—or at least believe in—what you experience regardless if it’s a movie, television show, book, radio broadcast, or video game. Bluntly: character development is important for games because it makes them better experiences, but only if it actually tries. Let’s see how games can try to make character development an integral part of the gameplay experience, and in some cases, already have.

How’s that world conquest going there, Kane?

Often, a crap load of older games (but not always) fail to produce any character development at all. Possibly this might occur because you’re playing a multiplayer / sports game. On the other hand, Valve recently decided that you can have compelling, growing multiplayer characters,  as seen in their “Meet The” video series.

Shooters are also big on this, representing such luminaries such as Doomguy, William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, Duke Nukem, and the ever-debatable Gordon Freeman. Strategy games also frequently lack character development, although they can often still have interesting characters (see Kane in Command & Conquer).

These games typically lack character advancement because the developers actively don’t  try to attack something they know they won’t be able to deliver, so they choose to focus simply on the gameplay. Take a look at Just Cause 2. The characters are wretched, but you aren’t playing it for a deep exploration into character study, you’re playing because you enjoy hijacking commercial airliners and using them to assassinate the populace of a small south-eastern Asian country.

‘Soap’ is Scottish. That’s it.

Of course, the game might  not even care about presenting characters at all, ala Doom. This, in comparison, allows for the player to build their own experiences about a game without being explicitly directed by the developers; see Total War & Civilization games for examples. This is the simplest way. You sidestep the issue by not even trying, and that’s fine. I’d rather have a game with solid gameplay and no story than a game with alright gameplay and crap characters.

I’m looking at you: Call of Duty. The key problem here is that with nothing ventured, nothing extra is gained. If no games tried to push developing characters than we’d be stuck with games like Crysis: awesomely brilliant gameplay, but oddly empty inside.

Our next stop brings us to the house that Hollywood built—your typical linear character development avenue. And by linear, I mean there’s only one way for characters to develop. As implied, this kind of growth is what we know from the television, movies and books. While you’d think this would be the simplest style for games to copy, coming up with games that successfully utilize it is a hard task.

Dwelling on the issue, it becomes clear that this is one of the problems games face. TV shows may take significant time investments like a game can, but TV shows are episodic and able to stand on their own. When their characters evolve, it’s the summation of a season (or seasons) of plot and character interactions, rather than over the course of a single episode.

Who would’ve thought this urine-soaked geek could become so much more?

Games, it seems, cannot do this. Episodic delivery has proved problematic at best thus far. In addition, games need to include gameplay into their experience, but how much is up to the individual development teams. Kojima, of Metal Gear Solid, clearly favors a clean 50/50 split between plot and gameplay. Some games intertwine the two, as Half-Life 2, whereby you never lose control of your character in a cut-scene and thus experience everything first hand.

The end result is the same. In Metal Gear Solid you see Otacon develop from an annoying pissant who literally wets himself, to an annoying pissant who literally wets himself but takes some brave first steps. And in Half-Life 2 we find the young and nubile Alyx a brash but capable potential love interest whose fate we’re concerned about by the game’s climax.

Another problem with this approach is that while there are plenty of good television and movie writers, there are far more mediocre or poor ones. Who do you think is most likely to end up writing for games? Not the good ones who have no trouble finding work, but the poor ones. Yep, games get the sloppy seconds, or the developers end up trying to write their plot themselves, which usually ends badly (not convinced? Check out Borderlands).

What do these sloppy writers usually lack? The ability to place meaningful realistic character developments within their plots. In general, hiring book writers seems a solid compromise; books are structured more parallel with games, with book length avoiding any kind of rigid network time slots as we see with television or the ideal 90-120 minute movie experience that maximizes theater revenue.

So while a simple linear character development might appear to be the simplest and easiest way to get decent character development in our games, thus far it has alluded us for the reasons mentioned. That’s not to say we should stop trying this method, look at a movie like Gran Torino and tell me with a straight face you don’t want more games to have characters with that much depth and growth as we see in Walt Kowalski throughout its 2 hour duration.

The closest I’ve seen games come in this linear style is with Max Payne 2’s title character, and in the same vein: Grand Theft Auto IV’s Niko Bellic, both of whom we see struggle throughout their respective experiences. When it works, it’s just as effective as any movie or TV show. Problem is: it barely ever does. Really, this is just video games aping Hollywood, and as such, they can never truly resonate any deeper with a player than any movie or novel can.

BIG AMERICAN TITTIES!

Last to the party in this analysis is player driven character development; as in you’re controlling the development. This is where we come to something that gaming can truly call its own. Okay, choose your own adventure books maybe, but those were all rubbish. These video games are typically the hand-me-downs of the tabletop games.

Most Bioware and Black Isle RPGs fit the bill, although System Shock 2 and Deus Ex are worthwhile additions, but not simply traditional RPGs. The essential bit is that in a tabletop game you have complete freedom. Obviously, this can’t be replicated completely in a video game, but that’s no reason not to try. Basically the idea is that no two play-throughs should be the same.

This is the most ambitious of all forms of character development possible simply because the game needs to respond to your actions and allow the game to adapt to it. Problems arise because player driven character development is extensive and requires huge amounts of time and consideration to properly work out, but it leads to without a doubt the most involving form of characters possible. Your game is literally your game.

Any notion of canon for a game’s story becomes impossible if there is only your play-through. I played through Dragon Age and became attached to certain characters in specific ways. My sister played the game principally with the same characters but came to see them each in a different light.

We could have utilized the dozen or so characters in different ways and could have dealt with each of them in several unique manners. When this works out, it really works out, but when it fails, it’s a catastrophe. Just take a look at Heavy Rain, which gives you lots of choices, but fails to tell what any choice actually means or even is before hand. Your characters will develop in Heavy Rain—quite interestingly I might add—but it’s never really under your control.

The… no, your party. Who does what depends upon your decisions.
So if they all leave you alone you might want to seek a counselor.

Obviously, the dynamic of player-controlled character advancement tends to embrace the RPG genre, due to the inherent focus on character in such games, with much of the gameplay revolving around how you interact within the game’s world. The games that choose this path make character development an actual part of the gameplay, intertwining the entire game experience around the notion of meaningful characters who evolve and develop over the course of your adventure. The good games will present you with difficult decisions, and they don’t have to be no-win scenarios; they simply have to force you to make choices, and that those choices have impacts.

Knights of the Old Republic 2 went so far as to turn this convention on its head in the character of Kreia, who scolded you regardless of your actions. What’s interesting is that the KotOR2 never forces her down your throat and you can decide you disagree and never talk to her again. Or, if you’re intrigued by her point of view, you can keep her around and learn more about her viewpoints. It’s all about the choices.

Character development truly is something worth investing in, perhaps more so in gaming than in any other entertainment medium. The ability to connect a player to their interactions has a profound effect on the overall impact the game has. Besides, if Deus Ex did it? Seems like a good idea for me. Then again, it seems that the general trend nowadays, especially in triple-A big name titles, is to avoid character development and simply give the audience what they think they want. And that folks, is really quite tragic.

The recent rise of the DotA community is an interesting example of how a mod can become more popular than the game from which it mutated. Think of DotA as the next Counter-Strike. DotA never erupted into popularity, but rather  infected vast swathes of the gamer populace in something like a zombie attack, without anyone really noticing, until their family members dined on their bodily fluids. But the numerous gamers who haven’t played Warcraft III (and subsequently haven’t heard of DotA) are probably wondering, “What’s the big deal, and why should I care?”

Even artistic painters enjoy DotA. Clearly, DotA is enjoyed by people from all walks of life.

Well, Defense of the Ancients (you need a copy of Warcraft III and its expansion: The Frozen Throne to play it) and its newly emerged spawn reveal a compelling and unique style of gameplay that lies somewhere between a team-oriented FPS and a strategy game, both jumbled up with some of those oh-so-wonderful RPG elements served as a sumptuous side-dish. Some, desperate for a name, have dubbed the gameplay MOBA, for Massive Online Battle Arena, which is something of a misnomer. Massive is hyperbole, and while DotA may have online battles in arenas, what online competitive game doesn’t? I prefer to utilize the term DotA to associate the games that are DotA-esque.

So where did this style of game come from? Is it a gift from omniscient aliens who feel the best way to disrupt the planets’ productivity is to turn us all into cursing idiots who can’t go a single sentence without calling someone a noob? If so, they’re brilliant, and I eagerly await my servitude with my new xenomorph overlords.

It started here, sorta.

On the other hand, if we thought DotA up ourselves (which is more likely), than we should probably look at its history, and exactly what it does so right, and where its filthy dirty offspring are going to differentiate themselves from dear ol’ pop. When something new appears and grabs a sizable portion of the gaming community (DotA estimates several million players with its competitive scene, outstripping Warcraft III’s), it’s in our best interests to give it a healthy and proper once-over.

DotA, when it sprouted wings, wasn’t a new style of gameplay. Rather, it was simply a variation on a theme that Warcraft III churned out for quite some time. The original gameplay type is loosely derived from a custom map in StarCraft, specifically: Aeon of Strife. AoS featured something pretty radical for StarCraft’s day— it gave you the choice of a few select units, told you an army was coming, and that you had to kill them all, with all the other players on your side. 3 to 5 humans against an unrelenting horde of Starcraft units.

You’d get cash for killing the hordes, and use it to power up your units. Pretty simple, but the thing is, it was brutally tough; you’d be lucky to last 5 minutes your first try. Push too fast and stronger units would spawn and kill you, go too slow and you’d be overwhelmed by little weak guys. But it was addictive getting your guy beefier (I favored the Zergling myself) only to have the poor sod dashed over and over again.

Then something happened; a precedent. Rather than fighting a faceless horde, you now fought other player’s special units, and both sides had armies that clashed. When Warcraft III came out, most of the StarCraft mapmakers shifted over to the new engine and its new possibilities. Warcraft III offered a substantially different opportunity, because Warcraft III had Heroes, units with attributes and skills that would increase as they gained experience.

Getting warmer…

Further, it had a rudimentary skill and unit editor so more variety was theoretically possible, although much of this was locked until the expansion came out, and removed most limits on custom maps/units/skins. As such before the launch of The Frozen Throne, we simply saw lots of recycled default heroes and skills in the competitive AoS template.

One of my early favorites was Rival Nations, which made 3 rival sides rather than merely 2. However, it only used Warcraft III’s basic hero units. There was another that let you choose a deity to play, where you began as a little peasant guy who transformed into a bigger more dangerous entity every 10 levels (with more skills and better stats), eventually turning into the God you originally chose.

As time progressed, some young gun who went by the name of Eul (real name unknown), released a map called Defense of the Ancients.  There wasn’t too much customization in it: pre-expansion custom map editing was quite limited. The original form bears little semblance to its current incarnation, beyond the basic map layout and objective. The heroes have all been replaced or extensively redesigned. The original game was best described as a clone, and there isn’t any good reason why it gained stature while other AoS clones didn’t. As luck often dictates, it just caught on with the right people who later changed everything about it.

We’re technically very cold. I blame Arthas for that.

Then came Frozen Throne, and sometime in 2003, following approximately 3000 crap-tastic tower defense maps released, Defense of the Ancients: Allstars emerged. Various other versions of DotA also surfaced around that time period, but Allstars, with its emphasis on overpowering heroes to counter other overpowered heroes, came out the victor. Perhaps the game that came closest to usurping Allstars was a totally separate map called Tides of Blood. It had awesome custom character skins, custom skills, unique items and no recipe system. But DotA eventually felled it like any other tree in the forest.

DotA: Allstars was developed by Steve “Guinsoo” Feak (remember that name), who promoted the idea that the Heroes should be all-powerful ethereal figures capable of crushing everything and everyone around them. At least the first versions took this stance. Roughly 2 years later, around the launch  of World of Warcraft, the same Allstars advanced to roughly the 6.xx era, with the appearance of Icefrog, the map’s current “developer” who took a stance that the game was good, but clearly lacked balance. And, in his mind, that balance meant the need to weaken heroes rather than just buffing up opponents.

Icefrog is an interesting figure. He’s never publicly revealed anything about himself, or how he was granted control of the map’s development. The best thing that can be said about him is that he listened to criticisms from all sides. Mostly,  he did this by following threads in the official forums at dota-allstars.com and currently at playdota.com. Through the ancillary advice of others, he patched the game accordingly by slowly updating the code for efficiencies, adding stabilities, and somehow bringing balance to a game that was widely considered to have far too many possible heroes.

These are the objectives, lose yours and you lose the game.
Sounds so simple.

In truth, the balance issue was a widely known fault against Allstars. The game was hilariously fun, but certain heroes were vastly more useful then others. Through Icefrog the map slowly transformed into a finely-tweaked and ever-evolving beast that began to play more to the strengths of teamwork and skill above simply using the best heroes in the game at that moment in time.

Fast-forward to today. The map is currently at version 6.67c, although it’s been patched literally 6 times since I started writing this. Icefrog still manages it, with numerous retail “clones” that copy the style to varying degrees.

In DotA, the objective is destroying “The Ancient” in the opposing teams’ base. Barring this are 3 groups of barracks that produce new units every 30 seconds, called creeps. Over time, more and more units spawn, and their strength increases chronologically as matches progress. Every 2 ½ minutes a siege unit is spawned. Each group of creeps follows a path that leads to an opposing team’s barracks. Along the path there are 3 friendly towers and 3 enemy towers to push through.

The map of DotA. Green = Ancients, Black = Barracks, Blue Lines are the 3 lanes, white are main tributaries through the neutral creeps and yellow and red lines are for hiding/“juking”

The map is roughly symmetrical, although each route has differing nooks and crannies. Think of it like your limbs: they’re basically the same, but you can pick out dozens of differences if you really examine them. The game is typically played in matches of 5v5, although smaller matches can occur (but much less frequently). DotA has many different modes, from “all pick” (anyone can pick any hero, sans duplicate choices), or “all random” (everyone gets a random hero). There’s also random draft, small draft, captain’s draft, mirror match, and short mode. Switching between the different modes, in concert with the 90+ heroes available, keeps everything from growing stale.

DotA:Allstars‘ heroes are largely divided into roughly 3 categories: strength, agility, and intelligence. These are the primary attributes of your hero. Strength heroes are usually tanks, since strength boosts health points. Agility typically goes to the hero killers since agility boosts attack speed and armor. Intelligence mongers are usually casters, since intelligence increases mana points. Of course, you can even further categorize all that into many more divisions, such as stealth, nuke, disabler, support, pusher, ganker etc. Heroes may have melee or ranged attacks (possibly both), and may learn 4 skills or invest in stat points as they level up.

Early game is a lot of jockeying for position. You’ll want to keep moving, and choose your attacks carefully, and go for those denies (Find the exclamation point in screenshot).

One of the most unique parts of DotA is that actively pushing forward in the early game is discouraged. Not following this tactic leaves you open to ganks – when enemy heroes surprise you, killing your own hero off for some valuable money and experience. This is where “denying” comes into play. “Denying” entails killing your own units to slow your advance, and thus “denying” the enemy heroes experience and gold.

A solid mid-game gank, bolstered by a little luck. Yeah the screen gets cluttered pretty easily.

Successfully denying is tricky, but really just comes down to understanding how to land the killing blow, because you only get gold when you make the lethal strike on a creep. On heroes, any damage dealt before their death will net you some coin for an assist.

But what does all that “DotA-talk” actually mean? It’s not complicated: you really just have to pay attention and be proactive about your clashes with the opposing team.

This is bad. You should not let your barracks be attacked. Ever.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of DotA’s success is that it’s actually spawning retail clones developed by professional studios. The first retail carbon-copy of DotA to land upon our fertile hard drives was Demigod, developed by Chris Taylor’s Gas Powered Games. The next clone to step up was League of Legends – the brain child of Allstars’ creator Steve “Guinsoo” Feak, developed at Riot Games. It’s free to play, with the option to purchase the ability to play a hero whenever you want. Perhaps the largest of the bunch is Heroes of Newerth, created by S2 games, best known for their Savage series. Last to the party is Icefrog’s unannounced game in development at Valve.

Demigod kept the idea of teams facing each other, but focused intensely on balance and highly strategic team play. With only 8 demigods available at launch, it’s added a few more as well as a veritable plethora of maps to choose from. It didn’t leave the docks well: at launch, Demigod was unplayable in anything past 3v3 due to networking issues and a general failure of the player base to actually play the game online.

“Abstract floating battlefields and godly figures battling over… something? Well its gotta be important, why else would they have built floating battlefields?”

The general lack of acumen required to play Demigod, in comparison to DotA, likely hurt the game’s re-playability (there’s no denying, most of Demigod’s skills don’t require predictive movements, and the maps are at best simplistic). It nevertheless had surprisingly decent consumption numbers. It broke 100,000 sales, and landed at #3 in NPD’s figures for April 12-18^th in 2009. Demigod revealed that the DotA audience was out there, waiting to throw their precious cash at DotA titles whenever the games materialized from the mists of the developer’s mountains.

While initial impressions might give the illusion that League of Legends is merely a straight DotA xerox, the game plays more like a logical branching point from the roots of DotA, with every hero—or champion, as they’re dubbed here—serving a few vital roles. League of Legends‘ careful, strategic, and skilled use of champions has produced a game that, while obvious in its connection to DotA, truly is a unique entry. A large number of the skills require good timing and precision to have an impact on battles, and teamwork is paramount to success. They also added matchmaking, increasing frustration among much of the player-base due the system often building lopsided teams. Riot also greatly simplified the item purchasing system to make it far easier to understand for new players.

I don’t even know what’s going on here, and I was playing the game at the time. League of Legends is just like DotA in that regard.

Heroes of Newerth is DotA. You can’t get around it – it’s a direct rip-off. The items are identical (barring name changes), the heroes are mostly exact copies (again barring name changes and the occasional slight skill alteration), and the map is a perfect replica of DotA’s. That said, the game adds a much-needed back-end that DotA lacks. Built-in stat tracking, reconnecting if you lose your data line, built in voice chat, and updated graphics (with true wide-screen support). If all you want is a contemporary DotA, then Heroes of Newerth is perfect, because it’s just that. Not surprisingly, because of this, Newerth appears the current heir-apparent to the original DotA, with at least 45,000 players online at anytime in its existing beta status.

And Icefrog’s project? All we know is that he’s got a dev team at Valve and he’s working on something that DotA fans will “allegedly” enjoy. That’s all, and given that it’s Valve, I doubt we’ll be hearing anything else until they’ve got something to show us.

So that’s it, everything you never wanted to know about DotA and its ilk. Now get it there and try it; you’ll only get insulted out of every match and berated for your every action in those you don’t.

You may have heard about a beta that finally arrived. South Korea certainly did, much to their GNP’s dismay. Seriously people, it’s bigger than the second coming of Christ, or of the Giant Spaghetti Monster, if you float that way. It’s StarCraft II’s beta! But that doesn’t change that what lays before us is merely just StarCraft all over again.

That’s right folks, it’s StarCraft, so get over it. I see the “two” strapped to it, but if the beta is any indicator, the multiplayer remains firmly stuck in the original’s mindset. This is simultaneously great and horrible depending upon your stance. Now, I’m sure the singleplayer will have a wonderful and compellingly satisfactory narrative that’ll make the game a worthwhile investment for those who don’t give a damn about RTS multiplayer shenanigans, but for our purposes, this article is concerned entirely with the multiplayer portion of StarCraft II, as seen via the beta.

So StarCraft now with a “two,” is it a worthy multiplayer sequel? Does it deserve to exist? I suppose so, there’s an audience of millions who want it, and to them it delivers, but to everyone else? Well it’s a cold hard slap in the face. Oh sure – you can go on and say how it’s gone and given itself a wonderful new graphics engine, shiny physics and polygons with those oh-so-spiffy textures. That’s right: polygons in StarCraft, who’da thunk it?! And the new units! There are dozens of them, and clearly these units show how it’s more than your 13 year-old self’s StarCraft of 1998. But it is.

How? Well, the game focuses on the same areas of skill that StarCraft did – macro-management of an economy and knowing effective unit counters, all whilst micromanaging combat and scouting. All at the same time. Bow before the glorious APM (Actions Per Minute), and you’ll find your victor.

Giant air battles are all about huddling your units up into a ball. Just like in the original!

There is no streamlining for easy economy management, no auto-casting of your special abilities, no perma-unit build commands. Everything in StarCraft II is a deliberate action that you need to guide. Units under fire? There’s no auto-retreat or take cover command. If you were scouting or ordering your SCVs for some more starports, those units are already dead. The game is unrelenting and any mistake will cost you. Usually the game. But that’s StarCraft.

But there’s more! The launch of StarCraft II heralds the rebirth of Battle.net. And it’s perhaps Battle.net that showcases more changes to the game than anything in the game itself. For one, you have an online matchmaking system that simply works. That’s right – you click “Find Match” and within 30 seconds, you’re there. No fiddling with ports, no quibbling over routers and internet access, no checking your packets, it just functions.

I’ve utterly abandoned most recent RTS games simply because I can’t get into a match quickly. Waiting 20 minutes just to start playing a game is balls. Battle.net also added a lovely tournament system—divided into skill based divisions—which is a brilliant step forward to getting players of similar skill in a single match. These additions produce personal bouts of loud clapping; more titles need to make multiplayer components work, especially RTS games. Tragically, however, the matchmaking and ranking system appears to be the extent of innovation for StarCraft II.

Ahh resource raiding, it worked before, it works even better now!

I wouldn’t be bothered by an identical-nature of a sequel if it wasn’t for the huge strides that competitive RTS games have made in the time since StarCraft first graced us with its god-like presence. Relic showed us with Company of Heroes and Dawn of War how to end the turtling, how to get us to actively use our units to think about strategies for combat rather than merely worrying about our build orders and optimized economies.

Relic even went so far as to make combat units as tools for acquiring resources. And it’s not as though Blizzard showed us they weren’t afraid to mix it up with Warcraft III. Maybe that’s their desire – experiment with Warcraft, and then keep those legions of StarCraft fanatics happy with the exact same game as always. Perhaps that’s the root. The original StarCraft remains a top played RTS even now, hence the sequel should appeal to existing player-base. Right? So why are they even making a follow-up if so many people remain content to play the original? As for me, that goes to an entirely different place than where I want to end up.

So there you have it. StarCraft II is merely StarCraft. With a “two.” I assumed that after 12 years and numerous innovative additions to the RTS multiplayer genre, that maybe StarCraft II would take us in a new and compelling direction. Instead, the gameplay is ripped straight from the original. Which I’m not saying is bad; StarCraft is a good game.

But I do wonder why it took Blizzard over a decade to copy their own game. What Blizzard usually does best is collate ideas, toss them in the blender and make a nice gameplay smoothie with all your favorite up-to-date additions. Yet for StarCraft II, it looks like the multiplayer status quo, sadly, reigns supreme.

So how do you get players to return if you don’t offer a memorable virtual excursion? Well, you make an incredibly compelling meta-game that’s affected by the gameplay, but actually adds nothing to gameplay itself.

The meta-game does two things; It awards experience for kills (which determines your level, which controls access to weapons), assists in accomplishing your objectives, and then looks at how you achieved those kills and gives you titles and/or emblems (which are nothing more than some fancy words and pictures to brag about your overall progress).

The game, of course, is Modern Warfare 2. Let’s talk about how the lack of skill, combined with a reliance upon luck for balance, produces a game that gives you little reason to return beyond its aforementioned metagame. Not covered here: the bugs and glitches, knives, grenade launchers, shotguns or imbalances any of those have when mixed with certain perks.

There are even awards for shooting like a chump.

Any game that relies upon luck or random happenstance over deliberate actions gives pause, because in those situations little effort is required to “win.” Most games do rely upon some amount of luck to one extent or another; Team Fortress 2 calls upon lucky critical attacks to break stalemates, while Solium Infernum uses random chance to add uncertainty to your decisions, and some DotA heroes are built entirely around luck (faceless void) but you know that’s a risk you’re taking by choosing them.

But few titles force poor decrepit lady luck to fall to her knees from the sheer exhaustion of deciding all the encounters in the game. There are no intense duels in MW2, whoever sees the other first is gonna kill the other guy. You might say that’s the “modern” part of the game, but last I checked re-spawning isn’t in the Pentagon’s budget quite yet; and re-spawning is the key problem in MW2.

So it makes sense that to be effective in MW2 you need only learn a few things: spawn locations (and perhaps more importantly, understanding how the bloody god of spawns actually works), and the few good vantage points. As long as your position is serviceable and your gun is loaded, the game largely turns into a point and shoot affair.

This might be fine if the game was nothing but free-for-alls, but that’s one of the game’s roughly nine gameplay modes, and trust me: getting fragged within two seconds three to seven times in a row  because you spawned with your back to the enemy team  gets old in a hurry. You shouldn’t have to cross your fingers that you’ll live a lengthy 10 seconds. But how does luck actually factor in? Via two primary methods: killstreaks and—as you might have already guessed—good ‘ole fortunate spawns.

Lets start with killstreaks, which are intended to reward you for being “good.” You might argue that this promotes skill because if you want the killstreaks, you need to make successive frags without dying yourself. Of course, you can argue just as much that it does promote camping, as people carefully and slowly rack up those points needed, leading to devastatingly brutal god-strikes; but I digress.

“Hmmmm,” said one of Infinity Ward’s developers, “How can we possibly make it so that all players, even the bad ones, can inflict these wonderful levels of ludicrous destruction upon others with no chance of reciprocal attacks?” “Well,” his companion piped up, “People really seemed to adore grenades in the first game! Why not make one that’s just like rolling dice to get a killstreak?”

And thus the lovely care package was born unto our world. Don’t want to camp your way up to the attack helicopter or AC-130 gunship? Just grab a perk and then make 3 kills. Just toss the dice and hope you get lucky. Who needs to even learn to aim anymore? Just use the care packages and anyone can score some “awesome” kills. How? Simple: a shitty spawning system.

This is no companion cube.

Killstreaks suck, for sure, but at least players have some degree of control over them, with the ability to shoot down some, or hide from others. The spawn system, however, is utterly beyond control. The game attempts to put the player into the best spots possible: close to teammates and not overly near the opposition, unless you have tactical insertion (a flare that you place—which takes up the equipment slot—marking where you’ll spawn next) or you’re playing game modes with definitive “bases.”

Sounds good right? Not really. Most levels are built for flow rather than standing battles, so whenever you spawn someone’s liable to see you magically return to the mortal coil, and you can be sure they’ll say “Hi” with some bullets. Understanding the details and dynamics of the spawn is perhaps the most important factor to your success in MW2. All it takes is a couple of matches to get the feeling that 60% to 80% of your deaths are wholly beyond your control. By plucking choice perks and/or equipment you can be a little luckier.

And there’s that wonderful word – “luck,” and you’re at its dire mercy. Why not give players the choice of where to spawn? Or simply standardize it? Because luck is exactly what the developers are aiming for in MW2; skill is expendable. They want everyone to have what they consider “fun.”  Who cares if you actively spawn in front of an opponent’s cross-hairs? You can just retaliate by gunning down 3 to 5 players frequently without any of them knowing you were there. Ta-da! Free care package.

Woohoo, shot in back again.

The game is still compelling, to a degree, but the gameplay isn’t rewarding; the metagame is: getting all that experience, unlocking all those other guns, finding all those shiny emblems and titles watching your stats progress higher and higher. There was a time when simply winning was good enough, but this brings us back to one of the core problems at the heart of Modern Warfare 2:  a lack of a memorable community, a direct result of the exclusion of dedicated servers.

The faceless masses of a matchmaking system own little strength, but they’re always there waiting to be shot in the back when they get a shitty spawn. Infinity Ward appears to have addressed this irritation by switching the focus away from community and into stat-whoring. Everyone’s playing the game to get their titles and emblems to get a new prestige. The gameplay never challenges or encourages you break beyond its narrow boundaries, so you never have anything noteworthy to show beyond all that meta-junk above.

Thinking back over the 136 hours I’ve sunk into the seas of multiplayer so far, I can’t recall a single memorable experience. Not a single one. It’s not like I just played the opening of the newest JRPG or something, that’s a collection of five whole days. Sure, I was content most of that time, but when you play that long and the hours you’ve put in just bleed together into a blob of headshots, there’s a fundamental problem.

But then again, I do almost have the much relished Gold Skulls Famas title; only 200 more headshots to go! Damn you Modern Warfare 2.