Dota 2 and Other PC Modder Victories

Defense of the Ancients 2

One of the advantages that PC gaming still maintains over consoles is its modding community. I’ve stated on numerous occasions that until 360 and PS3 games allow the same kind of tools and access as you’ll find in the PC world, the question of “have consoles surpassed PCs” is a discussion that can’t yet happen. If you’re not too keen on the exciting world of PC modding, you might have missed out on a few pieces of big news that happened this week.

  • Dota 2 (an adaptation of the name Defense of the Ancients 2, probably to avoid legal issues) was announced by Valve for PC and Mac in 2011. For the uninitiated in PC gaming lore, Defense of the Ancients was a Warcraft III mod that pitted teams of heroes against one another as they rushed enemy turrets, with AI controlled units battling it out between them. Valve hired project lead IceFrog to come aboard and develop a Source version.
  • A Duke Nukem 3D fan remake of the game in the Unreal engine titled Duke Nukem: Next-Gen received legal approval by Gearbox and Take Two to continue in production.
  • Derek “Krael” Paxton, creator of the Fall From Heaven Civilization IV mod, was hired by Stardock to fix their maligned and catastrophic release build of their new RTS Elemental.

What do you guys think of all of these pieces of news? Have you played either DotA or Fall from Heaven? What other PC mods would you like to see full releases for?

Source – GameInformer, Shacknews, and for the sake of repetition, Shacknews

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I write about samurai girls and space marines. Writer for Smooth Few Films. Rooster Teeth Freelancer. Author of Red vs. Blue, The Ultimate Fan Guide, out NOW!

7 thoughts on “Dota 2 and Other PC Modder Victories”

  1. I’m kind of tired of Valve making games based on mods, I’d like to see them do something original, since Half Life and Portal are the only ones that aren’t based on mods.

  2. @SK beans, well seeing as Half Life was a quake mod I don’t see that happening very soon.

    This is why I love PC gaming so much! awesome people creating awesome content for an awesome pastime

  3. I’m pretty excited on the Duke Next gen were getting DNF and a remake this is just getting re-fucking-diculus and i love it. I’d like to see a fallout 1-2 remake with the f3 engine just for kicks.

  4. Also semi related to the post about the blogger from Bioware, found this in the comments of the Kotaku story about Dota2 – http://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/

    Now I’ll be the first to admit that I know nothing about the game, its background, creators, anything. And even more so than the Bioware guy, this blogger seems to me to be coming up with all sorts of crap just because he can.

    Any thoughts? Maybe someone who knows more about the game and its history can enlighten me, cause at the moment it just looks like a case of “he said, she said”.

  5. Even if what Valve has done is based on Mods, they still remain great games. Most people don’t know. Kinda like asking a kid who loves Rap where Kanye got “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” from, only to realize that even Daft Punk gets a lot of their stuff from 70’s Funk and Remixes that. See Edwin Birdsong or Berry Manilow if you need proof. Sometimes it takes a great team to come in, see what you’ve done, and show others what it COULD have been.

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