By Five years ago, S2 games released their first game, entitled “Savage,” a, unique combination of a real-time strategy game and a shooter. With a not very striking design and not much of a marketing campaign, their first game was not such a great triumph. January 2008, S2 games presents their second game – “Savage 2. A great improvement of the graphics and a much more challenging gameplay sets them on the road to success.
Why worth talking about ancient releases now? It’s because S2 changed this game and improved it so much that any analysis written in the last months is just out of date.
The new mod, Heroes of Newerth is a genetic copy of the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA 2), but a new improved DOTA 2 experience, taking the game to a new level of competition. Launched on Tuesday May 12th, 2008, Heroes of Newerth, already popular as HoN now, is getting closer and closer to the final release. The main features are presented on their front page: Heroes of Newerth
Matchmaking System – Get matched with similar players if you are playing yourself or with a team of friends.
Stat Tracking – Many statistics are tracked automatically by the game. Access an enourmous amount of valuable data online or in-game.
Diverse Heroes – Play with heroes new to HoN as well as many of the best heroes you are already familiar with from DoTA 2.
Ladder Rankings – Player and clan ladders are automatically updated by the game. See where you rank against the competition.
Custom Map Editor – Create new maps, or even new games with the included map editor.
But most important are the S2 engine advantages over the old Warcraft mod that you can see illustrated in the Hon Official Trailer:
Game Reconnection – Games are no longer ruined when a player is disconnected! Players that are disconnected, can rejoin the game.
Leaver Protection – Create and play in restricted games that can not be joined by players with a history of leaving games early.
Client-Server Netcode – No lag for all players when one player has a connection issue!
Re-Bindable Hotkeys – Bind custom hotkeys for almost every command in the game, allowing you to maximize your effectiveness.
Built in VOIP – No need for an external voice chat program. Voice chat is incorporated into the HoN engine.
What there also needs mentioning is:
Built in voting systems – You can cast votes to do several things: either everyone on your squad or the whole game has to consent on, like vote to kick a player, vote to restart the game, vote to concede the match.
Built in Statistics and Ranking – For every game played your statistics are recorded and then computed with your previous games and displayed in your Community Panel. These figures include such things as number of games you’ve won and lost, kills, deaths, assists and ratios for each of these.
Built in Community panel – feature almost feels like a exact replica of Steams Community panel: friends and clan lists, joining game info, chat etc.
A very important aspect is the multi OS clients support – contrasting to DotA 2, HoN can be played natively on Linux. This is great to all gamers alike and will help this game to grow to be popular when released.
There are also some downsides, which is to be expected from any game, and even more for a Beta.
- Server issues: For the moment, hosting can only be possible on HoN official servers and many of them are quite unstable or cause lagging. Lan hosting will be supported later, apparently.
- Player skill rating not quite accurate – PSR, aka Pubskill Rating – although meant to be an individual stat, it depends very much on the team you’re with; it’s impossible for players to reach a decent rating by themselves. Most of the negative aspects are for sure to be present just because the game is still in beta stage, and we are not expecting to find them in the final release.
With an only one time fee of $30, a number of over 1,000,000 accounts and over 4 million games played up to now, it seems that Heroes of Newerth will be in fashion this year.
You can get a beta key from Heroes of Newerth – Beta Giveaway! to play NOW. Try this great game yourself but be careful, it’s addictive!
