We're not entirely convinced that Blizzard understands the success of Defense of the Ancients. Sure, the trailer for their take on the popular mod is funny, and the screenshots below look properly zany, but it doesn't highlight the things people really care about in a DOTA-style map.
The quick glances we got at the character selects shows, what, 12 heroes? League of Legends is quickly barreling towards 100, Dota 2 looks like it's going to have a few dozen, and the original Dota has more than we can count. One of the reasons Demigod never really caught on (besides some horrid launch issues) was because it decided to focus on quality over quantity when it came to the champions. That's not how this works. We want a crazy number of characters to choose from. We want to play ten matches without seeing the same few people in every one. We want more, and it really looks like Blizzard is going to give us less. Even if it ends up being a blast to play, they're not going to defeat Valve and Riot with a handful of silly characters, so we're really hoping this is just a small part of what Blizzard's DOTA has to offer.
What's even weirder about this is that it looks like Blizzard trademarked "Coming Soonish" like their unreliability is something to be proud of. That would be like Microsoft getting a copyright on "Red ring of death" or Sony nabbing "PSN hacking" to use in their trailers. This trailer just misses in every way, which drives us crazy considering how excited we want to be for this.
...ah, who are we kidding, we're going to play the crap out of this. Nova versus Thrall? Yes, please.
