Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Savage Passion!

A brief disclaimer. I’ve never played Savage. I understand it was quite revolutionary but it premiered at a time when I had to ration both my games and my time carefully, and I missed my opportunity to sample what it had on offer. But I am a devoted DotA player and, as a result, when DotA “went pro” I immediately leapt on to its most similar successor: Heroes of Newerth. League of Legends was all good and well, with the original developers working on it and the raw spirit of the game intact, but Heroes of Newerth did a better job of capturing the mechanics, the flow and the intense, seething hatreds the original DotA managed to produce so readily.

I write this to essentially say that my first experience with S2 as a group of developers was with HoN. I didn’t have time to see their original concepts of indirect control and blending game types, I didn’t get a chance to get into screaming matches with friends over why they should follow my orders (or vice versa) when it was actually part of the game’s intended mechanics. I didn’t have a chance to experience any of the interesting and unconventional twists that Savage brought to bear firsthand, although I did my best to read about them, to learn about this fascinating new take on the strategy game where teamwork became an important mechanic. And while I did experience it this sort of mechanic second hand through games like Tribes and the original Rainbow Six titles (where coordination was not only necessary, but also complicated by a painfully underdeveloped communication system) secondhand experience is hardly experience at all, so I feel a little bit dirty writing about how Savage prepared S2 for the rigors of DotA. But no one else seems to be talking about it so I wanted to try and offer up something to kickstart the discussion.

Savage actually appeared around a similar time to the prototypical versions of DotA which started cropping up after the release of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. Apparently the idea of controlling a single hero unit and battling against other heroes was a compelling one even then, and while the mod community would still take its time in coming to unilaterally support DotA the seeds were certainly planted in those halcyon days of PC gaming, before the rise of the online console community. Still, Savage was a decidedly professional effort, unlike DotA, and it mechanized things that DotA simply relied upon wholesale (such as player cooperation and coordination). Without any sort of coordinating tools aside from Warcraft’s standard chat features and mini-map pings, DotA experienced many serious problems. So serious that they spawned a set of third party programs.

While many of these issues also afflicted Savage, such as key players leaving the game without consequence and people generally being dicks, S2’s attempt to generate a framework by which to encourage cooperation between players shines through, even in their earliest effort. Savage’s system of construction, buffs and waypoints isn’t obvious it the design of Heroes of Newerth. Only DotA really shines through HoN’s cracks. But the thought process behind Savage, the concept of forcing a small group of tightly knit players to work towards one goal and giving them the tools to do so is somewhat more pronounced in Heroes of Newerth than it is in the original DotA and, more particularly, in its rival, League of Legends.

While Warcraft 3 had many mechanics and provided users with an excellent set of tools which provided an excellent basis for some amazing customizations certain elements were hard set. Unit sharing was all or nothing, item trading on or off. Buffs could only have one effect, and while it could sometimes be contextual you couldn’t have it impact allies and enemies differently. And there were bugs, bugs galore, and no easy way to fetter them out. Testing was a mess, and the enthusiast group far outnumbered the people who actually knew how to use the scripting tools and had the drive to do so for DotA.

Paired with the enthusiast nature of DotA’s creators, the total lack of budget or any real funding to speak of and the demanding and dickish nature of DotA’s player base and it’s no wonder that DotA possessed such a phenomenal number of dicks and bugs alike. Even tools like Banlist could be tricked, its records falsified, tampered with or ignored, and they relied on a diligent and relatively cooperative user base, which anyone who has even briefly played DotA can tell you is not the case. It was a product of people who loved games, not people who were concerned with getting players to play them with one another.

Heroes of Newerth, on the other hand, entered the stage fully cognizant of these issues and of means by which to solve them. Providing greater customization for unit and item sharing, more sophisticated tools for tracking both player skill and sportsmanship and adding in a system that allowed players to actually find and stay with their friends, something DotA made almost impossible for a long time.

But these are just the more brute force nods that HoN gave to DotA’s many problems. While these were real fixes, and they show S2’s deft development hand in creating systems for players to find and finger wag at one another the real genius comes out in the play of HoN. DotA, while more encouraging of teamwork than most competitive mods, could still be won by a single player running alone without his team. While later versions worked to correct this it was especially bad in early versions, where a skilled Lycanthrope or an even somewhat awake Summoner could steamroll an entire enemy team given a few seconds. And if a team were to get a Stealth Assassin? Forget it. Uninstall the game, it’s done.

HoN, however, is all about balance. Opposing heroes balance each other out. Got a problem with the Witch Hunter? The Trickster will deal with that. Got a Trickster problem? Keep your Legioniare nearby. As for countering that Legionare? Try a well-supported Pollywog Priest. The system is far from perfect, but it does a commendable job of trying to keep any one hero from being a trump by encouraging an interlocking system of counters better than DotA ever could. Players who run off on their own are undone not just by superior numbers, but all too often by the complimenting skillsets of their enemies. It’s one thing to be hit by the Hellbringer’s DoT, but to be hit by the Hellbringer’s DoT and Pudge’s pestilent aura? Or the Voodoo Jester’s damage amplifying Dot?.*

This interplay between heroes, the manner in which it is encouraged and the manner in which its understanding is necessary in order to consistently win fights is something that DotA only hints at. While it is certainly there it is nowhere near as important as in HoN, where a poor performance from a supporting hero can ruin an entire game. A set of strong heroes capable of acquiring kills can usually end DotA games regardless of circumstances, but one or two good support heroes coordinating with an even somewhat aware team in HoN can devastate an entire enemy team with a handful of careful plays. Cooperation is even more important than capitalization, a team’s ability to coordinate just as critical a player’s own singular abilities.

League of Legends further accentuates this difference. In League a solid player can easily overcome an entire enemy team given enough kills, money and time, regardless of how well his team coordinates. What’s more, many of the abilities, more it seems than in HoN, are focused on allowing individual heroes to defeat other heroes rather than support one another. While there are certainly support abilities and items, League has a focus on nitty-gritty one on one combat that HoN forces to take a back seat to team oriented play. And the only real difference between these games, aside from art direction, is the teams developing them. LoL remains firmly in the hands of many of DotA’s previously amateur developers who are attempting to break into the industry, while S2 has brought their own insights in design and play mechanics to HoN. So while S2 certainly hasn’t acquired much of a résumé with their previous well-received, poor selling titles, they’ve certainly shown an impressive pedigree for managing the difficult problem of not only presenting players with an interesting system to play with but with a framework that both forces, encourages, and provides them with the resources to cooperate and act like a unit in a way that I haven’t seen since the heyday of Tribes.

* Apologies to the uninitiated, who are no doubt now asking what the fuck a DoT is. It stands for Damage over Time, and refers to attacks in strategy or role playing games which inflict damage over a period of time rather than in one single attack.