Aonxe Gaming, Technology, Reviews, and Guides

Lets talk about Heroes of Newerth

For the past two to three weeks I have been playing the new Defense of the Ancients stand-alone game called Heroes of Newerth or HoN. HoN is kinda a cut and paste of DotA on a new graphics engine with player and statistic tracking that allows for players to play the game more competitively. I think that once this game has some more heroes and maybe once they tweak the balance a little more that there will be no reason to play DotA, as long as this game is free or priced competitively. Continue on after the jump for more information and if you want a beta invite, just reply to this post with you e-mail address and I will be happy to send you one your way.

Gameplay
Gameplay in HoN is generally much faster than in DotA. The first few levels take some time, not too long, but once you hit level 5 you can really plough through the levels and max out at 25 in about 40 minutes as opposed to the 60+ minutes of DotA. I think that this is mostly because of the hero imbalance right now in HoN and this will probably change as people get better and develop better ways to work together.

Pub-stomping in HoN is quite rampant right now and not because people actually try to do it but because so many people with no DotA experience jump in to the no noobs games and try to play with people who have been playing dota for the last 4-5 years. This should go away with time but once your Kill:Death ratio gets over 2 people don’t want to play with you unless they are a 5 man team because they are so worried about their stats.

Maps
There are currently only two maps in HoN, one that is a copy of an older DotA map, you will notice some of the more secret paths are missing. There is a completely new map that people don’t really play but I don’t know why because it is really quite good and it keeps some variety in the game, which was one of DotA’s main problems once you played it for a long time. There is also another map in the pipeline that should come out very soon.

Community
Right now, the community for HoN kinda sucks. It is hard out there for a new player because people really don’t want to help you out, they expect you to know how to play and they want to win. The elitism from the DotA community is running rampant through the HoN community but it should improve as soon as more people start to play the game.

The VOIP in the game allows for people to communicate much better then they could in DotA, I only wish you could talk trash to the enemy in your lane! I still prefer ventrilo but the in-game voice works very well.

Game Latency
Until recently, gameplay latency was the area that HoN completely and utterly destroyed DotA. But with the popularity of HoN’s beta increasing and there being nearly 8000 users on at all times with nearly 15000 during peak times, the offsite hosted solution that HoN has opted to use versus Battle.net’s dedicated user host system has started to show its vulnerability to mass use. The past games that had virtually no delay have begun to slow down and skip with some delay. I full expect this to be fixed in the next patch or before the game comes out though, so I am not worried because I saw how majestic it was a week or so ago. Hell, it is still quite good during the day time too!

I plan on writing a lot more about HoN as soon as I get some more time and I will post some screen shots and videos as soon as the NDA loosens up a little bit. If you can’t wait to get in on the action, then ask for a beta invite in the comments, if you can prove you have DotA experience it will be even better for you!