League of Legends

[Zyx]

Another free-ish MMO-thingie. League of Legends is based on the quite popular Warcraft III mod, Defense of the Ancients.

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I haven't played DotA as I don't have Warcraft 3 installed anywhere, but the basic idea behind the games is that it's a team vs team streamlined RTS where the players only control each one Hero character and try to attack other team's base. Someone who has played more this game can probably explain it better…

League of Legends is a standalone game based on this game mode. It's free, but with microtransactions. Nothing that should really affect gameplay, mostly skins and stuff like that. Like in many other free-with-microtransactions games, you can also get the stuff by playing enough which is cool.

Valve announced this week that they're releasing DotA 2 sometime in the future (this being Valve, you can never trust their date announcements). They also got the main developer behind the original DotA to make it. Of course, this is bad news for LoL because that will be a really direct competitor. And of course, who knows what Blizzard have in mind.

But for the time being, League of Legends seems to offer a quite straightforward way for people to play DotA without Warcraft III. If I convinced you with this little story, just go sign-up.

edit: I think it's important to point out that this games installer uses Pando Networks client to download the actual game. That thing is bit of evil, as there's very little indication that it is actually installed nor that it is running all the time even after installation and using your bandwidth. Be sure to uninstall the Pando Networks thing after installing the game.