You've really been enjoying that, Helmut. DOTA is pretty significant gap in my gaming experience, and this revelation that you can hide your shame from Online by playing against bots makes it harder to find excuses. MOBAs are not generally my cup of tea, but I feel I should try this at least once.

I'm currently playing a game called "Buying Other Games On Steam." It's not that much fun, as games go, but it is strangely compulsive and helps top off your quotient of self-loathing. I've sunk hours into it, and it only promises to get worse as autumn's releases approach.

In other news: Toger! How are ya!?

I have been having fun. Maybe your hesitation comes from a distant memory of Starcraft? I dimly remember a game where online success was mainly predicated upon build efficiency and RTS classic moves. I recently watched some online Starcraft vids online and it was a bit like watching paint dry. No offense intended, it's been very durable as one of the go-to tournament games for professionals for ages and I'm certain there are nuances that escape my eye.

The most interesting part of DOTA is the teamwork aspect. A massive part of tournament play is the pre-game selection of five heroes per team, performed in a number of steps that are intermingled with hero ban steps that prevent a team from choosing an overly strong (either solo or in combination with another already chosen hero) hero. There are so many point/counterpoint arguments for combinations of heroes, both in terms of their raw abilities and their abilities in conjunction with the player who will play them and their role in the individual games. 

Further, each game breaks down into discrete phases that evolve over time. Teams hope to have strong early game heroes, but the game is designed around the emergence of strong heroes as the game ages, generally in the 25-45 minute mark. At these stages, the late game heroes have earned enough experience and in-game gold to become serious dealers of damage and can generally sway the outcome of the game one way or the other. But of course there are exceptions to these rules, and aggressive early game drafts and strategies can upset these apple carts in an all or nothing attempt to take the other team by surprise and stop normal game evolution. 

After a game has progressed past its earliest stages, it can get really interesting with groups of heroes ganging up to look for kills of the other teams heroes. The nature of the players abilities and the items in the game often means to achieve a kill, a team will have to work in close cooperation to achieve this. A typical operation involves a hero teleporting in to an area with an opponent hero and immediately magically stunning or physically constraining the enemy hero in conjunction with silencing their anti-cast, coupled with a second (or third) hero who is capable of delivering great amounts of damage in a very short amount of time. When you first watch a vid online, it just seems a huge chaotic mess, but for me it's beginning to make a little bit of sense as I am learning about the most-chosen heroes and their skills. When team battles occur and it's five on five, it's crazy fun to watch. My strategy in these times is to just press every key on the keyboard and click both mouse buttons as fast as possible and hope something good occurs.

The good thing is that they've almost completely removed the RTS aspect of the game. There are AI elements ("creeps") in the game, but you have no control over them. Here's a link (some mild language) to an article that I posted earlier that describes the physical fundamentals of each game. There is only one map and it never changes. There is only one objective and it is the same every game. Your interaction with the creeps is both repetitive, yet still necessary and interesting and entirely possible to get wrong. Yet within these fixed boundaries the endless variation of hero choice and item purchase make each game entirely different. 

The reason I haven't yet played online is that I don't know which of the heroes to choose for a role since many can do many roles, and how to communicate effectively. It's hard to orchestrate any team action when everyone else is a bot, and at best the bots react only once you've done something (eg. stunning an enemy hero in a lane), but often that's too late to really achieve anything. But there is tremendous skill still to be developed in a lot of areas so I'm happy for now. It also runs well on my WinXP box with DX9 (which aren't stated as options in the system requirements) and is running the source engine, so it looks pretty good too. 

Nope, it could be that simple. As to how much coin... thirty, forty million maybe? These deals can be highly desirable to publishers, since they make great insurance policies against disappointing retail performance. The developer may or may not be involved in the decision (Respawn wasn't even told about the Titanfall deal until the ink was already dry), and may or may not get any of the money... though it can be good for them anyway. It's a lot easier to go back and ask your publisher for more money if somebody just poured a dump truck full of cash on them. Besides, they're on the hook now too.

Fans obviously hate it, but nothing to be done there. I've always had doubts about most exclusivity deals' value, though, especially ones like this where the platform holder negotiates timed exclusivity on an IP it doesn't control.

Microsoft has always been pretty aggressive with exclusivity bombs, but its bull/china shop approach hasn't been terribly impressive to date. Gears of War and Dead Rising come to mind as examples of good investments; the same can't be said of Titanfall, Ryse, Crackdown, Alan Wake, or any number of others. Surely MS can't believe an IP as old and laden with baggage as Tomb Raider will sell a lot of hardware, so really all it's managed to do is irk customers. Sony deploys exclusivity in a more subtle way, using exclusives to burnish the brand's overall desirability, rather than try and sell a bunch of consoles. 

I agree Dix.  Even though I'm not super disappointed in that I can wait for the PC version, I still find the logic baffling.  It gives the impression that Microsoft is desperately grasping for things to differentiate the Xbox One-Eighty.

My cup runneth over. I have The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Defense Grid 2, Wasteland 2, and Ancient Space all lined up and looking at me.