League of Legends: Update

I recently had the chance to participate in the beta. I wish I could be reporting with great excitement, but I am afraid the truth is nothing close. I consider myself a pro PC gamer, and a huge DOTA fan, so leading readers to believe this game is gonna be outstanding would be wrong.

On the bright side, the game has done a lot with the Summoner control (which is basically your account name or avatar). You have a talent tree that can give your champion random stat increases as you level. You gather runes from winning matches, which also give your champion random stat increases. Basically you can build different champion styles (offensive, defensive, support) with your runes and talents, which will translate to your champion in matches. It looks great, but honestly none of this is needed. After all is done, the more experience a player has, and the more games he wins, the more talents and runes he will have. It all adds up to buffing champions before the game even starts, which automatically takes away a strong DOTA feature, that is each player in each game starts completely fresh and statless (in other words: no advantage). The Summoner buffs give a slight advantage to a player before the game even starts.

The map control was horrible. I had trouble moving the screen, looking at other points on the map, and even moving within my given screen. There is too many icons and too much clutter on the screen. They lose nearly 20% of the view holding all the ad-ons. It was a nightmare. The graphics were too cartoonish. The enemy creeps were hard to single target for last kills or denies. I found myself mostly just running into the battle and spamming abilities. My champion was strong, so mostly I survived, but I never felt in full control of what I was doing. That is never a good thing.

I did like how the item shop functioned. It was easy to find recipes, and select items to complete them. They also suggested items, and helped me decide how to build my champion. This part of the game was a definite upgrade to DOTA. I am sure within a few matches I would be easily selecting my items without help.

Most of the champions were mirror images of DOTA heroes, as I expected. There were multiple champion imbalances, but thats normal for a beta. I would expect League of Legends to follow a similar growing process that DOTA did, patching from v1.0 to the current v6.61b, in which imbalances and game bugs were corrected.

Riot has closed the beta for League of Legends at this point. They might be fixing critical errors before releasing another round of beta, or pushing for game completion and release. Either way, I find it hard to think that this game will be successful. They took a great game, with worldwide attention (DOTA), and threw together a cheap copy with added useless features that basically make each match start with uneven advantages. The graphics make the game harder to play, the map control is impossible, and the voice prompts (for example "Mega-Kill") are terrible.

This game needs alot of work before pulling pro gamers into a League of Legends movement. Although, I do think that a massive amount of newbs will be excited to join. Most of the beta testers never even played DOTA, Im sure there was a reason for that. Time will tell. No need for real DOTA fans to worry though, a new game has been beta testing with incredibly positive results. This game is a true upgrade to DOTA. Stay tuned...

... and GAME HARD