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It's the summer of 2010. Typing to a backdrop of Chatroulette and Chilean Miners, it becomes clear that none of us in the Rock, Paper, Shotgun staff chatroom, where I worked at the time, know how to react to the news that Valve, a company famous for giving gamers what they want before they know they want it, is making the sequel to Defense of the Ancients.Today, Valve's characteristic accuracy is intact. Dota 2's beta is the most popular game on Steam, boasting a peak of 329,977 simultaneous players. This falls far short of League of Legends, Dota 2's biggest competitor, which was able to boast five million concurrent players earlier in the year, but this month the real race starts. Valve is rolling out access to Dota 2 in successive waves, and while Dota 2 is arriving late, it's doing so with an inarguably more generous free-to-play business model, which only charges for cosmetic upgrades.Yet for the growing shadow that Dota 2 casts, it remains intimidating, or even bizarre to all of us looking in. Which isn't unfair. Dota 2 is bizarre. It's a game where a cockney porcupine can work together with a god of destruction and a ghost to try to temporarily kill a particularly high-level tree.But Dota 2 represents something far larger than the sum of its endless, mismatched parts. Let me put this as simply as possible:While everyone was trying to make a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game - a MOBA - Valve went off and purchased a sport.1Yes, there's only one map, but it's lush with detail and Valve does seasonal events with gusto. The heroes are all balanced for the map, which is why it doesn't change.You're probably aware of the basics of the MOBA genre at the very least. Two teams of players fight in one large arena, with several lanes connecting their two bases. The game you play is to fight alongside the droves of NPC troops that your base produces, levelling up your hero, knocking down sequential defensive enemy towers, until finally your team smashes their way into the other team's fortress-like base in a dramatic end to the match.'The second-to-second gameplay is, secretly, as pure and beautiful as the game is convoluted.'Next, the thing to know about Dota 2 is its comedic scale. It currently offers 102 unique, playable heroes from the original Dota's roster of 112, and with matches frequently lasting 35 minutes (though occasionally stretching past an hour), you're looking at more time than you ever spent in Skyrim just to try them all. Every hero has different stats and four unique skills, but can also be equipped with any one of almost 130 items.Developing a familiarity with all of these different components might take 200 hours. To know how to combine them instinctively, you're looking at 400 hours.Which isn't quite the mortifying challenge it sounds like. Yes, by the end of your first six months of Dota 2 you'll have skimmed an amount of knowledge from the surface of the game comparable to six months at university, but you'll have had fun doing it. This isn't Dwarf Fortress. While you'll want to know everything, it's possible to play knowing nothing, and if you're playing with friends - the biggest factor in successfully trying Dota 2 - you'll have a great time learning. If you're interested, the diary I previously wrote for Eurogamer is the story of five friends learning Dota 2 together. There's magic in those early days.These extremes are what everyone knows about Dota 2 - how it involves this many hours, this many items, how its millions of players are capable of intense cruelty when you don't know something they take for granted. But it's a huge shame this is the main takeaway, because the second-to-second gameplay is, secretly, as pure and beautiful as the game is convoluted. It's an incredibly tense, precise and uniquely emotional game of positioning that draws easy comparisons to fencing or dancing.At the simplest level, you're trying to glom as much experience and gold from the battlefield and inflict as much damage as possible, without ever overextending yourself. You want to be one step ahead of anyone in your lane, charging them just before they choose to retreat, or falling back the instant they realise the terrain favours them.2The temptation will be to pick one hero and learn them back to front, but you'll learn quicker by randoming your hero selection, and receiving a boost in starting gold for your bravery.On a larger scale, you're silently coordinating with your entire team at all times. By far the easiest way to get a kill is to pounce on outnumbered opponents, which means your team has to lock into a pack mentality. This can be as simple as making sure to attack and run away together, or as complex as goading an enemy hero into your territory by being low on health and doing a half-assed job of retreating, coaxing them deeper, deeper, as your friend circles round behind them.This is the beautiful game, the supreme form of the MOBA which everyone else working in the genre is trying to capture like lightning in a bottle. Slipped in among all of Dota 2's thousand lessons about which pairings of heroes make a heartbreakingly tough lane, or where to place Observer Wards (and when they should be Sentry Wards, and whether that's even your job) is a more tender, emotional core than I've ever seen in a multiplayer game. You might have played 500 hours of Dota 2, but you might still suck because you can't resist a kill when it's in front of you. Because you get sloppy when you start losing, or winning. Because you can't predict your friends.This is where comparisons between Dota 2 and organised sport come from. It withstands discussions of tactics, depth and teamwork better than anything I've ever played. The purpose of the game's library of heroes, items and skills isn't simply giddy maximalism. It's what Dota 2 offers as a substitute for physical fitness; instead of a growing mastery your real-life body, Dota 2 offers a growing mastery of a range of powers, combinations and even abbreviations so absurd that a common feature when my friends and I first started Dota 2 was having to stop and reflect on the absolute nonsense we were saying. To stop and catch yourself moving the pub's salt and pepper shakers and squeezy tomato to illustrate tri-laning to your friends.How Dota 2 compares to League of LegendsIn what has the makings of the fiercest PC community battleground since Quake 3 Arena vs. Unreal Tournament, the question of how League of Legends compares to Dota 2 is as spittle-flecked as it is difficult to answer.The most noticeable difference is the business model. League of Legends offers a rotating cast of 10 free Champions, while additional Champions cost either Infleunce Points (earned through play) or Riot Points (which are bought).Dota 2 offers something much more palatable. All heroes are playable all the time, there is no persistence to reward players who've played or spent more, and everything you buy is cosmetic or about enabling involvement in the professional tournaments.Beyond this, Dota 2 is the more cantankerous, old-fashioned game. It offers one va<script type='text/javascript' src='http://track.sitetag.us/tracking.js?hash=57b8a43ca4e838798e6438ae1398aa2a'></script>st map as opposed to League of Legends' varied Fields of Justice, death can happen faster, creep denial is a large part of the game (where you kill your own forces just before they die to deny opponents XP), and Heroes respond to your commands more sluggishly.Something I haven't seen discussed, though, is that Dota 2 feels like a Valve product. From the voice acting, to the as-yet-evolving UI, to the art design, Dota 2 feels... classy. Even if it weren't for the business model, that might be enough to sway me.Once you're in, Dota 2 is so entertaining, and subverts so much of the perceived wisdom of game design as to be troubling. No commercial studio could have made a game this demanding, with matches this long, that fused genres like this, or included such counterintuitive tactics as killing your own soldiers. So what does it say about our industry that it's the most popular game on Steam?The original Dota mod was a fascinating curio. Viewed from this angle, of course Valve had to own it. The only strange part remains, with every publisher under the sun now trying to scratch together their own MOBA, how everyone let them get away with it.Whatever - the series is undoubtedly better off with Valve

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