S2 Games' Heroes of Newerth is a huge step forward for DotA while still preserving all that makes DotA great

Unfortunately, it was due to this incredible similarity that I simply dismissed HoN as being too basic in its premise. Yes, here was DotA reinvented, but since S2 had decided to remodel and rename everything, and they hadn't ported over all of my favorite DotA heroes, Heroes of Newerth, at that time, was simply a better looking game with fewer heroes. So what was there to make me stay?

Server-side hosting.

You see, DotA is almost purely client-side hosting, which means that, in order to host a game, players simply connect to each other. Unfortunately, if the host of the game ends up lagging, all of the players end up lagging, and, should you disconnect from a game of DotA, there's simply no way to recover. The only way players can ensure that their game will have consistent connection speeds and response times is to play "in-house" games, where friends who live in the same area (or go to the same LAN center) all pile into one game that's being hosted by one of their own. This is, of course, not always possible, and it can get terribly frustrating when trying to play a game of DotA in between writing term papers at 4 AM, only to discover that all of the potential hosts live in South Korea.

Thus, in order to satisfy my late-night DotA cravings, I ended up turning to Heroes of Newerth; at least it could ensure me a lag-free game at 4 AM! At this point, development teams should definitely take note, because even though I was fanatically dedicated to DotA, it really was the little comforts, like server-side hosting, which lured me into Heroes of Newerth. What's made me stay, however, has been just how much effort S2 Games has put into the development of HoN and how much fun I've been having.

What sets Heroes of Newerth apart from its peers is just how polished this game really is. While hundreds of thousands of gamers (including me) were completely fine with playing DotA on Warcraft III's dated platform, all it takes is a few games of Heroes of Newerth to see the difference in sheer smoothness of game play. You see, Warcraft III was designed with high latency in mind, and things that DotA players have gotten used to, like slow turning speeds and action delay, are really ways for Warcraft III to mask latency. In this way, Heroes of Newerth was designed with gamers in mind, so response times are almost flawless.