League of Legends - Origins and Summary

The rather popular game based of a popular game based off another popular game.

 However if you have never heard of League of Legends, or it's acronym (LoL) I don't blame you.  It is a game based of a custom map from Warcraft III called Defense Against the Ancients. (DoTA)  If you aren't a big PC gamer, I've most likely lost you already so allow me to attempt to explain.  Warcraft III was a sequel in the long running Warcraft series, popularized recently in modern culture with World of Warcraft.

Within Warcraft III the software gave players the ability to create custom maps, which were battlefields you could fight inside of and were created away from the normal maps created by Blizzard.  These custom maps became so large and complex that some players were able to manulate events within the game to create differences in gameplay, becoming games within the game.  Liken this idea to the modern game LittleBigPlanet, with it's game creating ideas, but on a more primative scale.  This idea wasn't exactly new either, with other Blizzard RTS's having some of the same ideas in their map editors, but Warcraft III really hit this idea home, having a wide variety of tools to work with.  I told you all of that so I could get to DoTA.

(Yes, back in the old school days before 'pwning' noobs became common place you would actually have to pawn them for money.  Times were hard back then.)

DoTA is probably one of the most popular map mods for WC III, in fact there are reports showing that at many points in the game's history there were more players playing the variations of DoTA, than the actual Warcraft III gameplay online.

The game is played like a RTS RPG, with you being placed a 5 vs 5 team and selecting a champion from many different looks and abilities, most of these derived from Warcraft III champions since the custom maps generally supported only those kind of models, but after many updates a lot of variety was introduced, such as an ability that allows you to pull enemy champions through the trees to give your team a free kill.  You start in a base on the opposite side of the enemy player's base.  Inside the base is a place to heal you and to buy items with gold which is gained by killing champions and minions.  Minions are spawned from the base and travel down three lanes, of which players choose to fight inside of.

Your objective is to support the minions, "pushing" the lane and destroying the three towers in each lane to gain access to the enemies base to destroy while protecting yours.  While doing this you level up your champion, gain new items to give you stats while fighting the other team.  Between each lane was a forest of monsters that you could kill to get additional gold.

(This single image of the DoTA minimap better explains what I took an hour attempting to explain. -Sigh-)

If you're not quite grasping the image I'm explaining to you, don't worry.  DoTA had a lot of newances and variations which only got more complicated with each update, adding more and more to the game.  With all of this complexity and teamwork being required to play, the game got very competitive and developed the fan following it has to this day.  Myself included.

Now where League of Legends comes in is when Warcraft became older, not as many people played it, which means less people played DoTA.  The developers of the custom map wanted to put together a completely seperate game that didn't rely on Warcraft III.  This birthed League of Legends, a Free to Play game that has a lot of the same ideas, look and feel. I would consider it an evolution of the original game (Though many fans of old school DoTA would disagree with this accessment and might attempt to hunt me down..) LoL takes those key ideas of the game and replicates them with an updated graphics engine, completely new and original champions (but some based off of classic DoTA champions and ideas.) with some few changes.

(And here we see the wild Nunu in his natural habitant, a giant yeti with little kid attached to his back... Seriously, Nunu may be one of the biggest trolls in modern gaming.)

 I became interested in this game when my cousin showed me it one day, enjoying the free to play nature as well as the resemblence to DoTA, which I enjoyed very much back in the day and I've been playing it off and on through the many patches and changes.  While I feel it's a great game that accomplishes a lot, there's a lot of basic frustrations which I feel needs to be addressed.  So over the course of time I will be listing off the good and bad and ranting about what a lot of players don't talk about, or just plain don't think about enough.

This will be a multi post section, where I discuss what is wrong and I will attempt to offer logic that shows why I feel  things are the way they are and how I think it could be changed, which I think if taken seriously and is actually read, might help the game as a whole.

Thank you for reading this and I hope you'll enjoy the future posts to come, viewers.