Ahh - finally found a pretty good analysis Demigod vs. DOTA and the like - by Big D. of isoleeted.com - thought I'd drop it here for your viewing pleasure:
SKIP TO THE END FOR AN OVERALL CONCLUSION OF EACH GAME
Personally, I've been playing Demigod since about June of 2009 and I was in the top 30 players recently. My win rate went down now but I used to play with the #1 ranked player until he went to work for the Vancouver Olyimpics. I've also had access to HoN for many months and more recently, I've been playing League of Legends - made by the guys who created DOTA. I think I'm in a good position to tell you which is the better game, depending on what you like. Here it goes:
Demigod
Good
- Great graphics. HoN and LoL look a lot like Warcraft 3 / DOTA. Demigod looks like a 2009/2010 FPS game. All its levels look great and mythical/magical as well. One level is a concrete snake held by a statue of a man in space, another is an Aztec-style level with waterfalls in the sky, surrounded by clouds, etc. They're all very unique and not your typical forest level.
- Camera zoom/rotation. If you've played SupCom, that's exactly how it is. At any point, you can zoom out to see the entire map or in on an individual unit. You can move the camera freely, go top-down or put it on the ground level. Since the graphics, special effects and animation are great, you can take really nice screenshots and/or videos.
- Gameplay - Citadel upgrades. This is not DOTA. HoN and LoL focus on PvP and nothing else. You get money by killing other players or creeps/npcs and you buy items for yourself. Demigod is not like that. You CAN buy items for yourself to increase all your stats, but your team also needs to upgrade the citadel (your base building) in order to get stronger minions (like catapulsauries and giants which can easily take out enemy buildings) or tower regeneration, stronger towers and buildings, more base gold or XP per second, etc. In most cases, if one team manages to get their war score to level 10 and buys giants while the other team doesn't, they'll win.
- Gameplay - Flags. Again, this is not DOTA. You capture flags like in the Battlefield games. You stand on a flag for a while to cap it. Each flag gives you things like more gold/hp/mana per second or access to a healing crystal or portals which spawn creeps. More importantly though, flags give you War Score. There are 10 War Score levels. Each one unlocks new things you can buy at your citadel to help your team. Usually, the team with the higher war score wins, that's why this isn't like Dota/HoN/LoL. You can't win if you're selfish in Demigod. Everyone on your team has to buy upgrades like stronger minions so that your team can push back the enemy team. Even if you get really good items for yourself, if the other team gets giants and you're a few War Score levels behind, you're pretty f*cked. In that sense, Demigod has way more strategy than Dota/HoN/LoL and it's a much deeper game.
- Gameplay – Favor Items and Shopping. Like in the other games, you shop for items. The more they cost, the better they are. They can increase your damage, attack speed, cooldown, hitpoints, mana, life steal, etc. You can’t get below .5 attack speed (you start at 1.3-1.5 seconds) and you can’t increase your magical ability power unless you have an ability which removes armor, makes enemies take more damage and so on. On top of that, you unlock Favor Items and select one favor item at the beginning of each match. Once selected, you can't change it until the match is over. Favor items give you abilities or boosts for speed, damage, cooldown, etc. and you buy them using favor points you get at the end of each match. You get favor points for winning, getting the most kills, most assists, making the most gold that round, etc.
- Concede option available anytime.
Bad
- No voice chat. Because of this, some people use Ventrilo to talk to their friends. This means you're a pre-made team. That means you win more often but fewer people will want to play against you.
- Server browser + P2P. This means that you host a game and people join it. The problem is, people will join, see that you've won 80% of your games and leave. Lately, it's been very hard to get games going because if I'm playing with my friend(s), it shows that we played 50% of our games together, for example, so random people usually won't want to play against us. This means there's a lot of waiting to get games going once you become good.
- Flawed Match-making. Now there is a "Pantheon" mode where you join, pick a Demigod and the game matches you up against other people. Why this is bad: You have to pick either the Light or Dark side your first time in Pantheon. This means you get access to half the Demigods (5) on that side. Pantheon only matches Light vs Dark teams, so if there are 5 Light players and 1 Dark player are waiting to play, the game will not start. Also, you can't switch sides until the next reset (Dark or Light side have to reach one million war score points or something then it resets). If they matched up ANY Demigods, you'd get games going much faster.
- Can't rejoin a game you got disconnected from.
Heroes of Newerth
Good
- OK cartoony graphics. You can't zoom out much, like in DOTA/WC3 and the action happens very quickly, but it looks nice overall. Smooth camera scrolling while holding down the middle mouse button.
- Voice chat. Only one of the bunch with that. Some people use it but not too much.
- Lots of items here as well, but you have your main store, a Secret Shop and an Outpost. The latter two are usually somewhere farther from your spawn and have more powerful/expensive items. You can combine items to create stronger items so you can fit about 6 in your inventory.
- Around 60 characters to pick from. On the flip side, it takes many, many matches to actually get used to what each guy can do so don't be surprised to suddenly see a fire dragon biting you, a giant kung-fu panda hitting you with a bat and stunning you, or strings suddenly appearing and pulling you back.
- You can rejoin a game if you get disconnected. You can host games with a "no leavers" option so people who leave often can't join.
- Dedicated servers host your game when you start one. You then have lots of options for evening teams, stats on/off, etc.
- Persistent stats (if you buy the game), I believe.
- rewards skill in the sense that people who get killing blows on creeps get money and others don't. You level very quickly so if you play smart and level up quickly, you'll be much stronger than other people in your game.
Bad
- Complex item mixing. You have to scroll over all items to see which ones contain items you already purchased. It takes a while to do this until you get used to it, and since there are tons of items, you have to either take your time (and try not to get kicked for being idle) or go on the website and learn everything.
- Pretty fast-paced. Some rounds can last around 10 minutes. During that time, 1-2 guys can end up doing 4-5 times your damage or more. If you're not on a creep lane for 1-2 minutes, you're already a few levels behind.
- Not very newbie-friendly because of how fast-paced it is, how you don't have time to learn the characters and items unless you play 60-100 games or spend hours reading all the descriptions online. Items mixing is also not user-friendly.
League of Legends
Good
- Match-making. 5v5 matches literally get made in under 30 seconds each time. Average wait time was 26 seconds last time I played. You can't beat that. Is the match-making picking even teams? Ehh, I don't know about that. Most games are fairly one-sided towards the end so it's hard to tell. Most of my losses were when 2-3 of my allies went 0-10 or worse. This happens quite often on both teams. They have match-making explained on their website and it sounds good...
- Fun game. It's like HoN in the sense that you kill Champions and creeps to get money then buy items only for yourself. There are lots of items to buy and you can combine many of them to create more powerful items so you can fit 6 of those in your inventory.
- You can rejoin games if you get disconnected.
- Stats for your last 10 games. Graph stats at the end of each game.
- You can buy skins for your characters, runes and other small upgrades between games using real money or game money you get just by playing games (you get more if you win, of course).
- User-friendly item-mixing. When you click an item in the store, it shows what you need to combine to get that item. You then see a tree and you buy parts of it as you get more and more money. It's very easy to know what you're buying and what good item you're going for. You can see the store items regardless of where you are on the map, but you can only buy if you're in the spawn.
- You can teleport back to spawn at any time for free. The action takes 7 seconds though and you can't take damage during that time or it stops.
Bad
- Camera scrolls if you use arrow keys or touch the edges of the screen with your cursor. You can't zoom out a lot or middle click and drag to scroll.
- Graphics are pretty outdated. They're cartoony and pretty Warcraft 3 looking. Not ugly but technically outdated. (Around the DX7 level)
- No voice chat either
- concede option available only after 25 minutes. Sometimes this is fine, other times you'll wish you gave up sooner if everyone on your team is 0-15.
Conclusion
Demigod: Overall, Demigod is the deepest game (Flags/Citadel upgrades + great camera controls + zoom out all the way). Peristent stats of all games. If they took Demigod and added the voice chatting from HoN and match-making from LoL, it would be the best Dota/TD game by far. They keep adding features to it, which is nice, but the long wait times to start a game is what's ruining it. There's nothing wrong with it gameplay-wise. The wait times could be fixed completely by adding in the ability to pick ANY Demigod in Pantheon, but that hasn't been done yet. Costs $19.99 or less.
Heroes of Newerth: Still in beta, but there's about 30 thousand people playing it at any given time and they constantly give out Beta keys on Facebook. Only one of the games with built-in voice chatting but you can't zoom out much here either. Looks better than LoL, but not as nice as Demigod. Costs $30-40 to pre-order.
League of Legends: The only free game of the bunch. Wait times are under 30 seconds to get a 5v5 game going. Looks cartoony but it's fun and each week they allow you to use some free Champions on top of the ones you bought (using game money or real money). They also allow you to buy things to improve your stats permanently, skins for your characters, etc. if you're into that. It has lots of Champions to choose from but for now only 1-2 maps and a ranked 5v5 mode (solo or pre-made team). You have to use "Practice" mode to play 2v2, 3v3, etc. You can't zoom out much.
Topic: Demigod - advice? (Read 1392 times)