Blizzard DOTA "flattened," rebuilt to be "more user friendly"

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Blizzard senior game designer Jonny Ebbert has been talking to Eurogamer about the current state of Blizzard's version of DOTA. It's being developed as a StarCraft 2 mod, but has been changed drastically since its showing at last year's Blizzcon . "We've completely flattened it since then," said Ebbert, "and completely rebooted it because we just thought, there's more we can question on this."

"Getting it right and just meeting the Blizzard quality bar, and questioning a lot of the assumptions behind the genre, which is what we do at Blizzard," he adds.

Blizzard didn't reveal any of the specific alterations they've made to the original formula, but Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce suggested that it's been changed to be more less daunting to newcomers.

"One of the game development philosophies we have at Blizzard is, easy to learn and difficult to master. That mod for Warcraft 3 doesn't really fit that description.

"DOTA's a very addictive game that chases the vast majority of people off because their team mates are screaming at them. We've always felt DOTA has a very accessible, easy to approach fun game deep down inside that's just waiting to come out.

"We've just been basically carving around that and trying to knock off all the rough edges and really make it more user friendly."

Blizzard's DOTA is set to be launched alongside StarCraft 2's first expansion pack, Heart of the Swarm in 2012.