I have been playing Pillars of Eternity as a second job the last week+. It's a fantastic old-school RPG. I am on my third restart, but I think I am pretty happy with my current setup. My current party of four would annihilate my old party of six. If you like Wasteland 2, I think you'll like Pillars. If you're looking for a hardcore RPG, Pillars fits the bill. I also got it set up to work on my Xbox for Windows controller using another app called Controller Companion. I still need to use the keyboard every so often for a few things, but it works pretty well.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XcE-uOqZ26Y" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> It may not have the viewership, but it'll eclipse LoL on streaming sites like Twitch when it takes over in Korea. It's about the only country where Dota 2 isn't as popular or already exceeded LoL in popularity. Thankfully Koreans treat their gamers like gods. Dota 2 is dominated elsewhere in the world. I believe it's even eclipsed LoL in China and they too treat their pros like celebrities. Here's what I like about Dota 2 more than LoL though. You can switch up lanes and lineups. In LoL, there's always one jungle, 1 support bot, 1 ad carry, 1 person top and 1 mid. You never see aggressive or defensive trilanes. You never see 2 people lane mid. You never anything different in LoL like that. It's always the same basic generic 1 top, 1 mid, 1 jungle, 2 bot strat. It's always fight over Dragon at 5,10,15 minutes until you gain enough of a gold lead that your team has 5 slotted items while the other team is 4 slotted and you can actually win a teamfight. That's winning LoL in a nutshell in the competitive scene. Gradually starving the other team of gold until they can't keep up with item progression. There's no split pushing. There's no all in pushing lineup tactics. There's no comeback mechanics really like in Dota 2. It's just slowly starve the other team of gold until you have an item advantage strategy. And it's not much fun IMO and certainly not as dynamic as Dota 2. There's no creep denying. Most if not all heroes have the same basic boring skillset. A "Q" skillshot. An ability with some sort of AoE damage, slow or stun, and a skill to move closer or away from an enemy. All abilities are highly spammable so you don't even to think about mana conservation. You can just spam Q whenever it's up with no worries. Teleporting to base is free. You're given a free observer ward and the cost of additional wards is cheaper in LoL than in Dota 2. It's truly ez mode and the gameplay isn't as dynamic or fun because of it. Watching the most recent Worlds was incredibly boring as a Dota 2 fan. For one, I saw many games where after 25 minutes, neither team got a single kill on each other. It was 0-0. There would be team fights but ultimately what would happen is both teams would fight, waste their flash cooldown and spells, then disengage. Gamecasters had to make a big deal over flash being used as though it was game deciding because there would literally be zero action on the map besides fighting over creep score. Then the real final nail in the coffin for me as a Dota 2 fan over LoL is it's employees. I know I posted about it before involving now LoL employee Pendragon, but he really tried to screw over the Dota community. Pendragon used to own and operate www.dota-allstars.com website. Back then it was literally the only website you could go to for dota content. Pro teams posted there. Fans of the game that wanted to add more content like new heroes, new items or gameplay/balance ideas, could post on the dota-allstars forum and get voter feedback. If it got enough up votes, it would then go to map developer Icefrog and it was very possible you could see your own hero creation implemented sometime in the future. When LoL first started up and was in competition vs Dota knock off Heroes of Newerth, Pendragon shutdown the dota-allstars website, lied about putting the website back up again after a week of downtime and then replaced the website with a promotion of League of Legends, which said Dota was dead and to give this free game like Dota a chance instead. So not only did he kill a thriving community with millions of active members after promising to at least give the content posted by users on the forum back, he lied about it, and then stole hero concepts on the dota forum and gave them to LoL heroes like Teemo instead. Teemo was a Dota hero concept. Jarvan IV's ultimate was a Dota hero concept. Master Yi is just a Juggernaut/Ember Spirit knockoff. The list for stolen hero concepts goes on actually. So Pendragon is as skummy, lying thief. When Valve got the rights to start up Dota 2, Pendragon tried to screw that up too. He took the content of the dota-allstars website to Blizzard and sold the creative rights of it to them, so Valve couldn't create a Dota 2 instead. Thankfully Blizzard and Valve are on friendly terms with one another and saw how petty Pendragon and the owners of LoL were being and gave the creative rights to make Dota 2 to Valve. This was all while going on while lone map developer Icefrog was making balance updates and introducing new heroes created by forum members for at least 5 years running without making a dime off of it. When he got hired by Valve and was given the job of making Dota 2, I personally was really happy for the guy. He worked his butt off keeping a map alive on an outdated Warcraft 3 engine for a number of years just to keep millions of gamers happy across the globe, and he didn't make a cent off of it. He never badmouthed Pendragon or LoL when all of that drama was going on. He just started up another dota website to download new map versions and kept cranking out new content. To see him get hired by Valve after all those years makes me really happy for the guy. So when I see ESPN do a news segment on the International and TI5 winners Evil Geniuses, I know Dota 2 is going in the right direction and it makes me happy knowing it's origin story and how employees within Riot tried to sabotage its success and failed at it. To see it gain the kind of popularity and success it has, makes it all the sweeter to me as a fan of Dota for over a decade now. Probably posted an essay again. Yep...I did.
