Dota 2 in game screenshots gears

Dota 2 Spectating

I was going to write some notes about the interface, but it was incredible boring. It has some neat stuff like a breakdown of your top used heroes, and showing what level your friends are within their games but you can see that easily in a screenshot.

Where it really shines, however, are the various spectating features. You can see in that image right when you open the client you’re greeted with the “Top Live Matches”, presumably based on however the matchmaking algorithm works.

In addition to showing you who is on each team, the match time, and how many people are watching, hovering the mouse over the game brings up the hero choices, and which towers are destroyed. A single click from here will bring you to the game to observe. Thoroughly awesome.

When you want to watch games there are a few options. You can watch your friends by clicking them and spectating their games. You can click on the top live matches games mentioned earlier. There is also a “Watch” tab on the top bar of the main screen, that gives you two options: watching any live game that is currently happening (with a

3 minute delay) or watching recent games from the past few weeks.

The recent game tab is almost identical, except the view button is replaced with a details tab that brings up the standard statistics after a game is done, and a way to download the replay. It has one big advantage in having a filter button that lets you search for games with all kinds of parameters.

It’s basically SC2 Gears within the client itself. Note the checkbox for tournament games, using it brings up the list of games from the entirety of ESWC. Having those kinds of options around makes it easy to find both learning tools and ways to mock your friends.

There are some useful options for use within a game as well. The camera view has four separate modes:

• Directed: Camera automatically moves around to where there is action, by far the best mode. My understanding is that this uses the delay between live and when a spectator sees it to calculate where things happen, and as such it never misses a kill.
• Free: Spectator gets to move around, click on heroes to see items and abilities, standard observing like any game.
• Player Perspective: Shows the first-person view of a player, even shows their cursor moving across the screen.
• Hero Chase: Keeps a hero centered on the screen. Can switch between them by clicking their portrait on the top bar.

As with Starcraft 2, it also has a variety of tools to view various game metrics with.

Difference in Gold Earned

Shows how large the gulf is between the amount of gold both teams have collectively earned. Those dots on the bottom mark hero deaths, you can read details of the fight by hovering over them.

Gold and Experience

Gives the info on total gold for each team, a breakdown for how the total gold earned has been collected by each player, and also rates for experience per minute and gold per minute.

Shows items that every hero has, as well as what is in their stash (if any) and level information for all the players.

The rest of the information, standard kill/death/assist numbers as well as current gold and tallies for creep kills/denies. The green diamond that tells if their ultimate is up, and if in cooldown how many more seconds, is a nice touch and useful for viewing. During The International this was tied into a webpage that you could load independently of the stream that I think really added to spectating.

When all is said and done I’m more incredibly impressed at how nice the various spectating and replay tools are so far, and it looks like there are plans to make it even better given the presence of tabs on the menu called “Learn” and “Socialize”. The ability to jump in and out of games to watch while you wait for your own game is and incredible feature that I hope scales properly when more people are added to the game.

I don’t have any real criticisms so far, it’s been great every time I’ve looked through replays or watched someone live. The directed spectating feature in particular is really fun, it makes it easy to throw something up to watch while grabbing a snack or relaxing in between playing. The only annoyance I’ve faced is the inability to rewind replays, there is only forward motion, but even that has yet to be much of an issue.

I’m sure there is something snarky to say here about the state of this client in beta and Battlenet 2.0 but people should be able to draw their own conclusions. At the very least, the prospects of observing Dota in the future seem very bright.