The lane-based RTS genre is getting a little crowded with competitors including Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, and Dota 2. It seems that this genre is the flavor of the week and every developer wants their piece of the pie. Blizzard's long anticipated StarCraft 2 version of the incredibly popular WarCraft III map mod, Defense of the Ancients, has finally been revealed.

At BlizzCon this weekend blizzard gave us our first look at Blizzard DOTA and it's a fairly interesting approach they have taken. Blizzard seems to have made taken the basic Dota formula and made it their own by both using characters from the Blizzard universe and adding new basic features such as chess-themed energy depleting towers. Characters from World of Warcraft - including Thrall and Arthus - as well as the witch doctor from Diablo III are just a few of the personalities from the Blizzard universe that are available as playable characters.

The trailer that debuted at Blizzcon took itself fairly lightly, explaining how the players will be red or blue gods battling using kidnapped characters from the Blizzard universe to use as pawns in their game of DOTA. Check out the humorous, action-packed and visually pleasing trailer for Blizzard DOTA below.

[HTML1]

The gameplay looks fast-paced and action packed as the trailer presents large groups of enemies and players with explosions and ice blasting across the map. Since the game is built off of the StarCraft Engine, the graphics are vastly improved over the DotA graphics from Warcraft III and will definitely compete with the other new generation DotA games from a visual standpoint. The new gameplay elements introduced sound like they could really change the overall feel and strategies required to play the game well.

It's interesting that Blizzard chose to take a more comedic and light-hearted route with DOTA as battle between the Blizzard characters in a crossover game similar to Super Smash Bros.. The games from Blizzard have so much lore and interesting character designs it won't be hard for new playable characters to be added consistently to Blizzard DOTA to keep players invested.

Blizzard DOTA is expected to be released alongside the StarCraft 2 expansion, Heart of the Swarm, which should is likely sometime in mid 2012 or "soon...ish."

Is there a character from a Blizzard game you hope they include at some point?

-

Follow me on Twitter @Alex_Sebenski