Ah. This will likely annoy those folks in the League Of Legends thread who said they played Heroes Of Newerth because the entry fee kept out the rabble. Well, now the rabble is coming for you! Don’t worry too much, though, because you can always set up your games to filter those pesky free accounts, and keep to the “legacy” players. Legacy is what your account will called if you paid for HoN in the past, apparently. Which keeps it all nice and tidy.

Still, I’ve just had a read of the HoN forums. Oof.

Yesterday’s denial of service attacks on Minecraft, Eve Online and League of Legends do not appear to be the end of hacker collective Lulzsec’s attempts to force online games offline. Heroes of Newerth’s login server was named a victim around an hour ago, shortly followed by the group declaring its intention to target Eve again tonight. That may of course be a double-bluff, but keep it in mind if you’re intending to play tonight.

Then, just moments ago, they stated that they were now rerouting calls to their ‘requests’ phone number to World of Warcraft’s customer support line. They claim their line, alleged by some to be a premium rate number, receives between 5 and 20 calls a second at present. Whether this signals an impending attack on WoW itself remains to be seen, but the group currently appear to be focusing efforts on phone rerouting.

From today until the 22nd, to be precise. It’s all to celebrate one year since the game’s launch. A bit like a birthday, only a for a game, which had a long beta. This means that you can pay the hero-based multi-player teamplay combat arena thinga-game (did we ever actually ever get past the “DOTA-clone” name for these? Was it a MOBA? I am so tired) for nil pennies! I know how excited that makes you, so don’t just sit there vibrating, go take a look at the website, where details of registration and downloads can be found, understood, and executed.

I played this a bunch last year. It was tough. I am a nood.

As evidenced by this awesomely overblown splash page, the Defense of the Ancients-inspired Heroes of Newerth has emerged, angry and red-hot, from the furnaces of development into a new era of “2.0”. The upgrades include a new Casual mode, improved matchmaking, an improved interface, a map editor, a new map and (wait for it) a new micro-transaction store! Yes, players can now buy cosmetic and flair upgrades with Goblin Coins! That’s just a name the developers made up, though. You don’t have to go out and find actual coins belonging to goblins or anything. 2.0 trailer after the jump.
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Is there a better genre name for these games than “a bit like Defense Of The Ancients”? I mean I was going to go with “Champion-based Tower Defence”, but that seems too wordy. Anyway, whatever the taxonomy of the game, it’s free to play Heroes Of Newerth for this week. I had a good old crack at this when it came out, and frankly struggled a bit with the arcane and unfriendly community, but it’s quite the game once you begin to master the rhythm of things, and figure out how to avoid getting insta-ganked when things go awry. Probably worth taking a look this week if you’re going to give it some time, that way you can be sure of full newbie servers. And I mean that in the kindest possible way. Even HoN’s newbie servers can be a little challenging for beginners.

S2 Games’ Heroes Of Newerth (fantasy multiplayer tactical combat in the vicinity of Defense Of The Ancients) is all set for release on Wednesday. I think that gives you close to two days to leap onto the open beta and see what all the fuss is about – the fuss being the IGF audience award earlier this year and a claim of two million people on the beta. Exciting illustrative video ‘neathwards.
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Once we get past early summer things get a little hazy. We enter a nether-realm of shifting dates and unclear prophecies. By then we’ll also have a whole bunch of games I haven’t previously mentioned show up in the intervening months, stuff that we didn’t have release dates for to place them in our line-up. This final post in our preview attempts to survey them all. To the future! (And check out part one and two if you haven’t seen them already.)
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Heroes of Newerth has been in Open Beta for a while now and the opinion-blocking NDA has now been dropped at last. As such, a perfect time for Beta-Boy Phill Cameron to SHARE BRAIN THOUGHTS via WORDS.

Man, I’m really impressively bad at Heroes of Newerth.
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…just for one Beta period. Matt Coddington gave us the heads up on this. Heroes of Newerth are giving 30,000 keys away via Facebook. There’s 27K odd left at the time of writing, so time for you all to get into this videogame thing. If you don’t know about it, it’s another of the Defence of the Ancients derived games which are appearing this year (See also: Demigod). Anyway, go get your code here or watch some manner of footage below…
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