Laura Baker of S2 Games Interview

Laura Baker of S2 Games Interview (Heroes of Newerth Interview)


DVOTurk recently interviewed Laura Baker of S2 Games.

Here's the HoN interview: (fixed)

Can you please introduce us to yourself and to Heroes of Newerth?

I am Laura Baker, Marketing Manager of S2 Games. Heroes of Newerth (HoN) is a session-based, multiplayer, Action-RPG that is heavily inspired by the popular Warcraft 3 mod, Defense of the Ancients, but with vast improvements in graphics and gameplay.

As we all know, you've already integrated a tournament and a league system to the game. Will players see a commentary enabled replay system also? Will we be able to watch top tournament matches live? Will HoN's website cover these matches?

Replays will have an extensive and feature-rich website to navigate, rate, download and research replays. One of our goals will be to make certain tournament matches available for live viewing through the HoN website as well as multiple other possible portals.

It's known that HoN utilizes server-client based netcode and your servers actually hosts the game. Where in the world are these servers are hosted?

We have several hundred servers hosted all across the globe, including 5 continents. The number and placement of these servers will only grow with time.

It's known that HoN implements an in-game voice chat system. Do you think the voice chat system will affect the gameplay of players with low bandwidth connections?

The voice chat system uses a surprisingly low amount of bandwidth as does the game itself. Many people claim near perfect performance with pings of 450 or higher. While the quality of the voice chat may drop with low bandwidth connections, the communication itself should remain intact.

We know that the game records statistics of the player's deaths, kills and assists. One of the latest trends with online games is featuring an armory site for the game with player stats, items etc. Even some of these official armory sites provide data as XML allowing 3rd party developers to build their own mashups. Do you have any plans about these?

A large and extremely feature-rich Player Statistics website is being built and tied into the various other websites, including the clan portal, tournament site, league site, and replay site.

Will players see regional tournaments or events? Will we be able to see HoN tournaments in Turkey and in other European countries?

Tournaments will be everywhere. Along with large sponsored tournaments that hand out prizes of all sorts, individuals can create their own tournaments through the tournament site and run them their selves. This will allow tournaments to take place on any scale imaginable from global to regional to a LAN center.

Heroes of Newerth is a DotA Based Game being developed by S2 Games.