The Rolling Stones or the Beatles? Soup or salad? League of Legends or Dota 2? These are the most important three decisions any human must make during their entire lifetime (suck it, Sophie's Choice). Today, we're going to take a look at the only one that really applies to a video game website - soup or salad, sorry, League of Legends or Dota 2.

Both games are excellent in their own rights, but the developers behind them have each taken different approaches to the focal points of each game, and we can make some educated guesses about where each of these games are headed to ensure that you, the player, choose the game most suited to your tastes.

Gameplay

Dota 2 very closely adheres to the design of the original DotA format. There's a huge number of heroes, and the rules are designed to greatly favor cautious play throughout almost an entire match. Players can kill their own creeps and towers when they're low on health (referred to as denying) to reduce the gold gains by an opponent. The map is large and complex, with dozens of secret paths and nuances that take many, many matches to thoroughly learn.

The roster of heroes is primarily balanced around hard-counters. If you're getting steamrolled by an opposing hero, there's a good chance it was designed specifically for the purpose of steamrolling you. This means that team composition tends to revolve around counter-picking your opponents as best you can. You can make up for being counter-picked to some extent through itemisation, which is complex and filled with items that might as well be entirely new abilities.

There's a lot of depth to Dota 2, but it's also brutally punishing. You lose gold upon death, and due to denying, laning can be very frustrating for beginners. The user-interface for skill use is also pretty minimalistic – you tend to have to know what an ability does, as there are very few on-screen hints. Oh, and almost no matter what kind of character you pick, your primary damage source will be from auto-attacks. Skills don't really scale with items, and most heroes have rather long cooldowns on their skills anyway.

In other words, if you've played the original Warcraft III mod, you'll be pretty at-home with Dota 2. Valve's current approach is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Riot Games believed that it was broken, though, and have made removing what it deems unnecessary or counter-productive elements of DotA from League of Legends a core element of its game design. Denying is gone, and the standard 5 VS 5 map is a great deal simpler than DotA's byzantine network of groves. You don't lose money when you die either, which makes the beginner's experience a little friendlier.

Champions are designed around filling a niche in a team, rather than undoing an opponent, which makes team composition more focused around how well a team's skill set complements one another. There's still an element of counter-play, but it's not as prevalent or as capable of completely shutting down an opponent as it is in DotA.

League of Legends also tends to push the boundaries of the genre a little more, introducing new game modes and maps designed for smaller teams. It's not always perfect, but Riot acknowledges issues and tends to address them... eventually. The 3 VS 3 map, for example, recently underwent a complete overhaul designed to make it playable by a wider variety of Champion types.

Value

Off the back of the successful transition to free-to-play for Team Fortress 2, Valve has virtually copied the business model and applied it to Dota 2. For the low, low price of nothing, players gain access to the full roster of heroes which, currently, numbers just shy of 100. That's pretty incredible, all things considered. It means you can download the game and immediately, and systematically, figure out which heroes best suit your play-style. But not everything is free.

Like TF2, play enough Dota 2 and you'll eventually collect some cosmetic loot, designed to augment the appearance of one of your heroes. Sometimes, you'll instead receive a chest, which can only be cracked open with purchasable keys. If you really want to personalize your Dota 2 experience, voice-over announcers (including Half-Life 2's Dr. Kleiner), couriers and complete armour bundles are also available. Interestingly enough, if you want to watch one of the regularly-held tournaments from your game browser, you'll need to pony up a little dough.

By comparison, and at least at a glance, more than 90% of League is locked away. In actual fact, most of the important stuff, like new champions, can be picked up with currency earned in-game, though at a pretty slow rate. While it's a bit of a bummer that League tends to prevent players from checking out new characters the way you might be able to in Dota 2, it makes the initial learning curve much less steep. Most new players will, like yourself, be limited to the ten champions available in the weekly free champion rotation.

In the store, only purely-cosmetic items have to be purchased with real money. The rest can also optionally be bought with the earned currency, and in fact, the more important items capable of augmenting your champions can only be bought with earned currency.

Some sweet Jarvan vs. Nocturne art.

The Future

Valve will soon run out of DotA heroes to develop, and may very well turn to the community for further heroes. They're already crowdsourcing much of the loot. And given Dota 2's emphasis on the eSports experience and community involvement, it's entirely possible that something akin to a paid coaching service may be formalised. That may not even be necessary though, as the opportunity to cross-promote other Steam products through Dota 2, the way Valve has done with TF2, may be enough to keep the game profitable.

Riot's interests with League have always been to provide new, novel and highly polished experiences. To that extent, eSports staples such as the ability to record games have languished. Riot also has a history of revisiting failed ideas and finding a way to make them work. Canceled champions have found themselves un-canceled, and spectator mode finally made it to wide release (though after a very long delay). Perhaps even the elusive Magma Chamber will one day hit your hard-drive. At some point, however, the volume of playable champions will become unreasonably large, and I suspect Riot will look to other information-heavy games such as Magic: The Gathering for a solution. League of Legends is already divided into seasons, it's reasonable to expect older champions to rotate out, giving Riot room to shape and change the meta-game.

Which camp do you find yourself rooting for? Let us know in the comments.

Nick Kolan is a former IGN staffer, now Australia-based freelancer. You can follow him on IGN here, and while you're at it, why not check out IGN Australia on Twitter, and join in our Facebook shenanigans?

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