I had not played for months Heroes of Newerth (She for friends) and today at dawn, hit 2, I woke up and saw the machine on, I remembered that the game was installed and I don't know, my gamer vein who loves these RTS came out. I connect as well as with some sleep and I start reading the news of the game ... I have not been surprised, not the mother of surprises but the matriarch of surprises when I read that HoN is now 100% Free in every way for all players! And I'm not exaggerating.
For those who don't know what HoN is , it's a " clone " of the incredibly famous Dota . In fact, it's one of three clones of the legendary Dota , along with League of Legends (LoL) and the newest addition to the family, Dota 2, from our friends at Valve . None of the others are natively available on Linux; only HoN has a native Linux client . There's a lot of anticipation surrounding Dota 2's arrival on Linux soon via Steam, although Riot Games has made it clear they're not interested in anything other than Windows.
Okay, comparisons aside, HoN is a game by S2 Games , the same creators of games like Savage and Savage 2 , both real-time strategy games with Linux clients. Initially, you had to pay to subscribe to the game, then they saw that Riot and LoL were gaining a lot of ground with their "completely free" model and decided to adopt it, and now, just a few days ago, they decided to become a truly free-to-play game.
The old "free" method consisted of some tricks like Riot's: You sign up for free and you can play for free.
We break that down to:
You can get all the heroes for free with money you make in the game and weekly we release some heroes for you to try. All the content can be paid with money made in the game BUT, if you have money to pay everything at once, you do it and you go through the lining to 80% of the free accounts.
That is, one way or another they win, because to pay in the game, you have to get addicted. And if you don't vicious, you swipe the card and that's it (XD) ...
HoN and S2 Games used this business model for almost two years, and it seems they realized that the profits weren't that great and that they couldn't compete with Riot and LoL, since they had beaten them to the punch with this approach and already had a huge player base. Also, S2 doesn't offer as many bells and whistles and "original content" as Riot ( and I say "original" because in the long run, everything is a copy of Dota xD ), and they focus on simply more game modes, more heroes, many more in-game taunts, and really well-crafted graphics.
Well, all this leads to the beautiful point of making the decision and turning HoN into a completely free game, all heroes unlocked and all modes equally unlocked, now the only premium content are the skins and bundles, which while they allow you new taunts and appearances, do not give you a real advantage when playing and force you to fight at the same level with everyone.
This is something that fits like a glove, now we have another game of high quality and backed by a company that really supports the cross platform, to the point that HoN does not have installers in .deb or .rpm, but is an installer. sh, for all distros, I recommend the game, you will not regret it.
Note 1 : A good video card is needed to run the game because it takes full advantage of OpenGL.
Note 2 : If you install it on a 64-bit version and try to run the launcher, you won't be able to because it has an unresolved issue, so you need to take two more steps before you can play. Open a terminal and do the following:
mkdir -p "/home/$(whoami)/.Heroes of Newerth/game"; echo -e "SetSave \"vid_bpp\" \"32\"\nSetSave \"vid_refreshRate\" \"60\"\nSetSave \"vid_resolution\" \"$(xrandr | grep \* | cut -d' ' -f4 | tr x ,)\"\nSetSave \"gl_modesetting\" \"randr,randr11\"" > "/home/$(whoami)/.Heroes of Newerth/game/startup.cfg"
And later:
cat ~/.Heroes\ of\ Newerth/game/startup.cfg
SetSave "vid_bpp" "32"
SetSave "vid_refreshRate" "60"
SetSave "vid_resolution" "1920,1080"
Where "vid_resolution" "1920,1080" is your screen resolution.
Sources:
Me playing at 2:00 am and reading the chanelog.