Jul 7, 2014

Half-Life 2 review November 2004, UK edition

Half-Life

Every week, we publish a classic PC Gamer review from the '90s or early 2000s. This week, Ben Griffin provides context and commentary followed by the full, original text of our Half-Life 2 review, published in the November 2004 issue of PC Gamer UK. More classic reviews here.

What more can be said about Half-Life 2? Jim Rossignol's words below still do a fine job of summing up just why the world got worked up over a singleplayer shooter. November 2004 was a standout month for PC gaming, and indeed PC Gamer: a 96% for Valve's opus, 95% for Rome: Total War to a 95%, an 89% FIFA 2005, and Shade: Wrath of Angels with a, er, 59%.

But the game we called 'messianic' was all that mattered that month, and indeed, that year. Not only did it kick off Valve's (eventually) world-conquering Steam service, but it courted criminals too. After FBI involvement and a concerted effort from Valve's community, the stolen Half-Life 2 code was returned several anxious months later, but not after a making dear old Gabe sweat through a heavily delayed development schedule. Could this be the official birth of Valve time?

And Half-Life 2 still matters. Just shy of a decade on, memories linger in the collective conscious. The gravity gun. The hoverboat. Striders. Dog. Ravenholm, to which we definitely do not go. The game left an indelible mark on its landscape, and not only in terms of those iconic moments. Underneath it all, the Source engine gave modders and developers a good platform on which to base their game. It's still being used today albeit in a heavily modified form in Respawn's multiplayer shooter, Titanfall.

So there it is, one of the greatest PC games in history. Here's our original review in full.

Half-Life 2 review

It was all in that moment when I just sat back and laughed. I couldn t believe it was quite this good. I chuckled in muddled disbelief, expectations utterly defied. My nervous fingers reloaded the level, knowing that I had to see that breathtaking sequence one more time. It was then that I knew for certain: Valve had surpassed not only themselves, but everyone else too. Half-Life 2 is an astounding accomplishment. It is the definitive statement of the last five years of first-person shooters. Everything else was just a stopgap.

Half-Life 2 is a near perfect sequel. It takes almost everything that worked from Half-Life and either improves on it, or keeps it much the same. But that simple summation undersells how the Valve team have approached this task. Half-Life 2 is a linear shooter with most of the refinements one would expect from years of work, but it is also a game of a higher order of magnitude than any of the previous pretenders to the throne. The polish and the stratospheric height of the production values mean that Half-Life 2 is a magnificent, dramatic experience that has few peers.

It would be madness for me to spoil this game by talking about the specific turn of events, so spoilers are going to be kept to a minimum. We re going to talk about general processes and the elements of style and design that make Half-Life 2 such an energising experience. Key to this is the way in which Gordon s tale is told. Once again we never leave his perspective. There are no cutscenes, no moment in which you are anything but utterly embedded in Gordon s view of the world. Everything is told through his eyes. And what a story it is. Gordon arrives at the central station at City 17 a disruptive and chilling dystopia. And from there? Well, that would be telling. This is not the contemporary America that Gordon seemed to be living in during the original Half-Life. The events of Black Mesa have affected the whole world. The crossover with Xen has meant that things have altered radically, with hyper-technology existing alongside eastern bloc dereliction.

The world is infested with head-crab zombies and the aliens that were once your enemies now co exist amongst the oppressed masses. This very European city is populated by frightened and desperate American immigrants, and sits under the shadow of a vast, brutalist skyscraper that is consuming the urban sprawl with crawling walls of blue steel. It s a powerful fiction. City 17 is one of the most inventive and evocative game worlds we ve ever seen. The autocratic and vicious behaviour of the masked Overwatch soldiers immediately places you in a high-pressure environment. People look at you with desperate eyes, just waiting for the end to their pain, an end to the power of the mysterious Combine. Who are they? Why are you here? Who are the masterminds behind this tyranny? The questions pile up alongside the bodies.

Half-Life 2 isn t big on exposition, but the clues are there. You re thrust into this frightening near-future reality and just have to deal with it. Your allies are numerous, but they have their own problems. Your only way forward is to help them. And so you do, battling your way along in this relentless, compelling current of violence and action, gradually building up a picture of what has happened since Black Mesa. The Combine, the military government that controls the city in a boot-stamping-face kind of way, are a clear threat, but quite how they came to be and what their purposes are become aching problems. Once again Gordon remains silent, listening to what he is told so that you can find those answers for yourself.

But even with Gordon s vaguely sinister silence (something that is transformed into a subtle joke by the game s characters) there are reams of dialogue in Half-Life 2. It is spoken by bewilderingly talented actors and animated with almost magical precision. Alyx, Eli, Barney and Dr Kleiner are delightful to behold, but they only tell part of the story. There are dozens of other characters, each with their own role to play. And each one is a wondrous creature. They might be blemished, even scarred, with baggy eyes and greasy hair, but you can t tear your eyes away. People, aliens and even crows, have never seemed quite so convincing in a videogame. Doom 3 s lavish monsters are more impressive, but Half-Life 2 s denizens are imbued with life. More importantly, they offer respite. Half-Life 2 s world is a high-bandwidth assault on the senses that seldom lets up. That moment when you see a friendly face is a palpable relief. A moment of safe harbour in a world of ultraviolence. As Gordon travels he is aided by the citizens of City 17 and the underground organisation that aims to fight the oppressors. Their hidden bases are, like the characters who inhabit them, hugely varied an abandoned farm, a lighthouse, a canyon scrapyard and an underground laboratory each superbly realised.

It is this all-encompassing commitment to flawless design that makes Half-Life 2 so appealing. Even without the cascade of inventiveness that makes up the action side of events, the environments become a breathtaking visual menagerie. Cracked slabs and peeling paint, future-graffiti and mossy slate, tufts of wild grass and flaking barrels, shattered concrete and impenetrable tungsten surfaces City 17 and its surrounding landscape make you want to keep exploring, just to see what might be past the next decaying generator or mangled corpse. Whether you find yourself in open, temperate coastline or mired in terrifying technological hellholes, Half-Life 2 presents a perfect face. The first time you see ribbed glass blurring the ominous shape of a soldier on the other side, or any time that you happen to be moving through water, you will see next-generation visuals implemented in a casual, capable manner. Half-Life 2 doesn t have Doom 3 s groundbreaking lighting effects, but objects and characters still have their own real-time shadows and the level design creates a play of light and dark that diminishes anything we ve seen in other games. The very idea that people have actually created this world by hand seems impossible, ludicrous. The detritus in the back of a van, the rubbish that lies in a stairwell it all seems too natural to have come about artificially. Add to this the split-second perfection of the illustrative music, as well as the luscious general soundscape, and you have genuinely mind-boggling beauty.

But these virtual environments are little more than a stage on which the action will play out. And what jaw-dropping, mind-slamming action that is. What s tough to convey in words, or even screenshots, is just how much impact the events of combat confer. This is a joyous, kinetic, action game. The concussive sound effects, combined with the physical solidity of weapons, objects, enemies and environment, make this a shocking experience. Each encounter is lit up with abrupt and impressively brutal effects. Explosions spray shrapnel and sparks, bullets whack and slam with devastating energy. The exploding barrel has never been such a delight. You think that you ve seen exploding barrels before, but no: these impromptu bombs, like everything else in the game, are transformed by the implementation of revelatory object physics. Unlike previous games, the object physics in Half-Life 2 are no longer a visual gimmick they are integral to the action and, indeed, the very plot.

Gordon can pick up anything that isn t bolted down and place, drop or hurl it anywhere you choose. Initially this consists of little more than shifting boxes so that you can climb out of a window, but gradually tasks increase in complexity. Puzzles, ever intuitive, are well signposted and entertaining. If they re tougher than before they re still just another rung up on what you ve already learned. This is immaculate game design. There are a couple of moments in these twenty hours where something isn t perfect in its pace or placing, but these are minor, only memorable in stark contrast to the consistent brilliance of surrounding events. There is always something happening, something new. You find yourself plunging into it with relish. Just throwing things about is immediately appealing. You find yourself restraining the impulse to just pick up and hurl anything you encounter. (Free at last, I can interact!) Black Mesa veteran Dr Kleiner is remarkably relaxed about you trashing half his lab, just to see what can be grabbed or broken. Combine police take less kindly to having tin cans lobbed at their shiny gasmasks.

But the core process of this new physics, the key to the success of the game, is to be found in the Gravity Gun. Once you ve experienced vehicular action and got to grips with combat, Half-Life 2 introduces a new concept the idea of violently manipulating objects with this essential tool. The gun has two modes, one drags things toward you and can be used to hold, carry or drop them. The other projects them away and can either be used to smash and punch or, if you re already holding something, hurl it with tremendous force. A filing cabinet becomes a flying battering ram, dragged towards you and then fired into enemies, only to be dragged back and launched again to hammer your foe repeatedly, or until the cabinet is smashed into metal shards. Pick these up and you can blast them through the soft flesh of your enemies.

Killing the badguys with nearby furniture becomes habitual, instinctive. Or perhaps you need cover from a sniper picking up a crate will give you a makeshift shield with which to absorb some incoming fire. Likewise, you immediately find yourself using the gravity gun to clear a path through debris-blocked passages, or to pick up ammo and health packs, or to grab and hurl exploding barrels at encroaching zombies, setting them ablaze and screaming. You can even use it to grab hovering Combine attack-drones and batter them into tiny fragments on concrete surfaces. Soon the gravity gun is proving useful in solving puzzles, or knocking your up-turned buggy back onto its wheels. Yes, a buggy. I ll come back to that. The gravity gun isn t just another a weapon, it s the soul of Half-Life 2. Do you try to bodge the jump over that toxic sludge, or take the time to use the level s physics objects to build an elaborate bridge? Do you waste ammo on these monsters or pull that disc-saw out of where it s embedded in the wall? Of course, you always know what to do. When there s a saw floating in front of your gravity gun and two zombies shamble round the corner, one behind the other, well, you laugh at the horrible brilliance of it. Yeah, I think that was the moment that I sat back and laughed. It s just too much.

Sometime after these experiments in viscera comes Gordon s glorious road trip. Simplicity incarnate, the little buggy is practically indestructible, but also an essential tool for making a journey that Gordon can t make on foot. Dark tunnels, treacherous beaches and bright, trap-littered clifftops become the new battleground. Like the rest of the game there are oddities and surprises thrown in all the way through. The bridge section of this journey would make up an entire level in lesser shooters. And yet here it is, just another part of the seamless tapestry of tasks that Gordon performs. Also illustrative of the game as a whole is the way in which the coast is strewn with non-essential asides. OK, so you re zooming from setpiece to setpiece, but do you also want to explore every nook and cranny, every little shack that lies crumbling by the roadside? Of course you do. This is a game where every hidden cellar or obscure air-duct should be investigated; you never know what you might find.

Investigating means using the torch that, oddly, is linked to a minor criticism of the game. Both sprinting and flashlight use are linked to a recharging energy bank. It s clear why this restriction was imposed, but it s nevertheless a little peculiar. The quality of the game meant that I was searching, rather desperately, for similar complaints. Smugly I assumed that my allies in a battle were non-human because that way Valve dodged the lack of realism and other problems created by fighting alongside human allies. Of course my lack of faith was exposed a few levels later, when I found myself in the midst of the war-torn city fighting alongside numerous human allies who patched me up, shouted at me to reload, apologised when they got in the way and fought valiantly against a vastly superior force. What a battle that was. I want to go back, right now. The striders, so impressive to behold, are the most fearsome of foes. Fighting both these behemoths and a constant flow of Combine troops creates what is without a doubt the most intense and exhilarating conflict ever undertaken in a videogame. The laser-pointer rocket launcher is back and even more satisfying than ever before. Rocket-crates give you a seemingly infinite resupply to battle these monsters but it s never straightforward. Striders will seek you out, forcing you under cover, while the whale-like flying gunships will shoot down your rockets, inducing you to resort to imaginative manoeuvring to perform that killing blow. Even dying becomes a pleasure you want to see these beasts smash through walls and butcher the rebels, again and again. Oh Christ, what will happen next?

I could talk about how those battles with the striders almost made me cry, or about the events that Alyx guides you through so cleverly, so elegantly. I could talk about the twitchy fear instilled by your journey through an abandoned town, or the way that the skirmishes with Overwatch soldiers echoes the battles against the marines in the original Half-Life. I want to rant and exult over this and that detail or event, this reference or that joke. I want to bemoan the fact that it had to end at all (no matter the excellence of that ending). And I m distraught that we ll have to wait so long for an expansion pack or sequel. I even had this whole paragraph about how CS Source will be joined by an army of user-fashioned mods as the multiplayer offering for this definitively singleplayer game. But we re running out of space, out of time. There s so much here to talk about, but in truth I don t want to talk, I just want to get back to it: more, more, more... You have to experience it for yourself. This is the one unmissable game. It s time to get that cutting-edge PC system. Sell your grandmother, remortgage the cat, do whatever you have to do. Just don t miss out. By Jim Rossignol.

Jul 3, 2014

Three Lane Highway: what it means when games become sport and why you should care

Dota 2

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes serious, sometimes silly column about Dota 2. The image above is from the ESL Flickr account.

We've always had a complicated relationship with e-sports. By 'we' I mean not just PC Gamer but PC gamers: I think it's fair to say that the paradigm shift that e-sports represent hasn't always been widely understood or accepted. That makes sense it's a form of gaming that the majority of gamers will never participate directly in, and this is a hobby that is defined by participation.

An attitude I've heard a few times is that the lure of e-sports is drawing gaming in an undesireable direction. That competition precludes fun, or that the notion of games as sport is a creative blind alley. I disagree with these ideas but I see where they come from. We're talking about a subculture within a subculture growing to the point where it dominates large parts of the discussion. Gamers can be prickly about both exclusion and pretension and there are times when e-sports embody both. What I want to explore this week is why I think the concept of sport is something that we should be getting excited about. I'm going to use Dota 2 as my main example, because that's what I know, but everything I have to say applies to the hobby as a whole.

When a game becomes a sport it sheds its status as a commercial entertainment product. It still generates money, of course, but the relationship between the player and the game is crucially different. When you start treating games as sports, you go from being a passive receiver of entertainment and become an active participant in a kind of test. Whether you're playing competitively or watching tournaments, you're engaging directly with the systems of the game in a way that demands concentration and knowledge.

There's an argument that runs along the lines of "why would I watch a game when I could be playing one?" This misunderstands something about sport. If you can watch a sport, you're almost certainly more intellectually engaged than you would be if you were playing a scripted game. The act of physically participating is secondary, to me, to the stuff that happens in your brain when you watch a set of game mechanics operating in a competitive context. That's what a sport is: a set of rules resolving into narrative.

You can't understand a sport without understanding game design. If you're capable of following Dota 2 or football or whatever then you know something about the way that systems create drama, even if you wouldn't frame that knowledge in those terms. That's really cool, because it makes it easier to perceive the corners that other games cut in the name of providing you with entertainment. When you've seen what a game can achieve with a simple set of rules, it becomes far harder for games without the design integrity of a sport to sell you a fantasy.

When a game becomes a sport it not only stops being commercial, it becomes unrateable. We're used to placing games on a review scale that is designed to assess how well they deliver on their promises. You can't do that with a sport, because it's not an entertainment product it's an algorithm for creating entertainment. A sport isn't good or bad: it simply is, and that's alien territory for most gamers. I appreciate that I'm writing this as a guy who reviewed Dota 2 but when I did, one of the things I considered was how good the game was at turning gamers into sports fans. In effect, how good it was at making its eventual score irrelevant, and itself indispensable.

So, Cool Thing About Sport #1 is that it frees us up from always seeing games as products being sold to us. Instead, you get to see your hobby entirely as an interaction between players which might be you, or might be somebody you're a fan of and an external system. It's about people, not marketing, and as a result you're more likely to take something meaningful from your relationship with it.

Cool Thing About Sport #2 is an extension of that idea. Sports don't have designers or owners, they have stewards. Valve didn't create DotA, and while they're capable of making significant changes to the game's identity they don't ultimately own it as a sport. The community does: from the StarCraft and WarCraft III modders that created it in collaboration with each other to the casters and analysts that drive interest to the players themselves. As a game it has no single point of origin, and this is something that it has in common with the majority of traditional sports.

Blizzard's games make for an interesting counterpoint to this rule. Technically, Hearthstone and StarCraft II do have specific designers and specific points of origin. Start seeing them as sports, however, and it's important to note that neither are based on original ideas: they're both expressions of the ongoing lives of their respective genres. What StarCraft fans get out of watching StarCraft they could get out of other real time strategy games, for example, if sufficiently competitive alternatives existed. Their preference is for a particular instance of a publicly-owned idea. Blizzard are the premier steward of the competitive RTS, but not its creator.

So why is all of this important? Because it's how games escape from familiar patterns and gain a cultural permanence that they can't achieve as commercial products. It's how we break out of a marketing-lead mode of thinking about games and start to perceive our hobby in more human terms. Sports are about effort, achievement, feeling. The fantasies that they encourage aren't oversold by marketing and underdelivered by overworked developers. They're real, and I'm just about as excited by that word as Twitch chat is.

None of this precludes the existence of other kinds of game. Scripted entertainment will always have a place, both as a form of entertainment and as a creative field to be explored. But man, guys. I roared along with a few thousand other people when a Swedish twenty-something controlling a giant red man slam-dunked a wolfguy and some kind of elemental bear-cow and it was among a dozen other similar experiences that surpass anything else I've ever felt about a game. I desperately want other people to get access to that feeling. The rise of e-sports won't be marked when we get Dota 2 on TV, or when the International prize pools top $20m. They'll have risen when we think of them as a separate hobby when 'entertainment games' and 'digital sports' exist as related but distinct ideas. Perhaps we're there already. If so, I know where I'd rather spend my time.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Jul 1, 2014

ESL One Frankfurt: Loda discusses Alliance’s tournament performance, rat Dota, and the impact of winning The International

Dota 2

Jonathan 'Loda' Berg has been part of the competitive Dota scene for as long as there's been a scene to be part of. He was the man holding the Aegis of Champions aloft at the end of The International 2013, and his team Alliance are one of the most effective, efficient, and idiosyncratic teams in the world. I first met Loda at TI3, when I interviewed him the night before the grand final. That interview became this article. After Alliance's loss to tournament champions iG in the semi finals of ESL One Frankfurt I spoke to Loda for half an hour about the current metagame, that incredible match against Cloud 9, and the way that winning TI3 has affected Alliance for better and for worse. This is a long interview, but I think most Dota fans would appreciate seeing the whole thing so you'll find it all below.

How are you feeling after those games against iG, and what's the plan now?

We feel quite well, actually. Usually S4 picks but this event, since it's so close to TI... it's not like we're holding back but we let EGM pick instead. Just to throw things around a bit and not show any of the things that we've practiced. So, yeah iG is a very good team and we can see what we did wrong. One of the things you always realise when you play against the Chinese is that you can't ever be greedy at all, because Europeans rely on ultis long cooldowns and the Chinese will always go for a lot of heroes that are strong throughout the whole game.

For example, what they did in the last game against us is that they saw that they had stronger roaming potential. Even if they had a decent chance to play against our trilane they chose to dodge it because they saw that we didn't have heroes that could rotate as well as them. They'll almost always dodge the trilane that way not to go aggressive against us, but rather to dodge us going aggressive against them. But it feels okay, actually. I don't think any of us are extremely cut up about it.

I've seen you play well when you lose one lane by capitalising on your advantage elsewhere. Today it felt a little bit like you were being 70% efficient everywhere, and that slowed you down.

Yeah, I agree. Today in the first game we won like one lane maybe, which was the bottom lane, but they had a solo Doom there who could just go jungle and eat creeps and get back slowly. Then when you get picked off in one lane your whole rotation gets fucked up. We wanted to switch our trilane to top but then one guy gets picked off somewhere along the way, then I TP top but we don't have our two supports there because Akke had to roam mid to remove a ward, then I get picked off top.

They're very good at stopping your momentum, but I think a lot of today was about the draft. I think everyone feels that way. We should never have picked Lone Druid for example it was quite greedy. We should have put the Batrider on top lane and he could just switch to the jungle for example. Then you have a strong hero mid that can affect the game a lot.

We've seen a lot of Brewmaster in this tournament. Like, everyone is running it and almost every western team is being punished for it. Or at least, for every game where it does well there's a game where it doesn't.

Yeah, for sure. For example the last game I feel what we did wrong was pick a carry like Silencer who is not very mobile and Brew... he is extremely good at taking control of the game but you need to have other heroes that have a lot of damage output and we kinda lacked that. When you're playing Silencer, you want the other four to roam around and fight with the global. For us the Brew could initiate, clap, ult, but even with the global silence we couldn't really kill them during that so the only times we got a kill was when we went for a solo kill with the silence rather than go for a fight with the Brewmaster ultimate. That was one of the big problems in the last game that we didn't have the right heroes.

As I said, the Chinese rely on having heroes that can do something at all points in the game, where a hero like Silencer would probably get stronger in the lategame with an Aghanim's, maybe a Refresher or Hex, something like that. At the same time you can just be countered by BKBs which they did quite effectively.

Were you expecting iG to change up the way they played so dramatically from yesterday? Their approach to Mouz was just constant push.

We kinda thought that they would go for push in the second game, but no. They have two playstyles they either go for an all-out push or... it's like this. iG, if you analyse them from an objective view they don't rely a lot on their carry. They put him on heroes that are strong early-mid and also quite hard to kill. They pick Doombringer for him, they pick Lycan as part of that push strat, they pick Pugna for him, but it's not like a carry Pugna.

They put him on heroes that are strong in the midgame and I think they do that really well because they have five heroes that, as I keep saying, are always active. Even if they're not active they can be active. That's what they do well.

Moving on to a happier story, then that game last night . When I spoke to you last year you explained that there are points in games where you feel confident that you've 'got' it you might not have it now but you've got it in twenty minutes. Did you have that feeling last night? Because it was fucking close.

Er... not really. We had a strat where we ran Skeleton King . He's a carry that really peaks between thirty and forty minutes and that game went on to, like, eighty minutes. We felt that they should have had that game because they had, like, two hardcore carries in Ember and Void and they had PotM as well.

We felt that we could win the game, but... it was just about me and EGM creating space just so that Bulldog could split push one of the lanes. Then we'd, like, try to soak them up so that we could get a rax. They had better lategame for sure, but then we just outmaneuvered them I would say. Honestly, I think if they'd have just played a bit better, had better item choices they should have won that game. If I was in their position with those heroes in the midgame I'd be quite content.

It felt like they never got the teamfight they wanted.

Yeah. Yeah, actually exactly like that. We made them waste their big cooldowns.

That's kinda the story of this whole tournament. It's interesting.

Yeah, it is interesting. We went to China one month ago and it was the same thing there. We realised that you can never get greedy in that way against the Chinese because they will punish it for sure. They are very good at baiting you and just dodging the fights. If you're pushing a tower they've got a Bristleback who has been getting quite good XP against a trilane. It's not so easy to jump on the Bristleback over the tower they'll be ready behind him and if we go for him we could lose the fight. We can't kill him fast enough, and they'll punish you. The Bristleback is something that they pick against the Enchantress, for example. I've seen it over and over again just put him offlane while the Enchantress is there and he's quite hard to kill against just two heroes. We didn't really have the right set up to punish him. Maybe if you went for a stun carry, or a Centaur, a midgame carry something like that.

You've really been favouring that, right? The stun carries.

We switch it around a bit. At DreamHack we did that. Here we did that a little bit as well. For me personally, I like some of them. I dislike some of them. With a hero like Wraith King, I know that my clock is ticking. I have very good farm but it doesn't really scale that well. You want to create chaos in the teamfights, you want to get that reincarnation so you just go in soak up damage, then you keep picking people off.

But I think you need to switch it around a bit against different teams. Against the European teams it's very good to have these stun carries because European teams tend to be a bit greedy, you can push them a little bit.

The last time we spoke was the eve of the TI3 final. How has that win changed the way you've trained over the last year?

It's changed a lot. Six months felt like a waste of time after TI because we didn't have the same focus, we didn't have the same drive to win smaller tournaments. Even if you try to get that focus it's hard to really be hungry to win these tournaments. For sure, every tournament now has good prize money, but it's just not really the same thing. It's only been in the last two-three months that we've really been able to get the drive to become good again. I kind of predicted it I was talking to my team about it but it can be hard to keep the team motivated, even myself, sometimes.

Last year, almost everybody I spoke to said that it's not the money, it's being the best at something.

Yes, it is that's what I mean. If you won TI it's not like "I won a lot of money" it's "I won the World Cup". Why would we want to win the... I dunno, the Swedish Masterchef or whatever? We would probably still win it, though.

You basically did. But has that attitude changed? I mean, this extraordinary new prize pool it's so much bigger.

In a way, but I think that either way we'd have started focusing a lot more before TI. I think everybody gets motivated by that, no matter the prize pool. But sure, the prize pool is extraordinary. That's good and bad, I suppose. It puts a lot of pressure on teams.

I'm very interested to see what happens after this year's tournament, because someone is going to walk away with enough money to do whatever the hell they like, training-wise, and whatever they like with the other tournaments. Do you think whoever wins this year will be affected by the same thing that affected you, but on a much greater scale?

I think every team was affected by what we were affected by. I think Na'Vi were affected by it, I think that iG was affected by it. After they won TI2 they were performing quite decently for, like, half a year then they went into a slump that they didn't get back from even at TI3. If you win this kind of money, you should just go away for a while. I think that's a better approach, just to stop playing for maybe three months. Then you come back and you know that you have to train very very hard to become the best again.

If you only take a short break you come back and you play scrims but you never have that feeling like "we really need to out think them, we really need to out draft them". We play these online tournaments where last year we'd be super, super focused and so motivated to win in the finals, but even now, when we've been doing so-so, it's hard to want to be the best when you've already got to that point.

Last year you had something to prove you had people to take down. Now you're the guys that people want to make a statement against. That must be a lot of pressure.

Yeah, for sure. At the same time, now we've been losing for a while so hopefully we'll be something of an underdog, heh.

It bothers me, the way the community sometimes reacts to the way you play the whole 'rat Dota' thing. It seems like such a misunderstanding of how sport works.

It's... it's just a result of you being bad and not really understanding. Pro players don't look at it the same way. Pro players don't feel that rat Dota is a worse way to play than any other way. It's a skilled thing that you can pull off or you can't. If you look at League of Legends, for example, rat Dota or whatever you want to call it is pretty much something they hype. If somebody split pushes well in League of Legends they're like "oh my god, they're playing so well".

I don't know. I mean, you can take some offense from it but I don't know that we care so much. We live in a world where people are stupid.

Ha. That's true.

No, but it is. So many Dota players are bad. So many of the casters are bad if you compare them to pro players. I'm not saying that out of arrogance, it's just how it is. It's just the top 0.1% of the players that are good enough to understand all the aspects of the game, and if it was easy to play split push and rat Dota everyone would do it but they can't. That's enough proof for us that it's just about outsmarting your opponent.

I wonder if it's because it's less visible than a gank or a teamfight or something.

Yeah, exactly. People hype stuff that is obvious to the eye. If someone goes for a solo kill "oh, he's really good." People see what is easy to see, and casters see what is easy to see. Casters say a lot of wrong stuff a lot of the time as well they analyse situations wrong.

There was a moment a huge teamfight right at the end of that second game against Cloud 9 that went from the bottom of the Dire offlane all the way up to mid. Teamfight ult after teamfight ult, but the whole point of it was where the hell's Bulldog? And then their rax is gone.

Yeah. It's just about outsmarting them. They had some TPs on them so we cancelled the TPs. We just want them to make mistakes. They get more and more stressed and the mistakes came. The time when they went all-in on our throne wasn't the right decision to make. They should have just went for our rax, backed off, kept going for the lategame.

They really wanted to end it.

Yeah, they really wanted to end it and you can see that they... I think maybe they're just not experienced enough. A Chinese team would wait ninety minutes instead of eighty.

What's it been like having WinteR here?

It's good. He hasn't been here very long, and as I said we don't want to show too much at this event, but for sure it's good. WinteR is an ex pro player, and he's good enough to understand every part of the game and bring good analysis to the table. Because we have people that don't speak up a lot after the game even if they have a point that they thing is good, they don't really talk about it. It's frustrating for myself it's almost like I'm sitting there and whining because noone else is responding. The good thing about WinteR is sometimes he will either agree with me or point out another part of the game where it's like "if you guys had rotated in the early game it would have put a lot of more pressure on their draft".

For me, it's nice to have someone who can come in from an objective point of view. I feel the same way I wish my team would tell me "oh, you did this wrong. You should have done this."

Last year you said that you guys were good at not falling into the trap of flaming each other.

We don't at all. I don't think the others feel like I'm blaming them it's just how we are as people. Communication is something that you have to practice. You have to be honest and it's a hard thing, sometimes. We are all honest towards each other, and if I say something that somebody disagrees with they will tell me, for sure, and I wouldn't be offended by it.

In Dota, it's never just one choice. It's ten choices and you have to go for one of them and make sure that everyone thinks that that choice is the best one.

And that everyone does it, right?

Yeah, that's something we've been working on. If we make different calls... we used to be extremely good at Rosh and we've become good at it again but for a time we were very bad at fighting around the Rosh pit because we went for different decisions. One guy wanted to finish Roshan, one guy wanted to bait them to go for us, then we'd split up in the fight around Rosh and rather than get one of the things we end up losing both Rosh and the fight just because of miscommunication.

That was also one aspect of becoming as good as we were. When you win TI people feel that... me as well, you feel like you've just won the World Cup or whatever you want to call it. Every feels that they're good enough to make the right call but maybe they don't speak up enough to make it happen. It's more like... instead of having one mind you now have five different minds.

So success turns you into individuals rather than a collective.

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you underrate the importance of just saying stuff rather than thinking that it's obvious.

There's not a lot of time left before TI. What's the plan, now?

This year's TI is best of ones in the group stage so we'll need to prepare in a different way. Playing best of one is not really the same thing as playing a best of three or best of two. Other than that we'll just keep preparing as we always have, try to be ready for anything I suppose.

Are you feeling confident, then?

Yeah, I think so. Same thing as last year I feel that TI pretty much gets decided after that first day. If you go there and get the right feel for the tournament then you'll keep doing well. A team that is extremely good can lose the first day because they get some all-in strats that somebody has been preparing for a long time, but if you look at it they're probably the most skilled team in the tournament. Some teams handle that in a good way where they'll just come back the next day and do well, some teams fall down and start blaming each other. Whatever happens, we are all confident in each other and we know that we are good enough to go as far as it takes. So, yeah we're not afraid of going to TI.

Do you have any shout outs you want to make?

Yeah, sure. Shout out to all of our sponsors. HyperX, Monster, XMG, Logitech our new sponsor. Axe, of course. A lovely fragrance! Also, Planetside 2.

Thank you for your time.

If you missed the tournament this weekend, you can find write-ups of both days here and here. Check out my interview with Pajkatt from Mousesports for more thoughts on the meta in the run-up to TI4. Images courtesy of the official ESL Twitter account.