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Netflix are trying to teach people Dota lore, the poor dears

It starts before the beginning of time

Dragon Knight and friends in the Dota: Dragon's Blood anime.

Dota: Dragon's Blood - the Netflix-produced Dota 2 anime announced last month - is due for release later this month. In preparation, Netflix have produced a video trying to explain Dota's lore to folks unfamiliar with it. Folks like me!

I really thought Dota 2's lore was, "Hey, this guy looks that way because the original Defense Of The Ancients used models from WarCraft 3." But no, it turns out it's all about gods and moons:

Watch on YouTube

I love the lengths videogames will go to just to justify why players are sending wizards at each other over and over again. To their credit, presenters Jake "SirActionSlacks" Kanner, Jorien "Sheever" van der Heijden and Owen "ODPixel" Davies (pictured in the thumbnail) do a good job over 6 minutes of explaining what the heck is going on.

When they announced Dota: Dragon's Blood last month, Netflix said the series "tells the story of Davion, a renowned Dragon Knight devoted to wiping the scourge from the face of the world." Alice O, who has played several lifetimes-worth of Dota, deemed Davion possibly "the most boring and generic character in a silly game filled with weird and wonderful wizards."

Hopefully he's just a familiar entry point into Dota's stranger aspects, but the video above didn't give me - a non-player - any new reason to want to watch the series. That's fine! It doesn't need to be for me. Mostly I just want this to be a success so that maybe Valve will let someone make animated series of their other games.

Dota: Dragon's Blood will spill on Netflix on March 25th.

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Graham Smith avatar
Graham Smith: Rock Paper Shotgun's editorial leader, corporate dad, and breezy evening news writer.
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