“Dota 2” is Valve’s most popular game right now, and one of the most popular titles in gaming in general, so it’s not surprising that the studio has been paying a lot of attention to the game and developing it actively with various new features. And now, they’ve apparently reached a situation where they want to do too much with the game – more than the current platform allows them to.
Because of this, they’re launching “Dota 2 Reborn”, a brand new, separate version of the game which overhauls the interface significantly, runs on a new engine, and introduces various gameplay features that should make it much easier to find people to play with, and stay organized in one’s matches in general.
The new version of the game is going to go through an open beta period before it’s released officially, starting this week. Valve will be releasing the new features in steps, not all at once – the first phase will introduce the new interface. The developers have done a lot of work in this area in particular, completely overhauling the UI to make it more intuitive, clear and straightforward.
The Hero Browser has been particularly redesigned in order to make it easier to use, and Valve realize that heroes are the main point of the game, and therefore deserve enough attention in its menus. Custom game support is coming as well, apparently, but we don’t yet know the exact details of how it will be implemented.
And then there’s the news of the new engine – something that doesn’t interest all players of the game, but is definitely exciting to some. There has been a lot of speculation recently that Valve are about to introduce Source Engine 2, and this might be the perfect opportunity to do that. The game could be a good showcase of what the engine can do and how good its performance is, and they can use the release of “Dota 2 Reborn” to polish any issues that the technology might still have.
Because, as good as Valve may be in general, there’s no doubt that Source 2 will have its fair share of issues once it hits the market, and it would be useful to Valve to run it through a test period with an actual game like “Dota 2”. And considering the popularity of “Dota 2” in particular, they should be able to generate plenty of feedback about the engine’s performance, and subsequently use it to improve it in different ways.