I've been playing Dota 2 for just under three years. In that time, I've seen a few dozen new heroes. I've seen multiple patches turn the meta upside down and force me to reconsider my (ever-fledgling) understanding of this vastly complicated game.

Even so, I've started to anticipate certain kinds of change. Hero rebalances and redesigns are expected, when you play a game like this. Even the addition of crazy new Aghanim's Scepter upgrades has become familiar—a theme of the last few patches, something that is exciting every time it happens but not, at this point, a surprise.

It doesn't take much for a Dota 2 patch to feel like a big deal—new heroes reliably achieve that. It does, however, take something really different for a patch to feel like the start of a new era. Every now and then, Icefrog does something to the game that makes people say 'is this even Dota'. That's how I felt when 6.82 dared to change the map. I didn't expect 6.84 to meet—or even exceed—change of that magnitude, and yet it has.

A lot of this is down to the new items. It's funny—new heroes form the most obvious milestones in the game's history, but items are far less common and a far bigger deal. A new character squeezes into the roster, upsetting some strategies and galvanizing others. New items—let alone nine of them, with substantial changes to existing ones—affect every character and every player. Learning a new hero, no matter how different, is a known quantity. Incorporating new concepts into every single hero you play is something else entirely.

The Dota community is currently dealing with the ramifications of the Lotus Orb, an item that allows you to reflect single-target spells back at their caster. This adds a new dimension to what could be described as Dota 2's substantial 'crazy shit' component: a million new ways for already-complex abilities to interact with one another. Here, via the Dota 2 subreddit, is Tiny's Toss being reflected. Here, also, is Doom dooming Doom. Here are five Snipers sending off 6.83 in the best way possible.

This is highly visible Crazy Shit; it makes for good gifs. Less visible are 6.84's fundamental changes to core Dota 2 concepts. In the era of midgame items that can be 'consumed' to gain a permanent buff reflecting some of their benefits, being 'six slotted' doesn't mean what it used to. This is also the era of farm being given to a character—Alchemist—so he can produce Aghanim's Scepters for other players, a substantial expansion of what it might mean to be a support in a Dota match.

On top of that, you've got the introduction of magical lifesteal and cooldown reduction, concepts that have never been part of Dota despite featuring in more or less every MOBA to follow after it. Figuring out the long-term ramifications of these changes will take months or more: we should expect surprising ideas to fall out of 6.84 for a long time to come.

I've seen some cynicism, in comments and on Reddit. 'We League now'. 'Is this even Dota'. That kind of thing—it happens every time, and its intensity this week simply mirrors the unusual number of new ideas in this patch.

I want to argue that this very much is Dota. In my mind, the process that is about to begin in earnest—a massive, community-wide adaptation to new ideas, new situations and new interactions—is the exact thing that defines the game. Other games might aim for a stable set of game mechanics that sustain entertaining competition in perpetuity, but not this one. Dota isn't stability. Dota isn't balance. Dota is chaos.

Back in January, I wrote an article about why I don't see Dota as a MOBA. In it, I argued that business models have a substantial effect on the type of experience that a game offers. I still believe this: your time with a game isn't just defined by what happens in a match. It's defined by the structure that surrounds that match, what you're asked to pay for and what you aspire to achieve with every game.

In that regard, Dota and League (and all of the games that imitated League) are very different. Consider how important account progression is in the latter: a high-level Summoner account represent months or years of effort, collection, and progression. It's equivalent to a high-level set of MMO characters, and includes a lot of the same ideas: a long-term commitment represented by cooler stuff and fatter, healthier XP bars.

Dota doesn't work like that. At all. You might collect cosmetics, I suppose, but your account level is one of the game's most meaningless numbers. Your time with the game is vaguely represented by your MMR, but that's hardly consistent from player to player. Dota has no MMO-style progression system, and as such it's a vastly different proposition. It's not a MOBA; it's Dota. This doesn't mean that either type of game is better than the other. It means that they offer very different things, and have different obligations to their players. Which one you prefer is a matter of taste.

That's what I argued back in January. The comments were a mixed bunch. A lot of people—hilariously—sent me the Wikipedia list of MOBAs, as if the terminology we use was determined by Wikipedia and not the other way around. Some people simply don't believe that business models influence game design: I'm more sympathetic to that view, even if I disagree with it.

Here's the thing, though: to me, Dota 2 is defined by its ability to undergo vast, sometimes fundamental changes. A Dota 2 match might only last an hour, but the (meta)game of Dota takes years and its most dramatic moments come when Icefrog does something totally game-changing. This isn't just a concern for pro teams. Everybody experiences it. It's what it means to be a Dota player.

Dota is never more Dota than when one complicated and probably broken game mechanic combines with another complicated and probably broken game mechanic to create a totally unexpected outcome. And it's Dota's business model—first free and community-curated, as a mod, then totally free as a professionally-developed game—that allows it to continue to be this way. It requires a development philosophy that values unexpected combinations of game mechanics, and a business model that keeps player investment and game design separate.

Chaos is the soul of Dota, but chaos is undesirable when your game is also a service. XP bars and microtransactions represent an investment of player time and money, and players expect that investment to be protected by a game's developers. MOBAs need to be balanced and fair and reliable as a courtesy to their long-term players.

Dota doesn't.

That's why there's nothing like it, and the 6.84 update symbolises that perfectly. The reward for your years-long involvement with this game isn't measured in progression bars or an expanding roster of characters: it's measured in the number of times you've looked at the patch notes and thought 'this changes everything.' Dota isn't just three lanes and ten players. Dota is crazy shit.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

For the past few Junes, right before one of the busiest gaming weeks of the year, we ve taken a moment to imagine the E3 press conference that PC Gamers deserve. It s become one of our tiny traditions (along with Chris questionable behavior in survival games). Mostly it s an excuse for us to publish something entirely detached from reality before we fly to Los Angeles and publish every scrap of gaming news and opinion that our bodies will allow. It s therapeutic to daydream about Gabe Newell materializing atop a unicorn through a fog of theater-grade dry ice to announce Half-Life 3.

We get valuable stories, videos, and interviews out of E3—you can imagine how handy it is to have almost every game-maker gathered under one roof for a few days. But it s no secret that the PC doesn t have a formal, organized presence during E3. Generally speaking it s the time of year when Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo jostle for position about who can create the most buzz. Despite being a mostly exciting few days of announcements, E3 has never given the biggest gaming platform in the world an equal place at the table.

That s our collective fault, not E3 s. One of our hobby s greatest strengths is the fact that there isn t a single owner. The PC has no marketing arm, no legal department, no CEO to dictate what should be announced or advertised. And thank Zeus for that. The fundamentally open nature of our hobby is what allows for GOG, Origin, Steam, and others to compete for our benefit, for the variety of technologies and experiences we have access to—everything from netbook gaming to 8K flight simulation to VR.

Everyone involved in PC gaming has shared ownership over its identity. One of the few downsides of that, though, is that there isn t really a single time and place for PC gaming to get together and hang out. We love BlizzCon, QuakeCon, DreamHack, Extra Life, The International, and the ever-increasing number of PAXes. But there s something special about the pageantry of E3 week, its over-the-top showmanship, its surprises, its proximity to Hollywood. And each June, even as we ve jokingly painted a picture of PC game developers locking arms in a musical number, we ve wanted something wholly by, for, and about PC gaming.

Well, hell, let s do it.

For the past few months we ve been organizing the first ever live event for PC gaming during E3, The PC Gaming Show. Tune into our Twitch channel on Tuesday, June 16 on 5 PM and you ll see a spectrum of PC gaming represented on stage: a showcase of conversations, announcements, hardware, trailers, and other stuff that makes PC gaming great. We ve been talking to everyone we know, big and small—if there s a game or developer you want to see—tell us! So far, Blizzard, AMD, Bohemia Interactive, Boss Key Productions, Paradox, Dean Hall, Tripwire, and more have signed up to be a part of this inaugural PC gaming potluck (Paradox has promised to bring nachos), and we ll be announcing more participants as we lead up to June 16. And hey, the endlessly friendly Day[9] is hosting. We love that guy.

We re sincerely, stupidly excited about this. The PC gaming renaissance we re all living in deserves a moment of recognition during the biggest gaming expo of the year—it s about time! Listen in on Twitter and on our Facebook page as we share more details leading up to June.

ESL and ESEA have teamed up to form the ESL ESEA Pro League, the biggest Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament in the history of the game. The league will consist of two divisions, one in North America and one in Europe, with 12 invited teams per division battling for their share of a $1 million prize pool.

ESL started out with Counter-Strike more than fifteen years ago," ESL Managing Director Ralf Reichert said. "Now, many years later, we are extremely excited to be in a position where we can take the industry to the next level with the first regular US$500,000 Counter-Strike league together with ESEA."

Pro league seasons will be scheduled around Valve-supported majors, with weekly online matches that "aim to consolidate the Counter-Strike market by providing consistent high quality content to the global esports audience." Full travel support will also be extended to teams taking part in the four-day offline finals that will be held in Burbank, California, and Cologne, Germany

The North American lineup has not yet been announced, but the European division will consist of the following teams:

Team Dignitas

Team EnVyUs

FlipSid3 Tactics

fnatic

HellRaisers

mousesports

Natus Vincere

Ninjas In Pyjamas

PENTA Sports

Team SoloMid

Titan

Virtus.Pro

It's not known how this jibes with reports from earlier this month that the ESL was negotiating with Twitch to create a new CS:GO league independent of Valve. No mention of Twitch was made in the announcement, and while it's a reasonable bet that this is somehow related to those talks—especially given the intent to "schedule around" Valve-sponsored events—it may also be a sort of "Plan B" instead. Whatever the case, Ulrich Schulze, ESL's managing director of pro gaming, made it clear that the new league is not exclusive.

"There is no exclusivity attached to ESL ESEA Pro League," he wrote on Twitter. "Teams can play whatever tournaments they want on the side."

ESL ESEA Pro League action will begin on May 4. Details are up at pro.eslgaming.com.

Valve is bringing matchmaking to Team Fortress 2 as a 'high priority', a feature that has been rumoured for a while and craved by the competitive community for even longer.

Details are thin on the ground right now, mainly because Valve apparently hasn't got very far into implementing its system, but the team does have plenty of other, successful competitive online titles to draw from.

You can watch the video where the matchmaking elements - and a few other things - are talked about right... here:

The folks at TeamFortress.tv will be offering up more details of what they learned on their trip to Valve on Friday, so you'll have to wait until then to get a clearer picture of what's going on. But for now, the competitive community can probably afford to smile a bit, right?

That promised Dota 2 "major balance update" is in testing, and as the patch notes reveal, it's a doozy. It's probably too early to tell whether it will change the dotes in any significant ways, but the community has uncovered a reference to the much-missed Terry Pratchett in the meantime.

One of Dota 2's new endgame items is called the Octarine Core, an object "formed from Mystic Staff and Soul Booster" that reduces all cooldowns by 25%, and bolsters intelligence, HP, mana and some other bits. Octarine, you might be aware, is the colour of magic, as seen in Terry Pratchett's 'The Colour of Magic'. It is not the name of a fruit; you're thinking of pineapples.

It isn't the first game to smuggle in a reference to the author—Elite: Dangerous recently honored Pratchett with the addition of a new starport named Pratchett's Disc.

Dota 2's update 6.84 changes so many things that I'm not going to list them, but you can check out the ginormous notes here. (Thanks, Eurogamer.)

Correction: The patch is now available in the Dota 2 Test client; not live in the game.

Shawn FMPONE Snelling is a modder and mapmaker for CS:GO. His work on CS:GO includes de_cache, de_crown, and the recent de_season remake. Shawn s currently working on de_santorini.

First things first: for me, this isn t about taking sides . I like Valve. And as for the community, well, I m part of that.

I m a modder, and I deserve compensation. Or, to be exact, I deserve the option to ask for compensation if I feel that s reasonable.

Let s talk about what that looks like for a second. Is it 25% of a sale on a Steam item? Should Valve and Bethesda get 30% and 45% respectively of any item I sell? Actually, I m not sure. If I m selling one trillion units, I m not minding that cut really. If I m selling six units and I m eating ramen noodles under a bridge somewhere in Detroit, I m minding that cut a lot.

Steam is a huge platform, and when Valve promotes your stuff as a modder, you re in the territory of making huge money. Huge money, for doing what you love. You can t really get that elsewhere, and that s a credit to Valve and how great Steam generally is and has been. So that cut, I m not sure I mind it as much as you might think. But let s go ahead and agree Valve needed to put more thought into their plan, or at least into explaining and executing their plan. There are real considerations here that just don t feel like they were addressed at all (did you know that some Skyrim mods can completely break your game?)

Here s my real question: just how effective is this system going to be at rewarding modders?

Well, if everyone is pissed off at Valve and refusing to purchase stuff, not very; in that situation, modders won t get paid.

So let s talk a little bit about this, shall we? Let s agree that modders deserve to get paid. That s right, I said it. Those people who put their time and effort into something that provides you with countless hours of entertainment. Let s start the discussion right there—those people deserve to get paid. But only if they dig the idea.

This is the trajectory of most mods historically: a small team of people works very hard to make something they feel is special and unique, and very often it is. Many of them have no interest in professional game development. Many do, and their mods serve as their resume when they look for a job in the industry. These hardworking individuals have an intense and productive relationship with the community, only to be shuffled off and placed into cubicles where their artistic voice is diluted and stifled churning out sequels for giant publishers. Instead of earning money doing what they love, they re earning money so that they can someday do what they love once again. Compensating modders is one potential answer to this thoroughly broken dynamic producing lousy games for all of us.

People immediately identified serious and troubling issues with Skryim s paid-modding plan.

Speaking personally, the Steam Workshop has gotten to a point where it s netting me a real salary and I feel rewarded and compensated for my work. I love what I do, and Valve has created a system which enables me to do it full-time, and to learn and improve every single day. Explain to me again why I secretly want to go develop the gaming equivalent of a TPS report?

However, even if the industry was a wonderful utopia, I actually kind of like working from home and not having a boss. Is that wrong? Am I bad person? Nah. I ve got a pretty sweet gig. And that s thanks to Valve and Gabe.

That s right, I said it! COME AT ME, INTERNET, LET S RUMBL—no I already regret saying that please do not come at nor rumble me.

To me, Gabe is still the same good guy he always was. But we need to realize a few things about Valve.

First and definitely foremost, they suck at communication. There are legitimate reasons for this that I could get into, but I won t bother. We know they suck at communicating. And that recently hurt modders. Because Valve communicated their plan ineffectively, it turned people off completely, which meant hey, modders might not get paid at all! As a modder, that makes me sad. Actually, it makes me worry about eating. Which is more scary than it is sad.

Secondly, and let s be honest, Valve s plan kinda sucked. If you re going to announce a bold new initiative, you should probably avoid mentioning that part where you re not going to pay people a majority of what their sale earns. Even if a handful of Skyrim modders could quite plausibly make hundreds of thousands of dollars in the near future, the revenue splits we ve all seen just don t look great. And that big uproar Valve faced is proof that Bad Marketing leads to Bad Stuff.

I admit, the community response was surprising and worrying.  Seeing Gabe downvoted on Reddit is, uh… spooky! But I m also deeply impressed with how legitimate the community s gripes have been. I hope Valve reads some of the discussions on Reddit, because they re precisely not whiny entitled gamers crying about having to pay for stuff. People immediately identified serious and troubling issues with Skryim s paid-modding plan.

I do think there are solutions to the current situation. If people are opening their wallet, they want to get something great as a result. The idea that anyone, regardless of curation or objective criteria, can simply charge $100 for an Extra Apple, isn t alright. There should be some level of subjective, human-level curation. I believe that 3rd party DLC works well. You have to put in time and effort as a developer, but customers like knowing that they re getting quality content. After all, customer happiness should be what matters, even if Valve hates the idea of bottlenecks.

The next glaring issue is paid mods ceasing to function or breaking your game. Obviously, that is unacceptable, and a 24-hour refund policy is inadequate.

Perhaps most importantly, gamers do not want to pay for bugfixes on a product they ve already purchased. The workshop should have a clear promise to customers (a rule, if you will): bugfixes and bugfixing mods will be FREE for customers, even if that means bugfixing contributors have to settle for donations. Incentivizing people to fix bugs in AAA games is wrong -- that s the developer s job. The community isn t here to clean up after major corporations, and rules are necessary when the alternative is exploitation and unethical business practices.

Talented hobbyists are beginning to become talented pros. As a gamer, I want that.

I believe these are important steps forward. Talented hobbyists are beginning to become talented pros, people more capable of delivering high-quality mods to you. As a gamer, I want that. I believe that modders could soon have the opportunity to pursue their own path and explore interesting ideas with totally unprecedented creative and financial freedom—I don t believe that s bad for modding culture . Quite the opposite.

Valve, please put together a plan that sucks less; or at least, seems to suck less. But, most importantly, please continue to support modders. Like you ve done. Like no one else really does. As a modder, I appreciate it more than I could possibly tell you in this short article.

Over the past three years, you guys have literally changed my life for the better, and an internet mob will not deter me from saying it.

Read more of Shawn's thoughts on the issue of paid modding and Valve's announcement on this Reddit discussion.

The world of professional Dota is about to get a lot busier. Valve have just announced the Dota Major Championships, an annual series of 'marquee' tournaments that will include their established The International event. The other three shindigs, they say, "will be Valve-sponsored events hosted by third-party organizers at different locations around the world".

As you can see in the above picture, there will be an event in each season, starting in Fall/Autumn and culminating in a bigger event, presumably The International, in Summer. The first is scheduled for this Fall/Autumn, and Valve say they'll reveal more details as that draws nearer.

Next week, Dota 2 will receive a "major balance update", along with this year's version of The International Compendium.

I just played a sixty-minute solo ranked game of Dota 2. We were winning for a long time. Then, as happens often, we stopped winning—they had Sniper, Veno, and Techies, and fighting uphill was a pain in the ass. Around the fifty-minute mark, we killed Roshan with the intention of giving the Aegis to our Slark. Then, our Axe took it. Then, Axe destroyed the sentry wards that Necrophos had dropped so that I could carry them. Then, Axe blinked blind into their base, died to mines, came back to life, and died again without buyback. They pushed. We couldn't defend. The game ended.

Axe threw, I think, because he was bored and kind of a dick. The latter is a tough fix; the former indicates a problem worth exploring.

Bored players are a bigger problem in this patch than they have been before. This is the era of game-prolonging comeback mechanics, Sniper, and pub teams that can't fight uphill. It won't last forever. There will come a time—hopefully soon—when regular Dota gets faster and snappier. I imagine Valve and IceFrog are looking towards the fifth International with a view to ensuring that matches don't run long and cause the whole thing to overrun (while also, y'know, putting the idea of an eight minute victory to rest.)

Regardless, regular Dota will always be a long, demanding game. I've internalised that side of it, as have most players. When you play, you are committing to a game that is likely to last between thirty and ninety minutes and that you're not allowed to quit. Back when I taught the rest of the PCG team to play, this was one of those things that I had to learn to see from their perspective: the notion of a game that you're not allowed to stop playing is totally alien to most people.

I also play a decent amount of Smite and lately I've been playing Infinite Crisis for review. Both of these games—as with the majority of MOBAs that followed the League model—provide surrender options and a variety of game modes, including those that result in shorter matches (single lane variants, and so on.)

For the majority of new players, the length of a Dota match in is an obstacle in the way of enjoyment. Developers of new MOBAs treat it as a problem to be solved.

For the majority of Dota players, however, it isn't a problem. It's part of what makes Dota what it is. That the game is demanding and that it asks a lot from you is a bridge you cross over on the way to getting more out of it than you'll get out of other games—and a lot of players are happy to make that journey. Its complex mechanics require room to breathe, and that 'room' is provided by having long matches. As a player, you're asked to respect that. If you don't respect that, you move on to something else.

The issue with this approach is that it divides players up along binary lines. The reality isn't really like that. Everybody who plays the game—even those who play it a lot—has a different amount of time and patience. Some are more willing to commit energy in the lategame than others. Some will play until it starts to get boring or hard, then throw or abandon in order to move onto the next one. This might be the wrong attitude, but it's sustainable for the players who engage in it. That they are sacrificing the enjoyment of nine other people in order to get their way is only a problem if they agree that it's a problem, and from their perspective it probably isn't (see also: 'dicks'.)

The issue with a purist approach to Dota, then, is that it doesn't account for people who play but don't care about spoiling the experience of others if it suits them. In an ideal world, people who didn't like playing Dota 'properly' would get bored with the game and stop playing: in reality, they show up as that guy who costs you a handful of MMR points every now and then. Even if most players never do this, even if some players only do it once and then quit the game forever, enough people play that it will reliably crop up as a problem for those that stick around.

With that in mind, then, I've started to see the value of 'shortform' modes. They don't really exist in Dota at present—1v1 Solo Mid takes less time, sure, but it changes so many of the game's basic systems and victory conditions that its relationship to regular Dota is limited to a few very specific areas. All Random Deathmatch is more lightweight, but can still take a substantial amount of time.

When official custom game modes finally make their debut, I hope that they'll play a role in offering alternatives that help to draw the throw-happy player away from regular matchmaking. Valve could do this themselves, of course—a 2v2 or 3v3 mode on a single lane would be interesting—but it's far more likely that they'll leave it to the community to build. And, honestly, I think it'd be a success for Dota as a whole if somebody does.

While there are many things about the regular MOBA model that I hope stay far away from Dota 2, the provision of more accessible ways to play is a proven good. It's a rare example of a community-dividing design decision that actually divides the community in the right way: not between serious and casual, but between 'willing to play for twenty minutes' and 'willing to play to the end'. I'd rather players declare the limits of their attention span when they choose a game mode, not when they throw at the end of a long match.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Speedruns are artistry. Not only do they demonstrate complete mastery over a game, but they also poke away at the edges of what a game intends you to do. Watching a perfect speedrun is similar, I imagine, to watching good gymnastics, but they're more than just skill-based. They're borne of a curiosity about the edges of games: the things we're not meant to see and the things we aren't supposed to do.

There's a whole science behind speedruns. Players spend weeks and sometimes years chiselling a perfect path through a game. They exploit minor traversal bugs to gain speed, they tap away at the outer limits of a game world in search of hidden routes, and then they move to execute all these tricks in one graceful swoop. There's a strong collaborative spirit among speedrun communities, because in the end, it's all about what's possible, not who wins.

There are lots of different speedruns, and the rules vary depending on the type of speedrun a player hopes to achieve. Most of the runs I've featured below are Any% runs, which simply require the player to complete the game under any difficulty setting as quickly as possible. These contrast with 100% runs, which as the name suggests requires full completion of the game (any secret worlds or any optional collectibles, for example). 

What follows aren't "the best speedruns of all time" but instead a selection of especially impressive runs. I've tried to collect those most suited to spectating, so there are a lot of shooters and platformers. Meanwhile, I've generally avoided speedruns too heavily reliant on glitches that bypass huge sections of a game (like this Pillars of Eternity run, for example). I'm not arguing these aren't legitimate: just that they're not as fun to watch.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Bethesda made a big deal of Skyrim's 100 hour potential back in 2011, but I'm sure they're not surprised that speedrunner gr3yscale has beaten the game in less than 40 minutes. After all, Skyrim QA guy Sam Bernstein managed to complete the whole game, glitch and cheat free, in two hours and 16 minutes. If you know what you're doing, the biggest games can be reduced to a series of carefully timed leaps.

Gr3yscale's world record time of 39:24 uses a number of built-in exploits, but arguably more interesting than the run itself is this accompanying tutorial video on how he achieved it. The lengthy video is a step-by-step instructional, detailing everything from the graphics settings you should use (as low as possible) through to how to steal the Blank Lexicon from Septimus Signus in less than five seconds. If you've got any interest in the painstaking process of routefinding for a speedrun, it's a must watch.

Dark Souls

For the best example of speedrunner Kahmul78 s thoroughness, look no further than the 1:56 mark below. The way he switches his inventory load out in the middle of a plunge attack demonstrates that every second is precious for an adept speedrunner. He won t need those newly equipped arrows for a while, but when you re looking to shave off precious seconds in a notoriously difficult game, you don t waste time.

After clearing the tutorial area, Kahmul78 takes a very unconventional route through Lordran. Using the Skeleton Key starting item he passes through New Londo Ruins and Valley of the Drakes into Darkroot Basin, then onto Undead Parish. This not only skips the second boss encounter, but it also means facing off against the first mandatory boss battle by the eight minute mark. 

For the average first time player it s likely to take up to five hours to make that much progress (or about ten, if you re like me). The fact that this whole run wraps up in under 48 minutes naturally  attracted a lot of attention when it was first posted. There are quicker Dark Souls speedruns out there which exploit a major glitch, but this is the real deal.

Dishonored

With so many tools at his disposal it's little wonder that Corvo Attano can get the job done quickly. He's not really meant to do it this quickly though, with speedrunner TheWalrusMovement completing the stealth adventure in 34:35. Attano's Blink ability a lightning quick dash mainly used for covert operations is utilised a lot in this run, to the extent that it's difficult to keep track of TheWalrusMovement's routing. 

Nonetheless, Dishonored is a surprisingly enjoyable game to spectate, and TheWalrusMovement is forthcoming with his secrets. This world record run can probably be improved the runner's commentary points out a couple of areas of improvement but this is the best out there in the meantime.

Doom 2

Picture this: you ve just returned from Hell only to find that Earth is in worse shape. You were really looking forward to having a beer though, so you want to save the world as quickly as possible. But how quickly is as quickly as possible? How s 23 minutes and three seconds sound? Not bad at all! Start pouring.

The work of speedrunner Zero-Master, this Ultra-Violent mode playthrough managed to topple a record set in 2010 by Looper. That s a long time in speedrun years and it only managed to come out on top by 22 seconds. A backseat speedrunner will no doubt see areas of improvement in the below video, which Zero-Master concedes to in his YouTube description, but for the time being this is the quickest run there is.

While Doom 2 is probably the most popular speedrunning instalment in the series, it s worth checking out speedruns of the two Final Doom WAD packs too. These outings upped the difficulty dramatically, and if you want to see a run with a few clever rocket jumps, look no further.

Duke Nukem 3D

Duke 3D s Build engine is home to a lot of glitches very handy to speedrunners. As Duke speedrunner LLCoolDave explains in this video, a major one is crouchjumping . If you crouch while freefalling and then hit the jump key before touching the ground, Duke can clip through certain walls and structures. The engine in Duke 3D is less than stable, allowing for switches to be triggered from unintended vantage points and whole regions of levels to be skipped.

As in most glitchy speedruns, triggering the engine s limitations at just the right moment is an impressive skill in itself. Speedrunner Mr_Wiggelz manages to complete the game in 9:19 below, though it s worth noting that only the first three episodes of the Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition feature (the fourth episode didn t appear in the original game).

Mr_Wiggelz admits that he messed up a couple of times during this run, so it probably won t be long before we see it bettered.

Click here to watch on Twitch

Fallout 3

Some genres, especially platformers and shooters, are particularly suited to the speedrun. Others, like the open world RPG, definitely are not. That doesn t stop people from trying to beat the likes of Pillars of Eternity, Skyrim and Fallout 3 in the time it takes to prepare an English breakfast, but there s inevitably glitches involved. Games like these are designed to eat up your time and life.

Rydou s 18:53 speedrun of Fallout 3 (that s 18 minutes, not hours) utilises a few glitches, but no cheats or third-party programs. As he explains on his YouTube page, this run makes liberal use of a quicksave bug. Basically, if you rapidly quicksave and then quickload you ll briefly have the ability to clip through walls. In this way, the player-character goes from birth to saving Washington in less than 20 minutes.

After a bit of publicity off the back of this speedrun, Rydou moved to emphasise the difference between cheating and exploiting glitches. For those who wonder about the legitimacy of the run, using and exploiting glitches have always been a part of the speedrun community. This is a way to push the game even further, and [is] not considered cheating.

Half-Life 2

An hour and 32 minutes might not sound impressive for a Half-Life 2 speedrun: the game's an all time classic and ten years old to boot. You can blame the game's regular unskippable dialogue sequences for that record, but hey, at least it gives record holder Gocn k some time to take a break. He needs it.

There are some interesting strategies in this video. GocAk makes liberal use of two traversal glitches common in Valve's Source Engine, namely Accelerated Back Hopping and Accelerated Side Hopping. For a stunning example of the former skip to the 29 minute mark, where a sequence of careful jumps actually propels the player into the air. 

Sourceruns.org has a more detailed description: "When you exceed the game's speed limit, the game tries to slow you down whenever you jump, back to the desired speed. By default the game thinks that you're moving forwards, so when you exceed the speed limit, it'll accelerate you backwards. If you are facing backwards, this will only increase your speed. So, the faster you're going - the more you will get accelerated."

Hotline Miami

No big tricks or glitches here, just an exceptionally talented player. Speedrunner Dingodrole completes Hotline Miami in 20 minutes and seven seconds, but his ultimate goal is to get below the 20 minute mark. If you watch the whole run you'll notice there's very little room for improvement, and Dingodrole seems to have the routing down pat. He's been steadily chipping away at the time for a while now, so it's probably inevitable that this will be beaten some day.

I Wanna Be The Guy

It pays to know a game intimately before embarking on a speedrun, but that rule has a different meaning when it comes to I Wanna Be The Guy. A parodic love letter to 8-bit platformers, I Wanna Be The Guy subverts every reliable trope in the platformer rule book. Shiny red apples aren t collectibles: they ll kill you. Don t worry about reaching those spikes: they ll come to you. Nothing is predictable, and everything is learnt from the experience of dying. You can t learn this game, you have to memorise it.

So it s always fun to monitor the speedrunning community s progress with I Wanna Be The Guy (as well as its many follow-ups). You need a great memory and superhuman dexterity to complete the game once, let alone in 28 minutes and 40 seconds without glitches, as Tesivonius has done.

Click here to watch on Twitch

Portal

A few caveats: this is a segmented Portal speedrun, which means the game wasn't completed from beginning to end in a single playthrough. Instead, the best level times were stitched together for the final video. Additionally, there were four different speedrunners involved: Nick "Z1mb0bw4y" Roth, Josh "Inexistence" Peaker, Nick "Gocnak" Kerns, and Sebastian "Xebaz" Dressler. Some would argue a segmented speedrun is illegitimate, but wherever you stand on that matter, it's still interesting to see what's possible.

This run uses neither cheats or hacks, but it does exploit a number of glitches. "This run first started after the discovery of a new glitch, which snowballed into a whirlwind of discoveries of new tricks, skips, and glitches," the team writes. As you'll see below, the glitches make for a disorientating watch, but its fascinating nonetheless.

Quake

The Quake speedrun scene used to be massive, boasting its own highly organised community in the form of Quake Done Quick. The below video sees all four episodes of the game completed in 11 minutes and 29 seconds (on Nightmare difficulty!) and demonstrates world class bunny hopping and rocket jumping skills. The occasional glitch is implemented and whole chunks of certain maps are skipped with the help of rocket jumps, but no cheats were used.

Spelunky

Twitch streamer Bananasaurus Rex is, or was, the world authority on Spelunky. It was he who figured out how to kill the game s invincible ghost. It was he who achieved a solo Eggplant run (this involves carrying an Eggplant to the end of the game, obviously). It was he who collected $3.1 million worth of gold in a single playthrough. Arguably the highest bar he set was the legendary 5:02 Hell speedrun. Simply reaching Hell is difficult enough on its own, but completing the whole game using this route is punishment. Doing it in five minutes is God tier.

Unfortunately for Bananasaurus Rex, someone managed to beat his Hell run, and not by a measly couple of seconds. Youtuber Latedog beat secret boss Yama in 4:36, creating a new record which let s face it will probably only be beaten by accident. Like Bananasaurus Rex he utilises the warp device, which is somewhat reliant on luck but pretty much crucial if you want to shear minutes off a playthrough.

Super Meat Boy

When humankind is wiped off the face of the earth by some malevolent alien society, the planet s new inhabitants will learn a couple of things as they sift through the rubble. First, we really liked bottled water. Secondly, Coca-Cola was an especially totalitarian leader. Thirdly, we were really bloody good at Super Meat Boy.

Speedrunner Vorpal has been chipping away at the world record for a while, but this is the best he/she has managed so far: the base game completed in 17 minutes and 54 seconds. That stat doesn t include the dark levels or any of the retro themed ones, but anyone who has spent half-an-hour with Team Meat s punishing platformer will peek through fingers as Vorpal passes the final boss run by the skin of his teeth.

VVVVV

Speedruns can be beautiful. Twitch streamer sheilalpoint completes VVVVV in 12:12 in the below video, and watching it (with the sound down) can be like watching a weird 1970s art film about a little man s efforts to euthanise himself in outer space.

The beauty of this run is that there aren t really any major tricks, just a thorough knowledge of the game s layout. Sheilalpoint pulls some interesting maneuvers with the game s checkpoints particularly in one sequence where hitting them as they collide with spikes actually increases the momentum of the player character but otherwise, this is plain old fashioned mastery.

For more awesome speedruns, speedrun.com and speeddemosarchive.com are invaluable resources. Think we've missed something important? Leave it in the comment section below.

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 277. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.

Dota is hard. It demands moment to moment skill, collective coordination, and a vast amount of learning. Despite being the most popular game on Steam by an order of magnitude, it s an acquired taste—and one that, despite years of listening to Chris drone on about it, the rest of the PC Gamer team has yet to acquire. Over the course of a week, we set out to see if that might be changed. 

In the first case, our goal was to determine just how difficult Dota 2 really is to pick up. Is it possible for newcomers to have fun straight away, or will those first hours always be punishing? What can more experienced players do to lower the barrier to entry, and how do you best go about matching characters and roles to players with a diverse gaming background? How do you introduce Dota as an action game, a strategy game, a sport and a social experience all at once?

More to the point: why make the effort? For some of the team, gaining a new hobby was not incentive enough to pour hours into the game. We needed a goal—something to fight for. We found one. Concurrent with our own efforts, our longtime friends, rivals and (in several cases) former colleagues at Rock, Paper, Shotgun began training their own Dota novices. The stage was set for a showdown that would pitch veteran against veteran, newbie against newbie. We really, really wanted to win.

That meant training. With Chris as our guide, we set about getting our hands on the bottom rung of Dota 2 s daunting ladder. Over the following pages you ll discover what sunk in, what didn t, and how we fared when exposed to public matchmaking. Spoilers: Dota is hard.

SESSION 1

Baby steps

CHRIS I ve thought a lot about how to introduce people to Dota. My approach is to simplify as much as possible. I start the first session by ushering the guys into a meeting room where I ve prepared a 15- minute presentation. Instead of focusing on the minutiae, I introduce general concepts. Dota 2 is a numbers game, I explain. Much like an RTS, it s about building and maintaining a resource advantage. How you go about achieving that is as complex as you d like to make it, but as long as you remember that simple concept, you can t go too far wrong.

I don t know how much of my introduction sinks in with the guys. It is, after all, a powerpoint presentation. When it s over, I assign roles and heroes that I believe suit our fledgling team.

SAMUEL Dota 2 is intimidating to learn, but Chris has been so specific in assigning us roles that we re really only learning the one small part of it we each need to function within his battle plan. I m the muscle, so Chris assigns me Earthshaker, a large hairy creature that turns up in the heat of battle to lay down Fissure, a powerful barricade that will help us control encounters.

PHIL I m playing the support, although we re not calling it support . We re calling it position five, because of graphs. My take on the presentation is that our job as a team is to filter resources in a way that keeps our joint performance stable, even as our individual power shifts. As an intelligence hero, I ll start stronger relative to my teammates. The upshot of this is that I have to buy a donkey. 

CHRIS After the presentation, I load us into a private lobby and give the team a tour of the map. They line up behind me like ducklings, and already look confused. 

TOM The strategic overview is useful for clearly laying out our priorities, but I can t help but start to get bogged down in the minutiae when we roam the map. The home shop is different from the side shops, which are different from the secret shops hidden in the jungle. They all have different items that you can combine into better items to give you stat boosts and special powers. These have weird names like the Black King Bar and Heart of Tarrasque . I comfort myself with the fact I m playing Sven. Sven s a blue barbarian guy who hits things with a big sword. I can do that. 

ANDY Prior to Chris s presentation, I don t know a thing about Dota. After it, I know a bit more, but I m still very much a member of the Clueless Club. Then we go for a walk around the map and my brain starts to rebel. Why are there so many items for sale? Which ones do I buy? I ve reached a point in my life where I m pretty resistant to learning new things, and Dota is a big thing to learn. I figure that when it s time to play against another team, Chris will just tell me what to do anyway. That I can deal with. I like that I ve been assigned ranged characters, because then I can just hang at the back.

SESSION 2

Rise of the robots

CHRIS I ve assigned everybody two heroes. For our initial bot games, I take the middle lane and send Andy and Sam to one lane and Phil and Tom to the other. This gives me a chance to keep an eye on them from a position of relative isolation. Some take to the game faster than others.

TOM Phil and I get into a good rhythm. I get used to Sven s attack timing and getting the last hit on creeps—this gets me gold to buy those complicated items. When you first look at a Dota battle, you might assume you ought to help your little guys get to the enemy ancient. In reality, they re RTS minerals to be slurped up, one hit at a time. Just when I think I m starting to get the hang of things, Chris asks why I ve bought two separate pairs of boots. I have no idea how that happened. I blame Phil s donkey.

PHIL You would think, given that my first job is to buy a donkey, that I would be good at buying a donkey. While the transaction itself goes smoothly, I forget to take him out of my inventory. My other job is to place wards. I do this by asking Chris where I should place wards shortly after every time he reminds me to buy and place wards. My job, I assume, is just to help other people be awesome. It s part way through the first bot game that I realise that s not quite right. Chris pings a location and telling me to wait. He draws in the enemy team and I activate Crystal Maiden s ultimate: Freezing Field. 

Everything dies in a flurry of snow and dancing. I cackle.

SAMUEL I m struggling with Earthshaker. I m not sure what my purpose is in the early game—I die a lot and I m pretty poor at aiming Fissure across groups of enemies. I enjoy teaming up with Andy but he s far more effective. In the next bot game, I switch to Lich, an ice-based long-range mage that seems a bit more well-rounded. This proves a far better fit and I die a lot less. A character fit for a coward! 

ANDY As Sniper, the game slowly starts making sense to me. I figure out that if I increase my range, I can attack towers without getting hit. If I keep killing monsters, I can earn money to spend on the thing that gives me lightning bolts. But when we fight tougher bots, everything falls apart.

I die constantly and start to zone out. I lose faith in my ability to get Dota. This isn t for me. I m not into competitive games that you have to play for a thousand hours to get good at. I play games for stories and experiences, not learning.

SESSION 3

Oh, the humanity

CHRIS It s time. We need to actually play real people if we re going to stand a chance against RPS. I load us into a match against equally-new strangers, using a fresh account to mask my own rating. I know, I know, that s naughty. I justify it to myself by assuming that the other guys will be doing the same thing. I take Storm Spirit, the first Dota hero I fell in love with, to the midlane. 

ANDY Humans! Actual humans. This is the first time I ve played Dota with people I don t work with, and the pressure is rising. But once the match begins, they seem as clueless as me. I dutifully farm away, waiting for Chris to give me instructions. Occasionally I get into a fight with another player, and I don t die every time. That s encouraging. I farm and farm, and I buy the lightning bolt thing, and upgrade my character. 

PHIL My assigned heroes were Crystal Maiden and Witch Doctor. After trying out both against bots, I decide to stick with CM from here on out. Witch Doctor s stuns are pretty handy, but I like the more reliable damage over time of Crystal Maiden s Frostbite spell. Also, I just enjoy being a magical snow princess. She starts every game by flirting with Sven, which I think is having an awkward effect on Tom s and my working relationship.

TOM Playing against humans is one thing; the big problem is dealing with new and unpredictable heroes. Phil and I face off against Alchemist, who likes to throw bottles of gunk to stun and hurt enemies. Bounty Hunter can turn invisible, which he uses frequently to gang up on us and then run away. We re spending a lot of time laning against three opponents, and it s miserable. There s no time to mouse over enemy abilities to read their details—the only way you learn how an ability works is to be killed by it. 

PHIL Bounty Hunter is awful. Until now, I ve done a good job of faking competence and stoic reliability, but I am not a good Dota player. I struggle to disengage against the enemies I can see, and now I ve got to deal with this shit? Bounty Hunter s damage is mostly to our confidence. He s out there somewhere, and even with Sentry Wards laid down, I m jumping at every shadow. 

CHRIS I face Mirana in mid, and it s clear that this is actually a new player and not an asshole on a fake account. I win the lane pretty handily and realise that I am an asshole. I am, however, an asshole with options. I move top and score first blood, then roam the map scoring kills fairly effectively. A highlight is when Bounty Hunter moves in to kill Andy. I catch a glimpse of him on the minimap and know what he s about to do, so I tell Andy to stay still and bait out the kill attempt. I punish it with a flashy Storm Spirit play and feel like Andy s cool magical lightning uncle. 

Then, Sam gets called into a meeting and has to leave the game for 20 minutes. Rather than risk him getting pegged with an abandon, I get him to hand control of Earthshaker to me and I play both heroes for a little while. I m used to the notion that you can t quit a Dota game once it s started, but it occurs to me that this wouldn t necessarily be clear to anyone else.

As we approach the midgame, the enemy stacks up items that make it harder for me to control fights: Orchid Malevolence, Black King Bar. That Alchemist has a Shadow Blade; my ducklings are struggling to deal with the invisibility it grants him. They re struggling generally, actually. I feel like I m spinning plates—if I make a play on the top lane, Andy will die on the bottom lane. If I go bot, Tom and Phil will get in trouble top. These games were never supposed to be about me.

TOM We re having a shaky time learning how to fight as a team. A lot of us have stun moves that can start a big fight, but we re hampered by a strange awkwardness, as though we re all trying to fit through the same door. There s a lot of after you, no, after you, and we never quite manage to synchronise our charges. Four out of five of us have no idea whether we re winning or losing a fight, so we disengage in drabs and get picked off individually. Only now do I truly realise how hard this is going to be. 

ANDY A player using the Phantom Assassin hero keeps killing me, over and over again, and I start to lose interest. I still haven t fully embraced Dota, and I m reminded why I hate playing competitive games online. Even these low-level newbies we ve been matchmaked with are better than me. I know I could get better if I practised, but I don t want to. I don t want to Dota. 

CHRIS This is salvageable, I think, but I m daunted by the number of small things I ve got no time to explain. I count off the enemy s full list of stuns and successfully teleport out of a fight gone wrong, but I realise that being able to do that represents the better part of thousands of hours of accumulated experience. It s no good saying teleport when they ve used all their stuns to people who have no idea how many stuns they have. 

PHIL We re relying on Chris too much. It s clear he wants us to start taking the initiative, but when he tells us he s coming to gank, we interpret it as him coming to singlehandedly make everything better. Even when he does lay out a step-bystep play, it turns out people are unpredictable. At one point, I hide in the treeline of the safe lane, waiting for Chris to draw the majority of the opposing team into Freezing Field s range. They move in and I pop it, waiting for the glorious snow-death. Instead, they move back. I miss everyone. It s deeply unsatisfying. 

CHRIS The game runs long—over 60 minutes—but we re pushed back steadily by Alchemist and Phantom Assassin, who both scale well into the late game. Eventually, our respawn timers run too long; there s nothing else to be done. If we re going to beat RPS, I resolve, we need to focus on fighting as a team

THE MATCH

PC Gamer vs RPS

CHRIS I think we ve got what it takes, although Andy is less sure. RPS have an advantage, because two of their players—Alice and Pip—have about as much Dota experience as I do. To make matters worse, one of their newbies takes a nap and doesn t turn up. They get a ringer, Quinns, who was a member of my original Dota group. He hasn t played in years, but a hundred hours of experience two years ago trumps five hours last week. I m sure it ll be fine if we stick to the plan.

I don t stick to the plan. I was going to play Storm Spirit again, but I don t want to beat up newbies with a hero they can t handle. I pick Invoker instead, a flashy mage who combines elements to conjure spells. He s an advanced character and I m merely all right with him—I feel this is a fair compromise. RPS don t compromise. They take Viper and Puck on their experienced players, characters that are very difficult for new players to deal with. Shit! 

ANDY The team seems fairly confident about the big finale. I m not. I m just planning to keep my head down, kill monsters, and hopefully not make too many mistakes. But then the match starts and I catch my first glimpse of a rival hero and suddenly all I care about is beating them. I manage to stay alive for the longest I ve ever stayed alive in Dota, even with a Drow Ranger pummelling my hero with magic arrows. This is promising. 

TOM This is it. I m a little terrified because I m laning against Pip s Viper. She keeps needling me from a distance, pushing me away from the creep wave. That means fewer last hits and less gold. There s some slightly frantic banter about the whereabouts of the RPS midlaner, who is apparently some sort of rainbow-coloured death fairy. I try to focus on killing creeps. 

PHIL Adam from RPS is playing Witch Doctor. I know how to play WD, and that, I realise, means I can respond to what he s doing. At one point, I see his health start to tick up, and realise he s activated Voodoo Restoration. I know for a fact that it s bottomed out his mana, because I once made the same mistake. Annoyingly, I can t do anything—Pip s Viper is too effective for us to get a kill—but I m pleased at myself for knowing a thing. 

CHRIS I m nervous. I don t get anywhere near the farm I need. An invisibility rune spawns, and I figure I can use it to make a game-opening play on the top lane. I do so, but Andy and Sam aren t anywhere near close enough to help and the enemy successfully withdraws. The long walk back to the fountain gives Alice plenty of time alone. 

SAMUEL Andy and I are gradually getting to grips with the tactical retreat. Early on I take out Alec s Drow Ranger, which is a great boost to my self-esteem. We re working well together. Then Alice arrives to ruin it all. 

ANDY Everything seems to be going well, but then I get killed by a giant floating frog fairy, and again, and again, and now I m mad. Every time I see the magic frog I run away, and I spend the next part of the match just hiding in a corner, killing creeps. 

PHIL I keep making logistical errors. I m so focused on where to place wards that I forget to buy them. Twice I mis-click, activating my ultimate when I meant to place a ward. It s frustrating, because despite having only played a few games, I already think I should be better than this. I m not the only one getting annoyed. Chris sounds frustrated. I don t know if it s with us or himself, or some combination of the two, but it has a profound effect on morale. Until now, we ve fed off Chris s relentless optimism and belief. We re not long into the match, and it s clear he s behind. His frustration hits me pretty hard. I go very quiet. 

CHRIS Alice has built a Dagon, a magical laser wand that allows you to explode underleveled heroes in a single hit. My ducklings are underleveled. It feels like a dick move. Really, though, I m cross at myself. I should have played what I knew, but I tried to both be noble and a show-off in a single stroke. I pull the team off their lanes, into a clump for safety. Regaining a bit of composure, I land a global snipe on Alec s fleeing Drow Ranger with Invoker s Sunstrike. We re still in this, barely. 

TOM It s a huge relief to get out of the lanes. I start amassing a bit of gold by chopping away at the wildlife in the jungles. I m gradually building the famed BKB , which I can activate to gain immunity from magic spells for a few precious seconds. I wait, and bide my time killing a colourful jungle ostrich. 

ANDY The latter half of a Dota match, I ve learned, is a lot more fun. Once you ve got better items and abilities, the combat feels a lot more satisfying. I m as engaged as I ve ever been in a Dota game. I want to beat these guys. 

CHRIS I m running the numbers. Alice is scary, but she s also pushing her luck. She over-extends more than once, and we re able to feint, counter-attack, and kill her. But the big picture looks grim. Quinns has Shadow Shaman, whose ultimate—Serpent Wards—allows him to place a nest of menacing snake-turrets. They re deadly against buildings and deadlier against players, and he s good at trapping people in them. At the beginning of this journey, I assumed I could ignore most of the little details and lead a team to victory by focusing on the major themes. I m wrong. You really need to know how to escape a Serpent Ward trap, how to clear them from a tower, and so on. There s no time to explain. They close on our base. 

TOM The mid-game felt like a fragmented mess of half-formed fights. Only now, on the doorstep of our ancient, do we finally rally. We re all in one place, and our mission is clear: kill anything that comes up the steps. That gives us the focus we need to start getting kills. We even manage to wipe their team at one point. We ve lost too many towers, though, and our barracks, which means we re being swarmed by enemy mega-creeps. My items have brought me back into the game, but I have to spend all my time beating back the hordes. It s a valiant last stand, but we can t get out of our base. The end is nigh. 

ANDY The RPS army is relentless. They won t stop coming. I m dying a lot, and they re all a higher level than me. Game over. I stand in a corner, lower my rifle, and wait patiently for the match to end. I just don t have Dota in my blood. 

PHIL I m distraught—partly at RPS s win, but mostly at myself. I didn t play well. I don t think I can play well yet. As I wallow in post-game ennui, I realise that I d really like to learn how. 

CHRIS I m heartbroken. I know this feeling. I look around the office. Phil feels it. Tom feels it. Sam feels it. Andy s already moved on. Something occurs to me: I can tell which of us will keep playing—they re the ones who are utterly, utterly crestfallen. Dota this weekend? Phil asks. I agree. Our next conversation concerns revenge.