After a week packed with phenomenal Dota 2 [official site] plays, combacks and upsets the winners of The International 2016 (and a casual NINE MILLION DOLLARS?????!!!!) are:
This is it! The grand final of The International 2016, Dota 2’s [official site] ultimate world championship, is mere hours away. Two matches and three teams remain so if you’re still catching up with Friday’s action BEWARE SPOILERS!
With the upcoming release of Underlord (The Artist Formerly Known As Pit Lord) there was more than a smattering of “What next for Dota 2 [official site]? Is that it for the hero roster?” Answering those questions at The International 2016 was Valve’s teaser trailer for new hero Monkey King! The simian sovereign will be coming in an update this autumn/fall called The New Journey. OBSERVE:
The All-Star match at The International 2016 saw the reveal of new Dota 2 [official site] hero, Underlord. We wrote about it in our TI6 daily recap but he’s been so long anticipated that he deserves his own post.
Vrogos, the Underlord – formerly known as Azgalor, the Pit Lord in DotA and Warcraft thanks to DotA’s origins as a mod – will be added to the game from 23 August. Underlord completes the Dota 2 roster in terms of heroes also present in DotA so from then on we’re entering uncharted territory in terms of the Dota 2 roster and whether/when further heroes will be added*.
Day four of The International 2016 main event was all about underdogs (and one Underlord, but we ll get to that in a bit) the incredible rise of one, the heart-wrenching fall of another. And, as fate and lower bracket scheduling would have it, these two young Dota 2 [official site] teams would have to face each other in the very first series of the day.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
Much exciting Dota 2 [official site] occurred during the night, and now not only do we have our last eight teams left fighting at The International 2016, but we know two of the guaranteed top three finishers.
SPOILERS AND HEART-STOPPING COMEBACKS AHEAD!
All right folks, you know the drill. The forums of Dota 2 s official website have been hacked, compromising details from almost 2 million user accounts, including usernames, emails and passwords. A database of 1,923,972 records has been exposed, according to Leaked Source, a search engine that lets internet users see if their details have been leaked. So get those keyboards ready, it’s time for a password change!
Dota 2 s International 2016 is almost halfway done, and good grief, what a digital sportstorm it s been so far. Champions have been slain, underdogs have dominated, and panels have turned into hand puppets for completely unstated reasons. Here s everything you need to know (besides a puppet explanation) ahead of today’s upper bracket semi-finals.
Obviously HERE BE SPOILERS:
For The International 2016 I watched a game of Dota 2 [official site] entirely from the Roshan pit in virtual reality.
Dota 2’s VR hub is all about offering viewers new ways in which to spectate matches, new ways to present information, and new vantage points from which to observe professional players’ comings and goings. You can sit in a darkened area watching a massive VR screen if you want, but you can also teleport yourself into the actual map and shrink yourself to life-size proportions as you follow pro-players about.
Well, I wanted to see what it was like to be Roshan, or at least Roshan’s lodger never moving outside the pit that the huge monster inhabits on the map and entirely dependent on distant sounds to make sense of what’s actually going on. Oh, and also seeing what a team attempting to fight Roshan looks like close-up, when suddenly a violent house-party of spells and punching breaks out and Roshan has to uh go away for a while to recover.
Here’s what happened:
You might have noticed all your friends’ avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That’s because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let’s you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs – without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.
I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man’s Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.