It’s easy enough to make a bot that can trounce a human player in a first-person shooter – just react faster and shoot straighter – but anything strategic presents a fresh set of exceptionally complex problems. To this day, few Starcraft or Dota bots could rival a decently skilled player or group, at least until now. AI research group OpenAI reckon that their Dota 2 bot team (dubbed OpenAI Five) is nearly good enough to give the pros a run for their money, and will be testing that theory this August at The International 2018.

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It was a matter of time before battle royale got spun up from a top-down perspective. True, the surprisingly fun surviv.io was the first to get there – but that’s essentially a 2D port of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and nearly as shallow as that description implies. Dota 2 is the first game to tackle the genre with a little more depth: I’ve been playing its Underhollow mode, with strangers.

I do not advise playing Dota 2’s Underhollow mode with strangers. (more…)

What do you call a Dota 2 last-man standing mode? A battle royale with cheese. No, really – today the gates opened on the MOBA giant’s new Battle Pass-exclusive playmode, Underhollow. Eight teams enter a rapidly collapsing dungeon, and victory goes to either the last one left standing, or the first to sneak back out holding a legendary wheel of extra-mature cheese. It’s the kind of daft cartoon antics I’ve come to expect from Heroes of The Storm’s special Brawl modes, but don’t take that as a complaint – more of this kind of thing, please.

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You thought all the European General Data Protection Regulation related news was over, didn’t you? Think again. Don’t worry, this bit takes the form of fun trivia rather than an endless onslaught of delivery companies begging to throw pizza promotions at you. Among other things, you can now see every report and commendation you got in Dota 2 since 2015, along with the reason given by whoever snitched on you. This’ll be old news to anyone who’s already part of our fancy supporter program, but I’ve hardly ever been reported and thus claim my title as the nicest person in the world.

Valve have also given everyone access to their Counter-Strike: Global Offensive stats and reports, as well as all sorts of Steam bits and bobs like your chat history (going back two weeks) and community bans. (more…)

Competitive games like League of Legends, Dota 2 and Overwatch are at their best when you play them… competitively. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of fun to be had tooling around in casual play – relaxed environments are great for hanging out with friends, or just being silly. It’s how I spend 95% of my time playing those sort of games. That other 5% of the time though? Those comparatively brief periods where I’ve been playing with a full team of people who I know, all on voice coms, all trying their hardest to secure a win? Those are the times when those sort of games have truly shone as games.>

That’s why I think League’s upcoming tournament mode, Clash, is going to be a big deal. Starting on May 25th, each online tournament will cost a small amount to enter, run every fortnight, and take place over a full three days of the weekend. I’m a Dota man through and through, but Riot’s plans are starting to make Valve’s automated tournaments look a bit rubbish. (more…)

I’ve had Artifact on the brain these past few weeks, so I’ve mulled over the phrase “Dota-inspired card game” more times than I count. But what does Dota-inspired really mean? Artifact has lanes and creeps and heroes and also some nifty rectangles if you haven’t heard, but that just makes it a MOBA-inspired card game. What makes it a Dota game? I spoke to Artifact programmers Bruno Carlucci and Jeep Barnett to find out. (more…)

With Dota 2‘s huge annual tournament, The International, drawing near-ish, Valve have launched a new Battle Pass to help boost the prize pool. Dota 2’s Battle Passes are multi-faceted doodads including access to new modes, challenges, a sticker album, progression tracks to grind through, and oh so very many cosmetic pretties to unlock and collect. This year, it includes a battle royale-soundin’ mode. Battle Passes cost 7 to start, though you can pay extra to skip ahead in the unlock grind, and 25% of the proceeds go to The International 2018’s prize pool. (more…)

Collectible card games have been around for decades, but they’ve really been running hot ever since Blizzard unleashed Hearthstone four years ago. Since then, we’ve seen Shadowverse, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Duelyst, Faeria – there are a lot of these things, if you haven’t heard. They all put their own spin on rectangles with numbers on ’em, but they also universally take cues from Hearthstone and, just as often, each other, and as a result they regularly run into similar problems, the biggest two being how to balance a competitive system and how to price card packs fairly.

Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-inspired card game, is definitely using some pages from the same books, but it’s also doing enough things differently that it has the potential to solve a lot of those problems. (more…)

Kevin ‘Purge’ Godec is an ex-pro Dota 2 player turned analyst, commentator and coach, and I recently went to an event in London where me and a few other journos (*puts on Red Bull Esports voice*): “trained under Purge .

We played a couple of games against people who were far better than us, then listened to a man with near comprehensive knowledge of a stupidly complicated game brutally highlight our every misstep in front of a large crowd of people.

I loved it, though not because of the valuable advice. I loved it because it felt like stepping back into a world that I thought I d left behind, and realising that I m eager to get back to exploring. I also hated it, because it brought me face to face with some of that world’s unpleasant inhabitants in a way that I never have been before.

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You’ll often see characters in sci-fi stories play seemingly incomprehensible games like multi-dimensional space chess, and that’s basically what it’s like playing Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-inspired card game. It’s an ambitious hybrid of the studio’s MOBA and Magic: The Gathering, and it works shockingly well. So much so that it only took two games for me to understand and get on board with Valve’s vision. (more…)