The patch notes for the Dota 2 7.07 update, "Dueling Fates," fully reveals the new Pangolier and Dark Willow heroes who were teased back in August. The update will also make a big change to the matchmaking rating system, updates the Ability Draft, adds a new Dota Turbo game mode and Ping Wheel functionality, and changes the Guide System to make it more accessible and useful. 

Donté Panlin, the Pangolier, is a dashing, Puss in Boots-style swordsman, but instead of a cat he's a sort of anthropomorphic pangolin, with natural scales that provide a handy, always-on defense. "There is no monster he won't slay," Valve said. "No creature he won’t woo. No tyrant he won’t stand against. And no noble immune to his silver tongue." 

The Dark Willow Mireska Sunbreeze, the daughter of a fae merchant, also appears to be a mischievous sort, but of a much darker bent: "While she was quite adept at navigating the etiquette, unspoken laws, and social rituals that permeated every element of her life, she found the whole thing rather boring. So, Mireska did what most rebellious children do: burn down her family estate and set off with her pet wisp Jex to live the life of a wandering grifter." 

To ensure that the matchmaking rating [MMR] system is "recent and accurate" for everyone, MMR for both ranked and unranked players will now work on a six-month seasonal system, the first of which will begin in two weeks. Players will be given a profile medal for each season based on their peak skill during that season, which will be displayed, along with their previous seasonal medal, to all players before each match. 

"At the start of each season all players will recalibrate MMR, seeded by their previous season’s MMR," Valve explained. "Your current historical preseason MMR value will be recorded and selectable in your profile, and ranked players will continue to be able to track their current seasonal MMR value." 

Other changes of note: Turbo Mode keeps the same game rules as All Pick but grants more gold and experience to heroes, weakens defensive towers, and reduces respawn time, all of which will simplify the process of trying out new heroes and strategies; the Ability Draft has been given a new interface; the Guide system is more easily accessible; and new functionality has been added to the Ping Wheel. We'll have a more in-depth analysis of everything that's going on here for you soon, and in the meantime you can dive into the patch notes yourself at dota2.com.

Update: The post originally indicated that the Dueling Fates update was live today, but it will not actually be out until November 1.

Robert Guillaume, the American actor who voiced Half-Life 2's Eli Vance, has died of cancer, aged 89-years-old.  

Guillaume was known outside of videogames for voicing Rafiki in Disney's The Lion King, playing Dr Bennet in 2003's Ewan McGregor-starring Big Fish, and as Benson DuBois in the popular sitcom Soap. 

The latter performance netted him an Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series in 1979. In 1985, the same role saw him become the first black actor to win an outstanding lead actor award. 

Actors, celebrities and personalities have taken to social media to pay tribute to the esteemed actor, such as this from Soap co-star Billy Crystal:

And this from Valve writer Marc Laidlaw:

According to the BBC, Guillaume is survived by his second wife, a son and three daughters.

It was the middle of a Monday afternoon when Marco Cuesta, co-founder of the blockchain esports platform FirstBlood, gave me a call. After plenty of jargon and esports talk had been thrown around, Cuesta's vision for FirstBlood was clear: The future of esports, he says, is one where high-quality competition and rewards systems are made available to everyone, not just professional gamers, and FirstBlood is going to help bridge that gap. But whether or not blockchain technology and cryptocurrency will really help usher in this new era is not so clear.

What is blockchain, and how can esports benefit from it? 

Blockchain is basically a decentralized network that's powered by peer-to-peer communications and transactions. If you're a fan of HBO's Silicon Valley, think of what Richard Hendricks was trying to accomplish with a decentralized internet—it's similar, but different. Instead of having companies maintain everything on a few servers, entire groups of people can interact with each other on a "block" that records data and transactions specifically for those people. Once the interactions are complete, the data is recorded for as long as the network exists, and the next "block" on the "chain" is created after a new set of interactions begins. You can think of each block as a unique page in an ongoing ledger.

A big draw of blockchain is the use of encrypted currency, or "cryptocurrency". This is a type of digital currency that's usually invented by a company or organization for its customers or users. What makes cryptocurrency secure is a process called "mining". As defined by Digital Trends, "Mining uses algorithms to go through each transaction, encrypt the cryptocurrency, and add it to a digital ledger, essentially verifying it and cementing its position online." The currency is visible to everyone on a specific block, so it's virtually impossible to counterfeit. 

Esports and blockchain intersect in uncharted and untested waters. While the benefits of this relationship need time to fully manifest, there are a couple of topics we can discuss with some certainty right now. The first is security. Blockchain-based platforms aren't vulnerable to DDoS attacks, which are annoying to users and can cost companies a ton of money to clear up. Since blockchain replaces centralized servers with distributed systems of thousands of nodes, there's no single target for a DDoS attacker to hit.

The second is more pertinent to esports: the need for better scoring systems. Nothing's worse than losing a match due to lag or some other anomaly that was either out of your control, or abused by your opponent. One way that FirstBlood takes advantage of blockchain is by offering a "juror" system that allows people to review the results of a match if they're disputed, and adjust the outcomes accordingly. 

So what is FirstBlood?

In the simplest of explanations, FirstBlood is an app that syncs up with your Steam account, allowing you to compete against other players on a ladder for in-game rewards. Only Dota 2 is supported right now, but more games will be added down the road. Once the competition window is live, FirstBlood tells competitors which in-game custom lobby to join. They risk tokens (FirstBlood cryptocurrency) on themselves, play the match, and the winner walks away with the tokens. The more you win, the more you can compete, and the leaders win items that have real monetary value. It's still in beta right now, and while I can tell you that the ladder rankings have been fluctuating, FirstBlood could not provide user numbers at the time this article was published.

FirstBlood also wants to break more into the professional level of esports. The company already has its feet wet in that regard with Dota 2 thanks to BITS (Blood in the Streets) EU, a tournament the company hosted back in June. Some big names including Team Singularity, Danish Bears, and Gambit Esports fought for their piece of a $5,000 prize pool in front of Twitch audiences that capped at about 3,500 viewers per match. While these numbers aren't a whole lot to write home about, if nothing else, it tells us that blockchain is up to the challenge of hosting significant events down the road. BITS Americas is currently being planned for next month in early November.

Most recently, and perhaps most significantly, FirstBlood partnered with the China General Administration of Sport to host the China University Esports League (CUEL), in which players from thousands of universities compete in each year. If successful, it could be a very big step for the integration of blockchain technology into the esports industry. 

Though these tournaments and partnerships are great for blockchain, it's still a very new and unproven technology in the gaming world. Even in the business world, where blockchain is most popular, analysts suggest that companies be wary of how they utilize this technology.

"Blockchain won't be a competitive differentiator," according to an article by Forbes. "It's an eventual commodity function that will be embedded in every organization's processes where it's needed most. The differentiation will be in how companies use blockchain for competitive advantage." 

The burden on blockchain esports platforms to establish what that competitive advantage is seems hefty. Think about a game like Overwatch for a minute. There's already a built-in ladder, as well as a reward system that's easy to engage with. It's simple, you don't need to constantly win to earn rewards, and your rolling stats are saved to your player profile after you're done playing a match. Blizzard even uses the regional Skill Rating system as a measure of one's worth to Overwatch esports. This isn't unique to Overwatch, either. It would seem as though the highest skilled players would prefer to stick with the in-game ladder for practical and professional reasons rather than compete on another platform, and casual gamers wouldn't have the need for anything beyond what the game already gives them.

There are quite a few possibilities for blockchain in esports, but the real question is whether or not the technology is in a unique position to help the esports industry evolve. There are plenty of companies out there that have some sort of technology aimed at improving or advancing competitive gaming. Some of them tweak latency, some of them have special products, and some even track your stats to give you a tailored path to improvement. Most, if not all, even host their own tournaments with the help of various sponsors. The addition of cryptocurrency is a nice touch if you're into that sort of reward system, but it's difficult to say whether or not the enhanced security and other amenities of blockchain will have a meaningful impact on esports in the long run.

The fact remains that the future of esports is one where the professional product exists alongside similar experiences for players and fans of all levels. In a sense, as certain esports leagues begin to adopt franchised structures to help pull the industry into local ecosystems, other evolutions need to occur at the casual level to propel esports to a visible space within mainstream culture. It may or may not be blockchain that brings about that change, but companies like FirstBlood are ensuring that progress never stops.

A Half-Life 2 mod released this week adds locations, characters and story beats that Valve cut from the original game. Dark Interval takes all the tidbits of information we know about drafts of the genre-defining FPS and stitches them together into a standalone game. 

This week's release is just part one of the overall project, containing 11 levels in total including a revamped prologue, a reworked Kleiner's Lab section and a new locale called Manhack Arcade, where the player sees citizens of City 17 remotely piloting Manhacks (those annoying flying robots with twirling blades) to kill fugitives in the city.

The development team have filled in some of the gaps too, adding their own original work. "Dark Interval doesn't include original levels found in the 'leaked' version of Half-Life 2, and instead features brand new maps which were built from the ground up. It was decided that this was the only way to make them both stand out and be actually modern and not just modernised fix-ups," the creators said.

You don't need a copy of Half-Life 2 or any of its episodes to play Dark Interval, but you will need to download Source SDK Base 2013 Singleplayer, which is readily available in the 'Tools' section of Steam. Dark Interval can be downloaded here—that page has all the instructions you'll need to get it running. 

Here's some more screenshots from the mod:

Cheers, DSO Gaming.

Every week, we ask our panel of PC Gamer writers a question about PC gaming. This week: which old PC game do you revisit regularly? We also welcome your answers in the comments. 

James Davenport: Portal/Portal 2

I can't count the times I've played through Portal and Portal 2. With over 100 hours clocked in each, I'm an amateur speedrunner at this point. I treat every puzzle like a choreographed dance, a nearly unconscious performance that to any observer unfamiliar with the series makes me look like the master of all time and space. Because the Portal series is a game about momentum—you're always anticipating the resulting arc of a 'toss' of your body after leaping from a given height far above one portal—it's become my new way to skip rocks without a pond. Except these rocks tell jokes. And the rocks are always funny. 

Andy Kelly: Broken Sword

I've replayed the first Broken Sword more than any other game. There's an element of nostalgia to it, as it was one of the first games I really loved. But it's also a great adventure game in its own right, with an atmosphere you can get lost in and a genuinely funny script. There are TV shows and films I watch repeatedly because there's something comforting about the familiarity, and Broken Sword is the videogame equivalent of that for me. I know all the puzzle solutions, but I still enjoy reliving that mystery and travelling the world as amateur detective George Stobbart.

Chris Livingston: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

I still jump into Oblivion a few times a year. When I do it's often for a specific reason, like to test a mod or write a quick diary for the site (like finding the ugliest NPC or trying to poison everyone with apples) but I always stay a while longer since I still enjoy the game and the world. It's the first Bethesda RPG I ever played, and while it's not much in the looks department (and never really was) it's still one of the best examples of a free and open world where you can do whatever you like, be whoever you want, and tell your own stories.

Tyler Wilde: Quake II

I've played hundreds of hours of Quake 2 multiplayer—CTF, Action Quake 2, Rocket Arena—but I don't think I've ever finished the campaign. Even so, at least once a year I spend an hour getting Quake 2 to launch without crashing to play through the first level. I think I just like hearing the sound effects, which deserve credit for how weird they are. They Quake 2 blaster doesn't sound like any other game's energy pistol, picking up armor sounds like someone chomping down on a bunch of screws, and the Strogg are just bizarre—clipped, blown out, grossly-distorted. The way unique scents can bring back memories, these sound effects do it for me. Now please enjoy a song someone tried to make using the echoey menu sound effects.

Wes Fenlon: NetHack

On-and-off for the past year I've been playing NetHack, which was first released in 1987. NetHack is actually older than me, although it's been updated as recently as 2015. I can't claim nostalgia, here, or some deep childhood bond with roguelikes. I never played Rogue and only played NetHack for the first time a couple years ago. But it's now a regular part of my gaming life, and even when I take breaks from it I'm thinking about my last run. What kind of scrolls I could've written if my blessed magic marker hadn't run out of juice; how unlucky I got rubbing a lamp and spawning a genie who didn't give me a wish; how lucky I was to find an adventurer's corpse wearing dragon scale mail, a key piece of armor that can reflect instakill magic attacks. I've never beaten NetHack, and I don't know if I ever will, but when I play I'm constantly in awe of how broad and deep it is. Last time my pet cat got turned into a magic brain-sucking floating jellyfish, and then turned into a chameleon. NetHack is weird.

Tim Clark: Hearthstone (obviously)

To the surprise of nobody, I play varying amounts of Hearthstone every single day, and have done for three years. During the doldrums between expansions, I just log in and crank out the daily quest to keep my in-game Gold top. But when a new set launches, and I've got a deck I'm really feeling on the go, I might play for as much as a couple of hours a day. The thing with any mulitplayer game, though, is that I feel the serotonin rush of winning acutely, so I find myself Jonesing for that buzz if I stop playing. Equally, the tilt from losing what can feel like unfairly can really sour my mood. So for both reasons I end up rationing my play in a way that I wouldn't with a big single-player game like The Witcher III. Right now I can't envisage a time when I ever stop playing it completely though. Which is both comforting and kinda scary.

Samuel Roberts: Shadows of the Empire

I put Shadows of the Empire in my list of the worst Star Wars games a few months ago, and I'm still sure that was the right call. You sometimes have this weird thing as a critic where something you like is clearly not very good, and you have to call it as such, even if you've got a real soft spot for it personally. This is one of those games. Shadows of the Empire is obviously a pretty bad third-person shooter that made slightly more sense on the N64, and yet I've played the PC version so many times. I'm not sure I could recommend it to anyone but those who played it at the time, though.

I still love it. I played it yesterday, and the opening Battle of Hoth level is still one of the best ever put in a game—and there have been a whole bunch of them now across consoles and PC, almost all of which look better than this. The sound and feel of everything, from the scale of the walkers to the way snowspeeders handle, just feels spot on. On foot, Shadows of the Empire is never as good, but for a Star Wars-starved '90s, playing an original story set between Episodes V and VI was a treat, even if Dash Rendar is a mildly ludicrous figure. I even had the Micro Machines set. 

Valve’s been tormenting Dota 2 players for a while now. The 7.07 update, The Dueling Fates, was coming, but when? And what would it bring with it? There were teasers, sure, but not much solid information. Lost and confused, players started wandering the streets, grabbing strangers and demanding to know when The Dueling Fates was coming out. The strangers didn’t know. 

But now we all do! Finally, Valve has announced the release date for the big update, and it’s soon: November 1. Now everyone can just relax. 

We still don’t know much about it, mind. Two new heroes are on their way, however, so that should shake things up. 

Everything will be revealed soon enough, however, as we can expect the patch notes before November. 

Normally it’s pretty hard to halt an inferno, but Team Fortress 2’s Jungle Inferno update, which was meant to launch yesterday, seems to have been more of a small blaze. Valve is rectifying this, fanning the flames and adding some finishing touches, and it should be out today.

“Typically we ship updates on a Thursday, so those of you expecting the Jungle Inferno Update to flip live today, you might want to sit down for this next part,” a post made yesterday reads. “If you're already in a comfortable sitting position, you might want to sit up straighter, because we're about to tell you we're delaying a day and we don't want you to twist your lumbar.”

It’s almost finished, but Valve’s doing some stress testing right now. It will launch early today, says the developer. 

When it does arrive, you’ll be able to check out the new map, Mercenary Park, along with a bunch of community maps, taunts, war paint and Pyro items. Check out the full list of additions here. 

Valve has just announced a new 'Jungle Inferno' update for Team Fortress 2, with the highlight being a brand new map. Dubbed 'Mercenary Park', it's a "new jungle-themed disease-ridden three-control point map" created by Valve. 

The video below doesn't really show much of the map, it being a new animated short providing some narrative colour to the proceedings. But the map isn't all there is: there are a handful of community-created maps as well, all jungle-themed, and for modes including Attack / Defend and King of the Hill.

There's a bunch of new taunts as well: the Yeti punch is what the name implies, and there are a tonne others too, all listed neatly over on this update page. 

This is all just the "Day 1" content – expect more stuff to roll out or be announced over the coming days.

For the last few days, Valve has been teasing the release of a revamped version of venerated Counter-Strike map Dust 2, and yesterday they spilled the full beans on the new facelift. Valve's been refreshing old Counter-Strike maps for a while now, in an attempt to keep CS:GO looking as modern as possible, but messing with Dust 2 is a bit more of a risky proposition than modifying less-played maps like Train.

The more beloved a map is, the larger the potential backlash will be. Dust 2 has been a staple of competitive play for over 15 years, and was far and away the most played map in the game until its removal from the active map pool back in February. 

It's not surprising, then, that Valve's rework is so conservative. While all the assets have been replaced with higher-res, higher-poly ones, achieving the goal of bringing the map in line with modern graphical expectations, changes to the way the map plays are modest. 

The biggest change is to the visual clarity, which has been improved across the map. Most of the dark or busy looking areas that allowed players to blend in with their surroundings have been illuminated: the tunnels leading to B are much brighter thanks to a new open ceiling, and a lot of the crates throughout the map have been draped in white cloth to better contrast with player models. Bombsite A benefits from the deletion of the busy-looking doors at the back of A long, and some cleanup of the wall decoration along catwalk. These are bound to be uncontroversial changes, and are in line with what Valve has been doing with the other map facelifts.

There’s also been some common sense cleanup work that probably should’ve happened years ago. Stuff like widening the window from CT spawn into B site, and simplifying the scaffolding near CT-side mid doors, feels like pretty basic quality-of-life improvements that will prevent newer players from getting stuck on weird geometry or having their shots glance off of random pipes.

What impact will these changes have?

In the coming weeks we’ll get a better idea of the full ramifications of this update. A couple things to keep an eye on will be whether the new single car on A long (which replaces a pair of cars that were at odd angles in the map’s previous version) will actually be useful as cover now, and whether the increase in room to maneuver behind B site’s car will increase its viability as a hold point for CTs.

There are also some subtle changes that may not even be intentional, and may or may not have a substantial impact on gameplay. Foremost among these is a problem we’ve seen already on some of the other modernized maps, but doesn’t seem to have caused enough of a ruckus to attract Valve’s notice: almost every previously-flat surface is now slightly bumpy (presumably for visual fidelity reasons), which affects the way grenades bounce off of floors and walls. Given how big of a deal smoke and flash placement is in CS, this may prove to be problematic in the long term, as it’s going to reduce the accuracy with which banked grenades can be placed.

Also on the topic of small, maybe-unintentional changes, the spawn locations have shifted slightly. A helpful redditor has pointed out after exploring the map that counter-terrorists can now get to their side of A long a full two seconds before terrorists can get to theirs, which may impact which corners CT players choose to hold, and which angles T players choose to peek from. Again, these are the kind of changes that will require some time to shake out, and we won’t know the full effect of this stuff until the competitive meta has fully adapted, which may take even longer than usual given there's a decade-plus of habits to unlearn.

But Valve seems to have struck a good balance with this update. It’s a healthy overhaul that makes some modest but interesting changes without reinventing the wheel. From a purely visual perspective, the new Dust 2 is beautiful, and undeniably an upgrade from the previous iteration. The terrorists have also gotten new higher-fidelity player models as part of the deal, and they’re a big improvement over the dated look of the existing models. (Puzzlingly, the CT models have not gotten the same treatment thus far.)

There are of course a host of bugs related to the new geometry, allowing for all manner of unintentional boost spots and weird clipping, but this has always been the case with these big map refreshes, and generally they get fixed in a fairly timely manner. Once these issues are addressed, we should expect to see Dust 2 re-added to the Active Duty map pool (possibly at the expense of Cobblestone) and the tournament circuit will quickly demonstrate what effect, if any, the update will have on the way Counter-Strike’s most iconic map is played.

Valve's next TF2 update is going to be a biggie, overhauling some of the multiplayer shooter's most iconic weapons and fixing items that have been unbalanced for years. When Valve announced the changes in June it didn't say when the update was due. After a blog post from the developer yesterday we still don't have a precise date, but we do have a much better idea.

"We're putting the finishing touches on a mammoth new update, and it'll be shipping in the very near future, we promise. How near? Well, very. Imminent. Not this week imminent, but you know. Really soon."

Hmm. The language suggests that it could arrive later this month. I really hope so, because it's the first TF2 update for a while that I'm actually excited about. There's tweaks across the board but some classes, such as the Scout or Spy, are getting a lot of attention (the Scout's triple jump-enabling Atomizer bat is now much less viable, for example), while others like the Demoman are being left mostly alone. 

You can read more about the changes in Valve's "sneak peak".

Every player will have a different view of the planned changes, but personally I'm looking forward to a nerf to the Spy's Dead Ringer, a cloaking device that players use to feign death that is really frustrating to play against. Ammo kits and dispensers will no longer fill the device's meter, so Spies won't be able to use it as often.

How do you think the changes will impact the game?