The history of Dota is the history of ideas being poured into a giant bucket full of wizards. From Aeon of Strife to the wild herds of tower defence games that roamed the plains of the Warcraft III custom map scene, Dota has always been a mongrel thing. In that sense it's appropriate that Steam's former chart-topper should spend the summer paying tribute to the genre that toppled it. Packed in with this year's International Battle Pass is Underhollow, a team-based take on battle royale were teams race to claim a cheese from the denizens of a collapsing underground maze.

Underhollow isn't pure battle royale, however. Its dungeon structure and focus on killing monsters gives it some of the qualities of a MMO raid, and the battles that take place when teams meet are pure MOBA. Think of a Dota teamfight taking place inside a WoW boss chamber on PUBG's map and you're most of the way there.

Its links to the battle pass reward system aside, there's little about Underhollow that couldn't have been done by a determined map maker in Dota 2's community arcade. That said, it's all the better for Valve's resources and craftsmanship—particularly when it comes to the map and monsters monsters, which feature some of Valve's first new art for the game in months.

The monsters are an all-round highlight, actually. Far from being just camps to farm for gold and experience, each room in Underhollow features a randomly-assigned encounter in one of three difficulty tiers, including boss fights. There are MMO-style tank-and-spank fights, 'the floor is lava' encounters, bullet hell wizards, invisible ghosts, and giant Wraith Kings that have to all be slain at the same time to prevent them from respawning.

Figuring out each encounter is the first step, and understanding how to leverage Dota 2's vast pool of heroes to exploit them is the next. Luna's ability to bounce her glaive between lots of different foes is good in most rooms; the fact that she can't switch it off is potentially a nightmare in the room where you have to focus on hitting a big vase rather than any of the trolls standing next to it. Laudably, Valve have made the entire roster of heroes available in Underhollow and been relatively free with how monsters interact with them. They could have stacked bosses up with immunities and forced a particular playstyle, but they haven't and I think the mode is better for it.

It's less balanced as a consequence, however, and while anything can work—this is Dota, after all—there are certain heroes who really love this structure. Axe, for example, thrives in multi-target encounters and is one of the rare heroes who actually becomes more dangerous when a teamfight takes place in a room that's still full of monsters. Zeus' ability to nuke every single hero on the map at the same time is a big force multiplier in Underhollow, where it can sometimes randomly ruin another team's boss battle at the push of a button.

This runs the risk of turning the hero drafting step into the most important moment of the game, with many of my early matches turning into a game of 'PICK AXE'. As an Axe lifer, it's nice to see him get his moment—especially at the expense of perennial pub menace Pudge, who simply isn't very useful in the confines of the dungeon. But this degree of one-sidedness is only forgivable because Underhollow is a throwaway mode to play over the summer. If it became a bigger part of the game—and there's a case to be made for that happening—then you'd want to see something resembling balance, and that'd probably mean a cut-down hero roster.

The biggest issue, however, is stability. Underhollow reliably crashes for a number of players at the beginning of a match, forcing them to reconnect—this happens without fail, every single time you play, to at least a couple of people. Players working to meet their weekly battle points cap will quickly get used to micromanaging their disconnected teammates while they wait for them to load back into the match. There's not much else to say about this other than 'it's bad' and 'Valve should fix it'.

This unreliable performance, coupled with a drive to farm battle pass points, can make Underhollow feel a little disposable—particularly when you're playing with strangers. It's really easy to throw a game away, and do so quickly, and as a consequence you're always at the mercy of your teammates. If all three of you are on the same page, great. If not, it usually means a few rooms of grinding followed by death to the first team you encounter, a trip back to the main menu, and another roll of the matchmaking dice.

This feeling that Underhollow is ultimately a throwaway experience—compounded by the bugs, the imbalance, and its seasonal nature—are a shame because there's something worth exploring here: a worthy extrapolation of traditional Dota. Were it just a little bit more polished, this might have justified the cost of the Battle Pass by itself.

Bonus Underhollow PSA!

Dota 2 is full of ways to be that guy, from spamming pings to premature GGs. In Underhollow, you can identify that guy really easily: it's the person who picks up all of the loot from a dungeon chest straight away, and then sells it without checking to see if their teammates need anything.

Don't be that guy, kids!

OpenAI, the independent research institute that was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015, will send its Dota 2 bots to The International 2018. There, the AI team will take on a professional team in a 5v5 match. And it plans to win. 

Known as OpenAI Five, the bot team has taught itself the nuts and bolts of Valve's free-to-play MOBA by playing 180 years' worth of games against itself every day. OpenAI says this process requires 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores—and is a scaled up version of the "much-simpler" variant that toppled pro player Danil "Dendi" Ishutin in 1v1 at last year's TI. 

"Our team of five neural networks, OpenAI Five, has started to defeat amateur human teams at Dota 2," says OpenAI. "While today we play with restrictions, we aim to beat a team of top professionals at The International in August subject only to a limited set of heroes. We may not succeed: Dota 2 is one of the most popular and complex esports games in the world, with creative and motivated professionals who train year-round to earn part of Dota’s annual $40M prize pool."  

This blog post explores the myriad challenges and obstacles the OpenAI team faces while brining OpenAI Five up to speed—not least Dota 2's complex rules. Read the post in full via the link above, and watch the following short which examines some of the learned behaviours the bots have picked up along the way below. 

These include teamfighting, value prediction and, rather amusingly, ganking. Here's that:

And here's Dendi's 1v1 defeat to an AI opponent at The International 2017, which kicks off around the 7.30 mark. The pre-match testing segment is worth watching too if you've time—I was particularly tickled by the chap who says "the not being able to kill it part is so annoying" in reference to the AI's skills.

Valve has disqualified a Dota 2 team from its upcoming The International 2018 for using a programmable gaming mouse. In doing so, Thunder Predator used an "unfair advantage", so says contest organiser FACEIT, during the South America qualifiers, which prevents them progressing to August's $15 million competition.  

As reported by Motherboard, Thunder Predator's AtuuN is said to have selected Meepo—a Geomancer, who is billed as "one of the hardest carries in the game to play effectively due to his heavy reliance on micromanagement." Meepo can create clones of himself, and when each clone teleports, they deal damage in the surrounding area. And while this cloning method can be a powerful means of offence, said micromanagement means each clone must be instructed individually. 

Under pressure—like, say, during a tournament—this routine isn't easy. 

Motherboard links to this YouTube clip of AtuuN effortlessly directing Meepo clones around the map during the third game. This caught the attention of the Dota 2 subreddit, who in turn accused AtuuN of leveraging a software macro—a process that lets players roll complex button combos into fewer/single clicks. 

Combat logs (see above) showed that AtuuN teleported Meepo clones at the exact same time. This process would normally take players several seconds—they'd otherwise need to instruct each Meepo individually—but Thunder Predator denied using macros. It did, however, concede that a programmable mouse may be at fault—a Razer Synapse 3.   

"The player of our squadron ‘Atún’ has a Razer Synapse mouse, which, like any professional player, has put its own manual configuration to be able to have a better use of Hardware in benefit of its efficient performance in each of the games played with this hero (Meepo)," says Thunder Predator (via Google Translate) on its official Facebook page. "In this way, we highlight the fact that no type of hack has been used."

FACEIT, on the other hand, felt differently.

Thunder Predator suggests it's been hard done by. "That is why through this announcement," the Facebook post continues (again, via Google Translate), "we denounce this accusation, affirming that at no time, our player ‘Atún’ use any type of hack or particular program that facilitated his game mode before the match, yesterday, with the SG team." 

After teasing us for months about CS:GO eventually getting updated to use the “Panorama” interface that Dota 2 has been using since its Reborn update in June 2015, Valve has finally released a public beta of CS:GO with the new UI up and running. This was one of our big wishlist items for CS:GO in 2018, and I’m happy to report that it's pretty darn good.

Admittedly, the bar has been set pretty low for Panorama, as the existing CS:GO interface is nothing to write home about. It’s looked more or less the same since the game’s release in 2012; a ton of game features and their respective menu options have been added since then, but the overall look and feel of the UI has remained pretty static. Big structural issues, like the fact that you can’t navigate any of the inventory or loadout options while you’re in a lobby with your friends, have been left unaddressed for years, and aesthetically it’s about what you’d expect from a game released in 2012.

Fortunately, those days appear to be behind us, as the Panorama update is a complete overhaul that replaces virtually every UI asset. Going through the menus in the public beta, it’s hard to spot much of anything that hasn’t gotten the Panorama treatment, which is a good thing, since the end result is a much more modern-feeling game.

The visual facelift isn’t the only thing Panorama has to offer either. It also introduces some clever new features, like a landing page that shows you recent news posts (a common and useful element in most recent multiplayer games), some new explanatory tooltips, and a handy table that shows you what your teammates have equipped themselves with when you’re in the buy menu. You can now navigate the various pre-match menus while sitting in a lobby with your party.

It’s worth reiterating that this is just a beta, and as such, not all the kinks have been ironed out yet. A bunch of the console commands don’t work properly, there are a couple actions that will get you stuck on an inescapable menu screen, and there’s something a bit weird going on with the way your crosshair is rendered. There’s a big thread full of bug reports on the CS:GO subreddit, so it may be a little while yet before Panorama is ready for primetime. Valve has already released its first patch for the beta version, however, and seem keen to get it ready for final release in short order.

What's not to like

There are also a couple stylistic choices that seem a bit questionable, and not being bugs, they seem unlikely to be changed before the update goes live unless the community gets extremely up in arms about them. Foremost among these annoyances is the background treatment for the new scoreboard; in the old UI, the scoreboard simply darkened the area of the screen it occupied enough for you to see the white scoreboard text, allowing you to see through it fairly easily. The Panorama version applies a blur effect instead, making it largely impossible to see your crosshair or any environmental details in the middle of your screen. For players who tend to compulsively check the scoreboard during the round, this is a big downgrade, and looks an awful lot like Valve trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.

Another head-scratcher is the inclusion on the main landing page of a big, animated player model right in the middle.This format has become pretty ubiquitous of late, perhaps due to its appearance in DayZ and PUBG, but it makes little sense in a game with, at the moment, virtually no cosmetic character customization to speak of. Surely there are more fruitful bits of information this screen real estate could be used for in CS:GO.

Minor quibbles aside, Panorama has survived the migration from Dota 2 to CS:GO remarkably intact. Given how enormous of an upgrade it is over the dated UI we’ve been using until now, one gets the impression of playing a whole new game upon first sight of the new main menu.

It’s a breath of fresh air to see Valve taking big steps like this to modernize CS:GO. One of the longtime complaints of the Counter-Strike community has been that despite boasting similar player numbers to Dota 2, it never feels like CS:GO gets nearly the same amount of love from its developers, and I suspect an update like this will help assuage that bitterness in the hearts of Counter-Strike’s crustiest detractors.

Here’s to hoping Valve can continue shipping substantive, high-quality updates like this going forward, and we can all stop reading snide HLTV comments about how Counter-Strike is a dying game.

In April, a study of loot boxes by the Netherlands Gaming Authority concluded four out of ten videogames considered fell foul of the country's gambling laws. And while specific games were not named at the time, the regulator body warned that "enforcement action" would be taken against any games that failed to meet legal requirements by June 20. 

That's today, of course, and it now appears loot boxes in both Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 have been deemed illegal. As reported by tweakers.net (via Reddit), players of both games were met today with a message from Valve detailing the sanctions. 

As posted by Reddit user hollandje, here's the message in full:

Dear Counter-Strike: Global Offensive customers,

In May, we received two letters from the Dutch Kansspelautoriteit, stating that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 contain ‘loot boxes’ that violate the Dutch Betting and Gaming Act. The Kansspelautoriteit accusation is different from how other countries think about loot boxes, so we hired Dutch legal counsel, looked at the recent Study into Loot Boxes published by the Kansspelautoriteit, and learned more about Dutch law. We still don’t understand or agree with the Kansspelautoriteit’s legal conclusion, and we’ve responded to explain more about CS:GO and Dota 2.

In the meantime, we have a threat from the Kansspelautoriteit to prosecute Valve if we don’t implement a remedy by June 20. The letters don’t tell us how to do that, but the Study into Loot Boxes does contain one rather simplistic statement:

"Loot boxes contravene the law if the in-game goods from the loot boxes are transferable. Loot boxes do not contravene the law if the in-game goods from the loot boxes are not transferable."

So for now our only practical alternative is to disable trading and Steam Marketplace transfers for CS:GO and Dota 2 items for Dutch customers. We apologize to you for this inconvenience. We hope that, after more engagement with the Kansspelautoriteit, they may refine their legal demands and we can find a solution that is less inconvenient.

This move follows Belgium's loot box injunctions, whose Gambling Commission also ruled against loot boxes in Overwatch, FIFA 18, and CS:GO in April. A deadline was not set in this instance, however it will be interesting to see how Belgian authorities proceed in light of the above.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive got a major visual update today in the form of the new Panorama UI. Valve described the overhauled interface as "the most substantial change to the look and feel of CS:GO since the game was released in 2012."

"From the Main Menu to the Scoreboard, the entire experience of interacting with the game has been updated," Valve said. Unfortunately, it's not actually finished, and so this release only supports the "practice with bots" option, either solo or with a friend. 

As Dot Esports pointed out, this is actually the second game to get the Panorama treatment: Valve gave Dota 2 a Panorama update last year. In order to check out CS:GO's hot new look yourself you'll have to opt in to a beta depot, which you can learn about here. 

By way of speedrunning, roleplaying servers and performance subcultures, I love communities that tailor games to suit their own esoteric interests. To this end, Team Fortress 2's annual trick jumping competition The Beginnings is underway.

As reported by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, The Beginnings 5 hosts contests in trick jumping, speedrunning and a live race. "Do you have what it takes?" asks this Reddit post. "Beginnings 5 is an organized event for competition within TF2 jumping. This year we will be holding three separate competitions, a speedrun competition, a trick jumping competition, and a live race. 

"There are in-game medals to be won. To be eligible for a participant medal you must send in a run that's faster than the showcase time of the map you submit a run on, send in a trickjump that isn't obviously bad, or participate in the live race."

The Reddit post points those interested this way, and notes that the race will be held on  June 23 and will be streamed on Twitch here. 16 racers for each class will take part, this post explains, with racers going head-to-head till two jumpers meet in the grand final. To enter, players are required to submit eight demos—four in POV, and four in SourceTV. 

The following map showcase is impressive all told, but I was particularly taken by the moves from five minutes onward.

More information on The Beginnings 5 lives here. Here's Evan's words on how Team Fortress 2 changed FPSes forever.

The Underhollow, the Dota 2 battle royale with cheese mode that was announced in May, is now live. The new mode is available exclusively to owners of the 2018 International Battle Pass, a multi-level offering for Dota fans that also includes new modes, sprays, a Cavern Crawl, and other rewards. 

The Underhollow pits eight teams of three players each against one other in a great quest for Roshefort, the rarest of all cheese located in the caverns beneath Roshan's lair. But the other cheese-chasing teams are just the start of your problems: Roshan himself is also that sharp, savory flavor, and his rambunctious roaming is causing the tunnels to collapse, slowly constricting the playing area. 

The last team standing will earn a hefty bounty of Battle Points, which can also be claimed (in smaller amounts) by taking out opposing players and discovering treasures or cheese. (Which isn't to say that a good cheese isn't a treasure, but you know what I mean.) 

The level 1 Dota 2 International Battle Pass goes for $10, while the level 75 is $37. You can also purchases levels separately if you want to upgrade your pass to take advantage of higher reward tiers. Full details are available at dota2.com.

We originally reviewed Dota 2 in 2013. It has changed significantly since then, so much so that we decided to review it again. Our original review can still be found here. For more about why we've chosen to re-review certain games, head here.

Given that it started life as a faithful recreation of the original Defence of the Ancients mod, you’d be forgiven for thinking of Dota 2 as the archetypical MOBA. Yet this isn’t the case: in practice, Dota 2’s purism sets it apart from the vast majority of games in this genre. What we think of as the MOBA really began with Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends—games that took that roughshod family of WarCraft custom maps and professionalised them, commercialised them, found them a form that would enshrine the MOBA at the top of the gaming world for the better part of a decade.

Dota 2 is different. Adopted by Valve, that original mod became a tool for boosting Steam’s popularity in places where the service hadn’t reached the ubiquity that it enjoyed in Europe and North America—such as Russia, Southeast Asia and China, traditional strongholds of the DotA scene. And the best way to do this proved to be to remain steadfastly idiosyncratic. What this resulted in was a free to play MOBA where all of the heroes are free, where there are no account levels to grind, where design compromises imposed by the limitations of a noughties map editor have been embraced as design law. Dota’s leap from mod-scene darling to million-dollar phenomenon was whiplash-inducingly quick, its uncommercial credibility ripped away like a bandaid—so fast that you might not notice it was gone.

What does this mean for you as a prospective player? Principally, it means that this is a dizzyingly deep competitive team strategy game whose core design benefits from fifteen years of unbroken refinement. It was in this strategic sandbox that the basic assumptions of the MOBA were established: two teams, three lanes, five heroes per team, towers, creeps, jungles, bases, and Ancients. On paper, your job is to lay siege to the enemy base and blow up the enemy ancient. In practice, your job is to manipulate the strategic, economic and psychological tempo of the match, a challenge whose variables change every time you play.

You’ve also got to pick the right wizard, cast the right spells, and make sure they buy the right shoes. Obviously. This is Dota we're talking about.

Dota 2’s learning curve is mountainous, but everybody has to start somewhere. You’ll start by picking a character you like and learning how to use their abilities effectively—lining up stuns, dishing out damage, turning foes into frogs, being the best helicopter or bear or fishman that you can be. Then you’ll learn something about how to play that hero as part of a team, which stat-boosting items to buy, and at what stage in the game you’re at your most powerful. You’ll learn some hard lessons about getting too close to enemy towers, about carrying a town portal scroll to get from place to place on time, about vision-granting wards and why everybody’s always yelling for someone else to buy them. Then you’ll improve, maybe learn a few more heroes, learn to look at your minimap, and then you’ll realise that you’re going to have to unlearn about 75% of the things you think you know in order to surmount the next step of Dota 2’s endless staircase. If you enjoy this process of learning, failing, and learning again, then thousands of hours will pass: and before you know it, you’ll be a below-average Dota 2 player like everybody else.

Although the community has always maintained certain customs about the best way to play, Dota itself has never enforced a particular methodology. This is the key thing that separates it from its peers: while other MOBAs have tended to fold the community metagame into the design of the games themselves—codifying player roles like tanks, supports and damage-dealers as fixed archetypes within their rosters—this doesn’t work quite the same way in Dota 2. This is a game with a simulationist heart, where a character isn’t a good tank because they were always intended to be so, but because of the specific way they interact with Dota 2’s underlying matrix of items, statistics, and map features. This is a game where the addition or subtraction of a tree in a single part of the map might change the viability of a hero—a game of endless interrelated butterfly effects.

What this means is that Dota 2 is a game you will never finish learning, one that cannot be perfected either by its developers or its players. It goes without saying that it’s hard to learn: I’ve been playing consistently for the last six years and I’m pretty bad at it. But that journey has been one of the most rewarding and remarkable experiences I’ve ever had with a videogame. The process of learning, sharing knowledge and adapting to continual change brings people together: I have made lifelong friends playing Dota 2, people with whom I now share an extensive vocabulary rooted in this expansive, strange, beautiful game.

That inherent flexibility is also the reason Dota 2 makes for such a compelling esport. Its complex sandbox allows for huge divergence in playstyles across teams, players, and regions. While restrictive metagames have emerged from time to time, they have never lasted: and in seven years of high-profile competition, the field has remained open to challengers from all parts of the world, with all sorts of different approaches to that core strategic challenge. Indeed, the creativity that Dota 2’s core simulation supports is something that the best players are ideally positioned to exploit, and watching the metagame get turned on its head by a brilliant bit of lateral thinking—something that happens at least once per International—is a pure thrill. If you’ve never felt a basketball stadium full of people explode with excitement because a teen millionaire has selected an unusual dragon, then, well, you’re missing out.

It’d be impractical to recount every way that Dota 2 has changed since I first reviewed the game for PC Gamer back in 2013. It has a better in-game UI and a much improved main menu, including faster load times and a more sophisticated interface for pregame strategising. Most recently, Valve introduced new quality-of-life features like context-sensitive indicators to let you know when a hero or item has been altered in a patch. Given that balance passes now take place fortnightly, allowing players ready access to this information is very welcome.

The Arcade was a flagship new feature when it launched, a freeform custom game lobby that recreates the conditions of the WarCraft III custom map scene from which the original DotA emerged. As in those days, a few game modes—chiefly tower defence mods and a couple of combat-heavy Dota variants—dominate.

In part, the flagging popularity of the Arcade is due to the introduction of Turbo mode last year. Turbo fulfills the same purpose that many of those popular Arcade mods do: it allows you to play Dota—or something like Dota—more quickly and in a more forgiving environment, and its inclusion shows the benefits of relaxing Dota 2’s purist tendencies. This mode features much faster leveling—and therefore much shorter games—and downplays some of Dota 2’s more complex systems, like the item courier. The result is a version of Dota 2 that is both more accessible for new players and offers experienced players the chance to blow off a little steam. It’s easier and sillier, and ultimately less rewarding than a full game, but it’s perfect when you want to check out a new hero or when you don’t have the time or energy to commit to a match that could last more than an hour.

Valve has spent years fiddling with ways to make money from Dota without compromising its core. This began with the Compendium—a sort of digital stickerbook released alongside each year’s International esports championship—and grew into Battle Passes, months-long event seasons where players race to complete challenges for points and prizes.

This year’s Dota Plus subscription system is as close as Valve has come to putting game features behind a paywall. Your fee grants you access to enhanced tutorial features, including in-game skill and item suggestions based on crowdsourced data. There are also challenges to complete and stat-tracking gems to collect—a further variation on the ‘collect all the hats’ theme that powers Battle Passes.

Dota Plus caused controversy when it was announced—this is a community highly sensitive to anything with a whiff of pay-to-win about it. But that hasn’t been my experience with the system. In fact, Dota Plus’ data-driven guides are frequently less useful than the player-made alternatives available in-game for free, and often make skill and item suggestions that aren’t helpful. A bit of extra guidance for new players is always welcome, but there’s nothing here to challenge or replace the value of having a friend show you the ropes.

Between Plus and Battle Passes, then, the bulk of Dota 2’s microtransactions take the form of premium systems that let you complete challenges and win hats. There are greater and lesser expressions of this idea—from co-op dungeon minigames to Crystal Maiden’s gambling wheel—but it basically comes down to paying a fee to get better rewards from the matches you’d be playing anyway.

This is a mixed blessing. On one hand, taken on their own merits, Dota 2’s premium options aren’t very compelling. There’s not much that you feel you’ll have to own unless not participating in the latest Battle Pass makes you feel like you're missing out. On the other hand: there’s not much that you feel you’ll have to own. Dota 2’s extraordinary generosity in terms of raw game-stuff, which sets it aside from every other game in this genre, means that Valve don’t have much left that they could meaningfully lock behind a paywall. In that scenario, it’s tempting to forgive them the odd underwhelming hat collection minigame.

Every now and then, however, a feature creeps into one of these premium packages that feels like it belongs in the core game. That's happening right now—at the time of writing, owners of the 2018 International Battle Pass gain the ability to queue to play specific roles in their next ranked game. This is a learning from League of Legends—a further relaxation of that signature purism, acknowledging that while Dota 2 allows players to occasionally transcend or redefine team roles, the majority of players naturally sort themselves into positions anyway. And you know what: it's a really good idea to borrow, allowing you to bypass one of the most socially fraught moments in any ranked game—the bit where half your team argues about who has to play support. It's a shame that this feature is, at present, restricted to the International's latest money-spinner.

Particularly because player conduct remains an issue for Dota 2. Valve have introduced, extended and tinkered with player reporting systems, matchmaking, and so on. They have taken steps to reduce the anxiety that surrounds ranked play by replacing granular numerical skill ratings with much broader, seasonal rank badges. They've implemented pop-up reports that tell you whether you're doing well or badly in the eyes of your fellow players, and added messages to the start of games telling you to be nice. The success or failure of these methods is, inevitably, invisible: you never know how many internet assholes the game is successfully keeping out of your games.

Even so, Dota 2 remains a place where strangers scream at one another for making mistakes, where hostility has been entrenched by parts of the community as the norm and even desirable. It is certainly not the only game that has this problem, but it can feel unusually intense: perhaps because Dota 2 forces strangers together for so long, or makes them depend on one another so much. The same pressures that make this such a remarkable experience with friends can make it hellish, too, and after six years I couldn't assure you that this is going change. Dota 2 is one of my favourite games of all time, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend playing it solo until you know what you're getting yourself into.

And yet for me, and for millions of other people, this strange, unlikely, unrepeatable game has become part of the daily fabric of playing games on the PC. It's a shortcut to a particular kind of competitive experience that I click on almost every day, and that has retained its ability to excite, fascinate and frustrate many years and many thousands of hours after other games have run their course. Its present custodian, Valve, has succeeded in improving it—in making it more accessible and adding new ways to play. But most importantly Valve has succeeded in preserving Dota—in protecting the spirit of a phenomenal game that predates this specific iteration and will hopefully outlive it, too.

Earlier this week, we asked you to tell us the last physical copy of a PC game you bought, while sharing our own choices. Today, as a kind of sequel to that question, we ask, what was the first downloadable game you bought on PC? 

In the PC Gamer Q&A, we ask the global PC Gamer team for their thoughts on a particular subject, then invite you to add your thoughts in the comments below. We'll also feature a few answers from the PC Gamer Club Discord, accessible to anyone who's a part of our membership program.

You'll find our answers below, and we'd love to hear what your first paid downloadable game was too. 

Jarred Walton: Half-Life 2

I'll take the easy route on this one, because it's also true: Half-Life 2 was the first downloadable game I bought. I also played Counter-Strike 1.6 on the platform (including using the Steam beta), but that was a mod for Half-Life so I didn't pay for it. Anyway, HL2 required Steam, so what else was I going to do? I'm old enough that having a credit card and high-speed internet back in 2004 wasn't a problem, and I was luckier than some, in that Steam worked basically without a hitch for me. Sure, there were a few outages, but I don't recall them ever really affecting me. 

I played (and benchmarked) Half-Life 2 all the way to the end in the first week or so after its release, and I thought the convenience of downloading a game was pretty awesome. Others hated the idea, but I don't think any of us could have guessed how huge Steam would become over the next decade. It went from a place where you bought Valve games and maybe a few others, to eventually becoming the virtual storefront for 95 percent of all the games I own. No wonder EA, Ubisoft, and Activision want a piece of that pie.

Jody Macgregor: Uplink

I kept buying boxed copies of games for ages because slow Australian internet made downloading them a hassle, until I got into small indie games that wouldn't bust my data limit. The first was Uplink, which let me live out the fantasy of being an elite computer hacker and also the fantasy of having really fast internet.

It's designed to make you feel like you're in the movie Sneakers, and for a while it did. Like every other hacking game I've tried—games like Hack 'n' Slash, and else.Heart.Break()—it eventually started to feel like work instead of fun. Now when I want to pretend I'm a hacker I just go to hackertyper.net. What it did get me into was playing more small, personal projects and I found plenty of those to love. The next two were Atom Zombie Smasher and Audiosurf, both of which became favorites.

Samuel Roberts: Audiosurf

Right when rhythm action games were blowing up on console, but tended to focus on guitar music that I didn't really like and plastic controllers that took up way too much space in a single person's bedroom, a friend explained how there was a rhythm action game where you could play your own songs. The novelty of this was huge to me. I was 20 at the time, working on a PlayStation magazine, and I didn't really have the cash for a good PC, having wasted hundreds of pounds on a PS3 I needed for work—which broke a year later. Sigh. At least I got to play Uncharted, I suppose. Eventually, my parents bought me an okayish laptop, and one of the first things I did was download Audiosurf on Steam. 

It was pretty amazing, to upload my favourite tracks into the game and to have so many cool and challenging ways to play them, along with leaderboards. This was one of the first PC games of the modern era that really showed me why playing on PC was better—both in terms of the variety of games available, and the experiences that only PC could give you. If I wanted to play the theme tune from Max Payne 2 in a rhythm action game, I could do it, damn it! 

Now I own close to 1000 games across Steam, GOG, uPlay, Battle.net and Origin, and I don't know why I've done that to myself. 

James Davenport: SiN Episodes

Remember the short-lived SiN Episodes reboot? I can't remember why I chose to make that my first digital purchase rather than, say, Half-Life 2, but it was. It was this whole ordeal. I didn't have a credit card and Steam bucks weren't really a thing back then, so I went to a friend's house (hey, Anton, I'll find that copy of Kingdom Hearts and return it as soon as I can) just to ask their older sister to let me use hers. Digital game marketplaces were a new concept back then, and she didn't play many games anyway, so it 100-percent came off as a con. 

Your little brother's good friend rolls in with wearing the edgiest Linkin Park t-shirt he could find at Goodwill, then asks, under his breath, to borrow your credit card to purchase something from "Steam" called "Sin". My ma had just started preaching at the local Presbyterian church and everyone knew it, so the look Anton's sister threw my way had me worried her eyes might pop out. Not sure why she agreed in the end, but thanks, Roxie. Only had dial-up internet at the time, so my parents paid for it next with a phone line that wouldn't put a call through for a day or two. And when I finally played Episode 1, the only episode ever released, I remember feeling like all the trouble was worth it. The novelty of a game floating somewhere in the ether that I could call mine and play from any computer was incredibly empowering. Bit of a shit game, but SiN Episode 1 got me hooked on Steam, and set me right in the path of innumerable indie games I would have missed otherwise. 

Phil Savage: Prey, the original one

I spent most of my 2000s dealing with a laptop that became too hot to handle after just 20 minutes of Command & Conquer: Generals. As such, the advent of Steam passed me by—if it wasn't a sedate isometric strategy game or RPG, I wasn't prepared to suffer the third-degree burns required to play it. In 2008, though, I got a real job and saved enough money to buy a desktop PC. I downloaded Steam, fully intending to finally play Half-Life 2. Instead, I ran face first into a Steam sale. Prey was on offer for about £3. I didn't know what it was, or if it was any good, but at that price how could I not immediately buy it?

It was good. Prey is far from amazing, but if you don't know any better—for instance if you hadn't played an FPS since Quake because your last decade had been spent ordering many sprites to gib many orcs in the various Infinity Engine RPGs—it looked spectacular. I also bought Audiosurf on the same day, because everyone bought Audiosurf in 2008.

Chris Livingston: Half-Life 2, probably

My Steam purchase history only goes back to 2007 for some reason, but I have to assume it was Half-Life 2. I remember staying up late to unlock it. It launched fine, and I remember seeing those Combine metrocops walking around on the menu screen. Instead of playing, though, I decided to change a couple graphics options, and then had to restart. And that's when Steam completely tanked. I couldn't get back in. I missed my window to play a game I'd been waiting years for, and after about three hours of not being able to connect, I just had to give up and go to sleep because I had work in the morning. I'm sure glad that 15 years later games no longer have launch day issues, huh? Huh?

The PC Gamer Club

We got a few answers from the Club Discord, so thanks all who responded. "I'm pretty sure my first digital game was Mass Effect 1 &2 in 2010 because I'm old and until that point I always got games from a store," says user IronGnomee. "A podcast I listened to at the time was always saying how amazing Commander Shepard was so I finally tried it out." 

"As far as I can remember, it would be The Orange Box," says user Buttface Jones in Discord. "I had played PC games before TOB, like Quake, Command and Conquer, and WoW but always from a disc. I bought TOB on Xbox and fell in love with TF2, despite how bad and limited the Xbox version was. I eventually got fed up and downloaded Steam specifically to play 'the real TF2'."

User Buttz says Garry's Mod on Steam. Imbaer adds, "Orange box in 2008 for me." Fellow user erdelf adds "Stargate Resistance honestly, before that I bought games in the store or played f2p online games." 

Let us know the first downloadable game you bought below!