May 11, 2018
Dota 2 - Valve
- Added a daily and weekly challenge to the Battle Pass.
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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…)
The 2018 International Battle Pass offers some very interesting new things for Dota 2 players, foremost among them The Underhollow, a new game mode that has three-player teams setting off on a competitive quest for cheese that sounds an awful lot like an underground battle royale.
"Battle through a labyrinth filled with monsters, marvels, and many other three-player enemy squads as you search for Roshan's rarest cheese and work to be the last team standing. You'll need to navigate carefully to earn the XP and Gold needed to destroy your opponents," the Battle Pass site say. "But don't take too long—Roshan's cheese frenzy is causing cave-ins as he moves towards the center of the Underhollow. Soon enough there will be nowhere left to run."
It's not a dead-on description of a battle royale, but the combination of competitive play, "last team standing," and what sounds like a contracting battlefield certainly bears some basic similarities. And of course there's the fact that battle royale is the big thing these days, so a Dota 2 take on the mode would come as no surprise at all.
Battle Pass owners will also have access to the Cavern Crawl mode, with a "cosmically rare Jade Baby Roshan at stake," a new Mutation mode, sprays, in-game tipping, and—this is another big one—the Emerald Abyss, a reward terrain that will never be unlockable or purchasable on the marketplace. You either unlock it before The International is over, or you say goodbye to it forever.
We'll no doubt be hearing more about The Underhollow very soon, and we'll keep you posted when we have more details. For now, you can take a look at all the many many unlockables and rewards the pass has to offer, and buy it if you like, at dota2.com.
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.
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…)