Every week, the PC Gamer team pick their most and least favourite happenings from the last seven days. Here you'll find the week's soaring highs and stagnant lows, picked from the news, the games we've played, the culture at large. The only thing that's guaranteed is there'll be no neutral opinions.

On this page, you'll find a profusion of positivity; on the next, a glut of gloom.

THE HIGHS
 
Samuel Roberts: I loved what I played of Alien Isolation this week. It's pretty cool that a game experimenting with emergent AI just happens to be based on a sci-fi franchise that has a recent spotty history when it comes to...well, look, the easiest way of putting this is, Colonial Marines was a pile of arse. This is so far from any other Alien game stylistically and benefits from Creative Assembly's laser focus on the values of the original Alien. Tom's experiences contrasted nicely with my own, so I'm now fairly confident in Isolation's potential replay value based on what I've seen so far.

Evan Lahti: Guys, Clockwork Empires could be special. I posted my hands-on with the indie, Dwarf Fortress-inspired, Lovecraftian colony-builder earlier this week, and as the rest of the press have begun to see the game at GDC they've been echoing our praise and interest. That includes our pals at RPS, who described it as "really exciting stuff."

We've seen a surge in popularity in games that generate emergent, personal stories in the past few years, and I have a feeling that Clockwork is going to be the next big one on that list. Gaslamp Games' eccentricity is infectious whenever I talk to them, and it's wonderful to see how that's extending to the design of their game--you can build barber shops on the frontier (and barbers operate as low-level doctors when none are available, apparently), and phrenologist will be a middle-class occupation for your colonists that's used to identify their character traits. Gaslamp's willingness to be themselves--that is, weird--is encouraging.



Tim Clark: An easy one for me: Sam and I getting to play Hyper Light Drifter for the first time. Most of the session was spent accusing each other of sausage-thumbed incompetence as our survival runs in the horde mode were cut short by sudden death, but when it came to the end of the hands-on it was a genuine wrench to hand the controllers back. Although developer Heart Machine isn't showing Hyper Light Drifter's main RPG elements yet, spending time with the gloriously whipcrack combat system, which is a frantic mess of slash 'n' dash moves fleshed out with a diverse suite of secondary abilities, has left me feeling entirely confident about the feel of the final game. And given its already startlingly cool looks, the hype for Hyper Light Drifter is only set to grow.

Tyler Wilde: That's cool, you all sat in rooms looking at screens with things happening on them. I mean, that's PC gaming for the most part. Totally understandable that you would do that, but here's a story from my week: I'm sitting in a room it's clean, nicely decorated. Someone's apartment, maybe. I turn my head and see another player sitting nearby. He turns his head toward me he's looking at me, right now, through his own Oculus Rift. What do I look like? It occurs to me that I don't know. I look down and my virtual chest shifts slightly. I seem to be wearing a hoodie like his. I see my hands, gripping a controller and frighteningly paralyzed. But what if I weren't paralyzed? What if I could get up and walk over to the strange, silent man sitting next to me? What if his mouth opened and he spoke? Later in the day, would this feel like any other memory of a place I'd been and a person I met?

I'm actually starting to worry about virtual reality, guys not that it won't be good, but that it will be too good. The Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 isn't there yet, but it's a lot better than DK1, and the consumer version is supposed to be another leap. And then there's five years from now, and 10 years from now. Are we heading toward the thing sci-fi writers have been warning us about all this time? Maybe. And maybe if we are, I want it to happen anyway. Long live the new flesh.



Chris Thursten: Given that I've been sat in a big empty office with Phil while the rest of you have adventures at GDC, the highlight of my week has been the release of Valve's Dota 2 documentary, Free To Play. I'd seen it a few times before - I watched an early cut at Valve in May last year, then saw the near-final thing at The International in August - but watching the community get to experience it has been a lot of fun. It's an accomplished exploration of what makes competitive gaming so exciting, and its positivity about the scene has brought about a great sense of positivity within the scene, which makes for a nice change of pace. I wrote about it in more detail as part of this week's Three Lane Highway column. I'd love to see more developers take their communities seriously in the way that Valve evidently do.

Phil Savage: It's been a week of cool tech, exciting previews, and being sat in a big empty office with Chris. And yet, the thing that excited me the most? New payment models for game engines. This could be a sign that I need to take a long, hard look at how I get my thrills, but let me explain what I hope Epic and Crytek's subscription models will mean. Unity has revolutionised the indie industry, partly because of its (relative) ease-of-use for those starting out in 3D development. But it's also the de-facto choice for AAA veterans moving to the indie space. Now, as increasingly more of these smaller studios appear, they'll have the option of an affordable version of tools they're already familiar with. Hopefully it's another step towards a future in which lines between indie and AAA are increasingly blurred, and a studio's budget is no longer it's defining characteristic.





THE LOWS
 
Tim Clark: As a serious Left 4 Deadhead, I was a little disappointed to find I didn't entirely love my hands-on with Evolve here at GDC. It ought to work. The idea of four-player extraterrestrial big game hunting, with another person controlling the monster, feels rich with promise. The weapon set and abilities all make sense, and the art design is fine, if a little cookie cutter sci-fi. (The current monster, called the Goliath, reminded me most of '90s creature features like The Relic.) And yet There's something about having to chase around after an enormous beast with an equally monolithic health bar that feels unsatisfying. Perhaps that's no surprise: chipping energy away from tank characters or bosses is rarely satisfying in itself, and the core trap and track mechanic doesn't seem intrinsically fun enough to compensate. There's a logic to Turtle Rock's assertion that a human-controlled antagonist ought to trump an AI, but equally isn't that exactly the idea they set at out to disprove with the canny adaptive AI of Left 4 Dead, which had 'The Director' to drop in threats at the perfect moment?

Evan Lahti: Steam Controller. It made a rough first impression. It's also a bit concerning that Valve isn't showing a wider set of games with the controller, despite saying in the announcement that Valve had "fooled those older games into thinking they're being played with a keyboard and mouse." GDC was a perfect opportunity to showcase the flexibility of the controller on a wider set of the Steam library, but instead we got a point-and-click game, Portal 2, and a side-scrolling action game.



Cory Banks: I wouldn't say I was wildly excited about Goat Simulator when it was first announced. I don't particularly want to be a goat, and I'm not dying to be a goat farmer (though maybe I'd be great at it. Food for thought). But when I found out that Goat Simulator is little more than a joke physics game, I was pretty let down. The cool thing about our recent trend of mundane simulation games Euro Truck Simulator 2, for instance is that they highlight the complexity and challenge in tasks that we often take for granted in the real world. Once I found out that Goat Sim is a game where you toss goats, I started imagining how interesting a real Goat Simulator could be: maintaining farm land, balancing operational costs with revenue brought in from goat milking operations, deciding to start a petting zoo so Benny The Goat can entertain children in the town.

So maybe it doesn't sound fun on paper, but there's more game there than an Angry Birds clone. And it's not like hauling cargo across Germany was the most fun game pitch ever, either. But it worked. Taking a jokey concept and turning it into a full, complex game would have been quite a feat.

Tyler Wilde: Despite the $350 dollars I'm about to blow on an Oculus Rift DK2, I'm a little disappointed to hear that when CCP's VR dogfighting game EVE Valkyrie is released alongside the consumer model, it will be exclusive to the Oculus Rift on PC. The Rift may be the biggest VR headset right now, but there will be competitors (not counting Sony's Project Morpheus, though I expect someone will make PC drivers pretty quickly). I hope the industry agrees on some standards so that VR games can be made to work with as many VR headsets as possible, and I hope this Rift exclusivity doesn't continue past launch. I don't want to choose VR hardware for the games that work with it.



Chris Thursten: Honestly, this has been a pretty good week. I've not been especially enraged or disappointed by anything. In part, this is because I have been sat in a big empty office with Phil. My low point for this week is less a specific announcement, then, and more the general state of a particular game.

BioWare announced a form of player housing for Star Wars: The Old Republic this week - and it looks great. I got a huge amount out of SWToR during my time with it, and I'd love to see it succeed. Yet I'm all too aware of the way its haphazard transition to free-to-play drove players away and broke the back of a community I liked being part of. As much as I'm tempted to return, the way the game has been picked apart for monetisable bobbins makes it a world that I'm no longer really comfortable occupying. There's a parallel dimension where player housing is being announced after a long series of successful, story-extending expansions - the kind of thing the game desperately needed. I'd like to live in that dimension. Sadly, I don't.

Phil Savage: I'm starting to suspect there's a secret industry raffle, deciding the fate of beloved gaming franchises. "Sorry Dungeon Keeper, you're becoming a maligned mess of mobile microtransactions." "Congratulations Baldur's Gate, you'll get a competent series of Enhanced Editions, and a spiritual successor on Kickstarter." This week, it was RollerCoaster Tycoon's turn, and, on the basis of the mobile game's trailer, it's not a ride I'm planning to take. Atari also announced a "PC experience", but it's not just their refusal to use the word "game" that has me worried. Looking at the revenue report of a company recovering from bankruptcy, it's clear that their interests are in the "Mobile" and "Online" space. Given that, I doubt we'll be getting the sort of sequel that fans have been waiting nearly a decade for.

This article was written in late August 2013 and originally published in issue 258 of PC Gamer UK. I've been thinking about my experience at The International 2013 since watching Valve's Dota 2 documentary, Free To Play. As a companion piece to today's Three Lane Highway column, then, we thought we'd make the following available online.

It takes the five members of Alliance ten minutes to move around Benaroya Hall s curved mezzanine to the off-limits corridor that leads to their private balcony. They are surrounded at every step by fans, pushing up against windows and leaning over tables to sign T-shirts and mousemats. Their manager, Kelly, alternates between apologetic determination and abrupt for-the-camera enthusiasm as she attempts to shepherd five sudden celebrities into a single doorway.

A lot of players that get a lot of fame tend to become assholes, to be honest, Alliance captain Jonathan Loda Berg tells me later. I was a little bit like that when I was younger. It was something that I put a lot of thought into when we made the team I said look, if this is going to work it s important that everyone stays down-to-earth. I think it s also a cultural thing. Swedish players are a bit different we don t really take ourselves so seriously.

It is Saturday, August 10, the penultimate day of The International 2013. The Seattle-based Dota 2 tournament boasts the largest prize pool in competitive gaming, and Alliance have just secured their place in the grand final. They are the favourites to win. They have played ten best-of-threes since the group stages and won nine of them 2-0.

A few hours ago the Swedes beat Natus Vincere (Na Vi) in the upper bracket final, sending the Ukrainian-Estonian-German team to face Malaysia s Orange E-Sports at the top of the lower bracket. The three remaining teams in the tournament are guaranteed, at this point, $287,438, $632,364, and $1,437,191 respectively. Between $10,000 and $20,000 is considered a major prize in competitive Dota. When Alliance won Season 5 of China s G-1 Champions League, they pocketed $40,200. The seventh and eighth-place finishers at The International take more than that.

None of the players I meet seem concerned about the money. The answer I am always given is that it s simply not why they re here.

There is no physical template for a Dota professional. That can t be said for tennis stars or NASCAR drivers or hundred-metre sprinters, all of whom are separated from the audiences they entertain by equipment as well as by innate and acquired physical supremacy. In traditional sport, the wall between exceptional players and the rest of us is tangible. It is made of time, talent, money and muscle.

In e-sports the talent is invisible and the fame that results from it settles differently on every player s shoulders. The professionals milling around in the lobby of Benaroya Hall play the same game as everyone else, but they are shaped by it in a way that is specific to them. Specific, even, to their generation. The youngest player at The International is 17, the oldest 29. There is no precedent in sport or elsewhere for what they do for a living, how long it should last or what it ultimately means.

In the private communal areas where players congregate they divide themselves by language, nationality, and a highschoolish network of friendships. Every player in the room is talented and hyper-competitive but they collectively fit no other template. There are jokers and serious young men who talk in low voices about the business . There are troublemakers who drink until 4am and the players for whom competitive Dota was one branch on a path that also included traditional sport. It comes back to the competition. The International is the most important measure of a team s performance in a given year, and for each player it s an opportunity to be the best in the world at something.

So no, they ll say. The money doesn t matter.

The lower bracket final begins at noon on August 11. Orange are the last remaining Asian team and have dismantled two of the most talented Chinese outfits, TongFu and Team DK. Dota is huge in South-East Asia, but China traditionally overshadows the SEA scene on the world stage until
The International 2013. Orange Captain Chai Mushi Yee Fung is the most versatile player in the tournament, playing 18 different heroes over the course of a week. It s the kind of talent that earns deep respect from the audience, and it does not go unnoticed. In September, Mushi will announce that he is moving to China.

The first game runs long, but Orange are the playmakers. Mushi s Queen of Pain is dominant, his glass-cannon mobility matched by Weaver, Nature s Prophet and Nyx Assassin with Naga Siren as a safety net. They take the first game, but settle into a slower, safer rhythm for the second. Na Vi pick up the Siren and Weaver for themselves, and, back in their comfort zone, end the game in less than 25 minutes.

The deciding match lasts more than double that. Long games of Dota are often resolved by single plays, usually crucial teamfight victories or successful attempts on Roshan, a powerful computer-controlled creep that drops an item, the Aegis of the Immortal, which grants a player a chance to respawn instantly in the field. Orange opt for the latter, but the moment Roshan falls a single miss-click by Lee kYxY Kong Yang destroys the Aegis rather than claiming it. The line goes that it was the most expensive single click in competitive Dota, and afterwards kYxY is visibly devastated. He posts a Facebook update from his phone.

Sorry.



Na Vi are loved by the crowd. It s hard not to love them, or at least not loving them feels like lapsing into the role of a stodgy police commissioner demanding his maverick star detective s badge and gun. They play loose, creative Dota and respect no law. Sometimes they win through staggering imagination and skill and sometimes they seem to surf a wave of luck and bravado. Either way, they win games.

Their captain, Clement Puppey Ivanov, always appears to be about to smirk. He s known for his strategies and it is safe to assume at any given time that he is planning something. He is a constant presence in the lobby and at the signing table. In-game he takes a commanding support role assisted by Kuro KuroKy Salehi Takhasomi with Gleb Funn1k Lipatnikov in the offlane.

If Puppey is always on the edge of a smirk, then Danylo Dendi Ishutin is perpetually about to smile himself inside out. Dendi and Puppey are questioned together before the grand final by Valve s backstage interviewer: Puppey answers questions in deadpan as Dendi leans closer and closer towards him, staring unblinkingly into the camera, responding to every query with the word good.

The team carry is Oleksandr XBOCT Dashkevych. On paper, his job is to farm gold and experience in the opening stages of a match in order to give his team a powerful advantage later on. The first time I meet him he claims to be from Paris and also to be adult film actress Sasha Grey: you get the impression that there s somewhere else he d rather be, and in-game this manifests as aggression above and beyond what is expected of his role.

It was Na Vi that sent TongFu to the loser s bracket. They did it by using a trick called fountain hooking a combination of powers that sends an enemy flying into a friendly safe zone where they are destroyed. It was hard not to feel for TongFu. They played well, but were forced to respond to tricks that are alien to the professional scene. But that s what Na Vi do. They win games, and are loved.

In Benaroya Hall that love takes the form of a pair of pounding monosyllables: Nah vee! Nah vee! The only other teams that receive the same support are Dignitas and TeamLiquid, Americans and the de facto home side and in their case, the chant is USA! USA! Na Vi are what the crowd would want from an American team: they are confident, independent, and comfortably exceptional. Something of the generational quality of e-sports is expressed in the sound of a thousand Americans bellowing their support for young people whose parents grew up in the former Soviet Union.

Alliance wear slate-grey winter jackets with patches on their shoulders that make them look like ski instructors or an indie band that happens to be sponsored by a company that makes expensive mice. Loda pulls a short ponytail back through a trucker s cap and has grown out his stubble, presumably to indicate his veterancy. He has been part of the scene for almost a decade, and I ask him if he worries about his reaction times as he gets older. I ve just been waiting for the day when I feel like I m starting to get worse, he says. But this year I feel like I m actually improving. I guess when I go downhill I will stop, and I will look to do something else but I will always want to be involved in the scene. Loda is 25.

Alliance have been playing together for a year, with Loda as their carry. He has been friends with Joakim Akke Akterhall since high school, and the partnership between the two is as old as European professional Dota. Akke and Jerry EGM Lundqvist form Alliance s supporting foundations, providing the early-game advantage that enables the team s remaining two players, Gustav S4 Magnusson and Henrik AdmiralBulldog Ahnberg, to establish map control.

S4 is the youngest player on Alliance and plays solo mid. The area between the two towers in the centre of the map is narrower than anywhere else, and the early laning phase is conducted with knife-fight pressure. It s a young man s game. I used to play solo mid and when I got older I started to have too much respect for people, Loda says. As a solo mid, you can t have too much respect. You have to be fucking confident. You have to want to outclass them.

AdmiralBulldog is regarded as one of the best Lone Druid players in the world. The hero is accompanied by a bear that uses its own set of items. Playing him well means acquiring a vast amount of gold, often in tricky situations, while effectively managing two distinct characters at once.

Alliance s style of Dota is sometimes described as conservative, but it s better understood in terms of efficiency and built-in redundancies. Their backup plans have backup plans. If Bulldog s lane collapses, EGM and Akke will buy him time to farm up elsewhere. If Loda, EGM and Akke are under pressure, Bulldog will knock down towers until the enemy is forced to respond. Alliance have the ability to both vanish off the map and be everywhere at once, and they are unflappable. If Na Vi are freestyle kickboxers, then Alliance are patient masters of Judo. The way they approach training reflects this.

Some Dota players are not honest with themselves, Loda says, calmly. When they lose games they point out each others mistakes so they won t be the weakest link. I think it s very important to show that everyone is human and Dota is a game where everyone makes mistakes, every single game. If you just realise that you will be not be so afraid. You ll focus on the big picture.

The grand final is a best-of-five, and it begins with a mistake. The talk in the lobby is that Puppey has been holding something back. That something turns out to be a bizarre draft of heroes that gambles heavily on winning the game immediately.

It s a disaster, and Alliance take them apart in 15 minutes. There is visible discomfort in the Na Vi booth, and the crowd is subdued.

Na Vi s comeback is resolute. Both teams respect each others star players enough to ban their signature heroes instead of generally-feared characters like Batrider and Io. This means, unusually, that these heroes are played in every game Na Vi would rather deal with them than face Bulldog s bear, and Alliance feel the same way about XBOCT s Lifestealer. In game two, Dendi takes Batrider to midlane while KuroKy supports as Io, and Alliance are outmanoeuvred. The game ends a Na Vi victory after 20 minutes.

Alliance try a riskier draft for the third. They get Bulldog his Lone Druid and pick up a tournament-first Ogre Magi, a character with a powerful buff that indicates a plan to double-down on the pushing power of the bear. They are not so much outdrafted as outplayed. The momentum granted by Na Vi s quick win in the second game gives each player the impetus to play their hearts out in the third. Alliance tap out with 47 minutes on the clock. The crowd s response is simple: Nah vee! Nah vee!



It occurs to me that Alliance are suffering for having a name that is harder to chant. Those soundproof booths can block out the commentary team, but they can t block out a thousand stamping feet or those simple, pounding monosyllables. Nah vee! Nah vee!

Alliance are a different team in game four. S4 takes Night Stalker, a hero who is rarely seen in competitive Dota but who fares well against Puck a strong midlaner that both S4 and Dendi have an affinity for.

Puck is a showman s hero, a grinning dragonling that can teleport, phase out of existence, pin groups of enemies down, silence them and escape to do it all again. The return of Alliance s confidence is visible. They play like Na Vi, for a game, and for the first time an International grand final reaches a 2-2 stalemate. Benaroya Hall seems to contract around the teams on stage. Over half a million people are watching online.

Na Vi start strong in game five. Dendi plays Templar Assassin, the hero that holds the record for the most kills in a professional game his record. Puppey is on Enigma, arguably his best hero, and XBOCT s Alchemist has been a core part of every Na Vi victory in the final. KuroKy s Rubick helped to win them game three and he resumes that role. Funn1k takes Batrider this time, almost for luck. The teams crash together in teamfight after teamfight, but Na Vi have the edge.

Alliance have Io and Chaos Knight on EGM and Loda, a combination that is feared for its mobility. Bulldog is Nature s Prophet like Io, a hero that can teleport and Akke plays Crystal Maiden, a fragile support that helps secure early kills. S4 picks Puck, as if to prove a point.

It comes down to a killer push by Na Vi. S4 tries to evade getting picked off by Funn1k but can t survive alone; XBOCT, Dendi and Puppey storm down mid and go straight for the barracks. They rush up the stairs into the base and take the third tower. S4 buys back into the game, but Na Vi are unopposed: because Alliance are gone.

Na Vi s killing blow sails in, and is met with air.

Bulldog teleports to top lane and starts knocking down towers. EGM and Loda head south to do the same thing. The Swedes trigger the backup plan to their backup plan, abandoning their own core and a key hero, in Puck to expose Na Vi s ancient in a single move. S4 keeps them occupied until the point that they need to teleport back to defend. Then, he stops them.

As Na Vi bunch up to port back, S4 leaps in and uses his ultimate to pin them down. The psychological impact is immediate. Na Vi stagger and Alliance takes two sets of barracks. Orange s kYxY spent $350,000 on a single click. S4 earns $800,000 with another.

A last-ditch attempt at Roshan is Na Vi s best hope at staying in the game, but they can t risk making themselves vulnerable. Alliance reform and charge for the throne.

Competitive Dota is a game of numbers, skill, ego and trust. Games are won and lost on momentum, on great tectonic power shifts that beyond a certain point are irreversible. Alliance have just reminded the world that it is also a game about defending an ancient.

They know they ve won. Bulldog seems to be controlling his character by slapping the table and yelling. Na Vi s ancient explodes, and game five ends. In one booth, there is a lot of jumping and hugging. In the other, Na Vi remove their headphones.

Loda picks up the Aegis of Champions from its stand and lifts it into the air. He s shouting over the crowd, but from the back of the hall it s hard to tell what he s saying. It s something simple and monosyllabic, and it sounds a little like Loda! Loda! It would be un-Swedish of him to bellow his own name, but this would also be the time.

Photography by Philippa Warr.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2. Previously a Tumblr blog, it now runs every week on PC Gamer.

Being in the crowd during The International 2013 grand finals was more or less the highlight of my career. It was certainly one of the most powerful experiences I've had in connection with a videogame. When Alliance won and green confetti streamed from the ceiling and the Dota 2 theme started to play and the crowd were on their feet I understood something about sport that I'd never really understood before. It was one of those rare moments when you are aware that you are experiencing something important even as you experience it. The adrenaline didn't give out until deep into the early hours of the following morning.

The message of that moment was "this is legitimate". I had no doubt in my mind that the the contest meant everything to Alliance, Na'Vi, and all of the other competitors. I believed in the absolute goodwill of the audience, the enthusiasm of the commentary teams, and the excitement of the game's developers (something you don't get to see often enough).

I felt justified in the thousand-plus hours I've put into a single game. I forgot about every time I'd been sworn at, harassed or abused in team chat. I forgot about the scene's occasional indulgence in locker-room pettiness. I was able to ignore, for a moment, the more serious issues with racism, sexism and xenophobia that dog every competitive gaming community. It was a brilliant, singular statement of the positive power of competition and passion. I wish I could bottle that experience up and give it to somebody else.

Valve's Free To Play documentary is a product of the same feeling. Released yesterday, it covers the first International tournament back in 2011, the first time that Dota 2 and many of its biggest personalities were exposed to a large audience. It follows three players - Fear, hyhy, and Dendi - as their teams progress through the competition, interspersed with interviews with their families and friends. Each story is structured to provide an emotional context for the matches being played. Rather than go deep on the mechanics of Dota 2, it focuses on what winning and losing means to the people who play the game.

It is stridently positive about the game, the players, e-sports, all of it. It's this that has it flagged as an 'extended commercial' by the Washington Post. I think there's some truth to this argument, but it stems from a belief that videogames are a commercial product first and a hobby or sport second. This is a generational perspective, then, and therefore it's somewhat undercut by the movie's unrelenting endorsement of the passions of young people. Free To Play ends, after all, with a montage where Dota 2 personalities enthusiastically forecast the death of the old order. In so far as it is a commercial for that sentiment, I can get behind it.

There's something a little naive about Free To Play, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. The documentary elides any of the problems experienced by players that do not stem in some way from generational conflict. It uses fairly unsophisticated emotional cues to lend weight to particular matches. Fear is compared to Rocky Balboa at one point, and sports movies inform a great deal about the film's structure. It is both naive and powerful in the same way that the Rocky movies are naive and powerful. These are simple stories, but they mean something to a large number of people because there is truth in them.

I saw some of that truth at The International 2013, and in my excitement I became a little naive, too. I believe that Free To Play is an expression of Valve's desire to bottle up the best of what e-sports can be and deliver it to a bigger audience. There's nothing disingenuous about that goal, and a tremendous amount of work has gone into making it a reality.

I'm glad Valve decided to make a film, and not just because it presents a game I love in a way that my parents might understand. I'm pleased because Free To Play is an expression of the values of its filmmakers and therefore, more broadly, an expression of the values of Dota 2's developers. It presents e-sports as something to be taken seriously but emphasises in turn the seriousness, talent, and dedication of the players themselves. It encourages professionalism - something that e-sports has a hit-and-miss track record with - by not only presenting it as a virtue, but by implicitly stating that it's this quality that makes certain players worthy of the all-star treatment by Valve. This is coming from a company that is typically reluctant to tell anybody how to act, and although I respect the spirit of that philosophy I can't help but be relieved to see it fray at the edges.

If you follow the scene closely, Free To Play could not have been released at a better time. Early March has seen a run of e-sports dramas and a sudden injection of unbridled positivity is what we needed. It's been fun to watch the Dota 2 subreddit deal with the movie's sentimentality, something that the community would normally treat with acid suspicion. I hope that the film has an impact - and I hope that Valve keep making statements like it. A few weeks after TI3 I was back to being called an f-word, a c-word and an n-word by kids on the internet, and I don't doubt that given a week or two the community will be back to demanding the summary executions of this pro player or that caster.

The positive response to the film shows that this doesn't always need to be the case, and I hope that Valve understand the power they have to shape the tone of the discussion that surrounds the game. I wish that being a Dota 2 player felt like being at The International all of the time, but I don't think that player surveys and automated punishment systems are capable of making that a reality. Nor do I think that participating directly in the scene constitutes a breach of Valve's corporate philosophy. The message I'd like Valve to take away from Free To Play is this: that yesterday's stories are powerful, but the way Valve chooses to frame them has a tremendous influence over the types of stories we'll see tomorrow. Don't stop here.

If you'd like to read more about my experience at The International 2013, I wrote a feature about it which is now available online.

Free To Play, Valve's Dota 2 e-sports documentary, comes out later today. And while you could watch it from the relative comfort of your Steam library, wouldn't it make more sense to see it in a setting more synonymous with e-sports? By which I mean on Twitch, next to a chat box that's spamming emoticons.

Luckily, you have that option. Valve and Twitch are collaborating on an online viewing party that's set to go live in a few hours. It will start at 9am PDT or 4pm GMT, and be shown running throughout the day. Because timezones are confusing, there's also a countdown timer ticking down to when that party gets started.

Free To Play follows three professional Dota 2 players - Benedict "HyHy" Lim, Clinton "Fear" Loomis, and Danil "Dendi" Ishutin - as they compete for the million dollar prize of Valve's first International tournament. Last year, Chris got an early look at the film, and you can read his impressions ahead of seeing it for yourself.

Later, Twitch will also be hosting the playback of a Q&A that took place between Dendi, Fear and the documentary team during yesterday's premier screening in San Francisco.