Dota 2: Reboot

The great and terrible DotA is once again threatening to conquer the minds and attention of all fans of creeps, Divine Rapier, and Barathrum. Less than a year from now, the sequel to this wonderful game, which has already won the love and loyalty of hundreds of thousands of fans and tournament organizers around the world, will be released on the screens of your monitors. The irreplaceable ideologist and creator of Defense of the Ancients, Mr. IceFrog, together with Valve, officially lifted the veil of secrecy on the development of DotA 2.

The new DotA will be as identical as possible to its “ancestor” from Warcraft 3, with a few exceptions. The most important and main novelty will be a completely new game engine – the Source Engine, which will delight us with excellent graphics, animation, and even physics. More than a hundred DotA heroes will appear before us in a new guise, and all their abilities will become even more vibrant thanks to a multitude of diverse special effects. Rumor has it that even Furion will have a cape fluttering on his back, which once again confirms the power and grace of the new graphics engine. Naturally, such effects will not be exclusive to just one blue druid – all heroes will be redesigned.

However, IceFrog emphasizes once again that the gameplay and mechanics of the game will not change one bit. It will still be the same old good DotA, with exactly the same items and authentic heroes. By the way, in the new version of the game, heroes will acquire their own identity: while playing DotA 2, you will often hear the grumbling of the fat guy Raijin about a creep stolen from under his nose or the joyful exclamation of Drow after another successful gank. Item vendors will also become talkative: in the end, several hours of voice acting and various dialogues were recorded for DotA 2.

DotA 2 will not overlook the ancient guys with dial-up modems: from now on, a specially designed AI bot will quickly take control of your hero if, God forbid, you get disconnected from the game. So now you can be completely at ease: your team will no longer call you a noob or a lagger. However, it is quite possible that they won’t need you either, in case the AI bot is as good as the creators of the sequel describe it. Artificial intelligence will also help you in training matches, but the creators of DotA warn right away: “there will be no single-player mode in the game.” No matter how you spin it, Defense of the Ancients is a multiplayer game and a separate e-sports discipline.

In pursuit of sweet pastries, Blizzard Entertainment – achievements – Valve plans to implement a similar system in their new game. Since DotA 2 will be distributed through the Steam network, this platform will be responsible for tracking various ratings and achievements. It is quite possible that in your Steam profile, you will be able to keep track of the number of creeps and heroes killed, as well as view statistics of your games. It may seem like a small detail, but who among beginner players doesn’t dream of boasting about a gank by someone like LightOfHeaven or Vigoss? All of this is planned to be introduced in the next update for Steam, which will be released on the eve of the new game’s release.

In conclusion, IceFrog and Valve promise to seriously work on the eternal problem of DotA: leavers and noobs. It is no secret that many good players simply cannot stand constantly dying beginners and prefer to play without one person rather than with a noob – the reason being that frequent deaths of a teammate give the enemy team a staggering economic advantage. Leavers and noobs have become a real nightmare in the DotA community, so finding a suitable game and an opponent of equal skill level often becomes simply impossible. According to the developers, they plan to solve this problem in two ways:

• Create a special matchmaking system based on Steam. This system will work on the principle of ladder from Warcraft or Starcraft and will search for a team of players of the corresponding level.
• Implement a game interactive help and hints system. Now it will be much easier for beginners to navigate and learn the game, as they will receive hints and detailed instructions right in the game by activating a special mode. “Learn, learn, and learn again!” – as the great grandfather Lenin bequeathed…

Another interesting innovation will be the introduction of the so-called “coach” role. By entering the game as a mentor, you will be able to see your protege’s game screen and have access to a personal chat and voice channel. This way, you will always be able to guide the lost one on the right path and give the student a couple of strong emotional instructions. Unfortunately, coaches will not be able to directly control the hero of their young padawan, but this information has not been confirmed yet.

This is how the sequel to Defence of the Ancients will appear before us, the release of which is scheduled for next year. Modern graphics, beautiful special effects, new technologies, and the old beloved DotA with its familiar heroes and devices. The second season of DotA mania is coming soon!

5 keys to Dota 2 chests and little things about a gamer’s life

Cosmetic items in Valve games have some kind of demonic charm. You know they’re “just hats,” but you’re willing to give up half of your inventory and maybe even real money for that legendary courier. But it’s much more fun to spend honestly earned/begged funds on keys. Not only will you definitely get something new and trendy (well, sometimes new, but still “not very”), but there’s also a tiny, but still! – chance to get a highly valuable item, like a Legendary Courier, glowing with some unusual special effect.

Recently, I succumbed to temptation for the third time, even on a relatively large scale. The second-to-last Dota 2 chest released, called the Treasure of Rubiline Sheen, turned out to be filled with attractive items. Among the standard packaging, the mythical items were particularly appealing – a golem for Warlock and a set of blades for Anti-Mage. And not just any set of blades, you can get the Arc of Manta from the box!

The first key, and… Arc of Manta! No, seriously!

Such things.

Experienced players don’t need to be told how cool it is to have them in their collection. For those who don’t know: a successful anti-mage always includes an item called Manta Style in their build, which increases the character’s lethality from two to infinity times depending on the rest of the “purchase”. The rough essence is that in addition to the already strong anti-mage on the battlefield, two weakened but still highly dangerous clones temporarily appear. Play against such happiness once – and you will hate the anti-mage, the opposing team, your own team, Dota 2 itself, Steam, Valve, and the sun outside the window.

The combination of “Anti-mage + Manta” has spawned a whole sub-level of Dota folklore. Take, for example, this photo, where everything is perfectly decisive – the event, the fans, and their masterpiece:

And as a bonus:

To possess a “signature” item of a character is the epitome of luxury. There are “budget” versions of this happiness, like a pair of blades called Sange & Yasha (commonly referred to as “Sasha-Yasha”) for the hero Rikimaru or Blink Dagger for Axe, and there is luxury like Scythe of Vyse for Nature’s Prophet or Battlefury for Faceless Void. Arc of Manta, it seems, falls somewhere in the middle of this ranking.

But the world of trading items from Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 is a whole separate healthy topic. It’s worth writing a separate text about it someday, but for now, let’s open the second chest.

The second key, and… Style of the Occult Protector

The moral barrier of “buying pixels” is easily overcome. It all depends on how you look at it.

Let’s say a person loves beer. They love it so much and drink a lot of it. In quantities that have no benefit for the body or even “harmlessness” to speak of. I think you already understand where I’m going with this.

Yes, those unfortunate $10 could have been spent on something material. Easily. But what can I do if I don’t like alcohol or any kind of smoking, but I want to treat myself a little? Let’s say I genuinely love “Dota”. Okay, I’m buying virtual items, but the pleasure I get from them is very real.

Plus, video games in general are just complex healthy programs, code that requires minimal physical form, and we buy them without complaining.

It’s actually great that purely entertaining useless trinkets have migrated to the virtual world. There will be fewer cheap Chinese plastic transformers, painted with harmful paint, and nature will be cleaner and children-adults healthier!

As they say, there is a grain of truth in every joke. It’s time to use the third key.

The third key, and… Last Judgment

The second consecutive subject is not very interesting to me, but what can you do. One should never forget that such treasures are a lottery, and there are no truly risk-free lotteries.

Sometimes people get lucky. Very lucky. You can open a random set of cards for a new game by Blizzard Entertainment called Hearthstone and get one rare card, one legendary card, one epic card, and one golden epic card. It is true, it even happened during an internet broadcast.

This is a wild jackpot.

Can I arrange a torture for myself, like in the video below:

Anticipating, I will say that I was much luckier than the unfortunate commentator Purge with his useless rare blades – irony – on the same Anti-Mage. All five items that I got turned out to be different, and that in itself is a small success.

Specifically, the Last Judgment sword is the most boring item in the set, just a sword for Doom. What can you do, we open the fourth chest.

The fourth key, and… Izoku. Immediately the fifth, and… Star of Silence

There are popular heroes, and there are heroes that you specifically love. Izoku is the former, and Star of Silence is the latter. The advantage of the tempting chest that caught my attention is that it hardly contains any blatantly disappointing items. Well, at least for me personally. Not many people play Silencer, but I am among the few.

In reality, the best trophy for me would have been the golem, but alas, I didn’t get it in the first five keys, nor in the three keys I received for Arc of Manta (well, I don’t enjoy playing as Anti-Mage, what can I do). However, I managed to open eight chests instead of five and get eight different items for eight different heroes, each of which I occasionally humbly play. And, as we discovered earlier, it can be much worse.

Plus, having is only one-third of the pleasure. It’s time to go to the public stage and show off the new items! It doesn’t matter that there was absolutely nothing for Huskar and Bloodseeker in the new treasure, hehe.