It appears that with Heroes of the Storm having recently released, the current MOBA juggernauts are not content to sit back and hope for the best. To that end, Valve has announced Dota 2 Reborn, which will enter into open beta sometime next week. The full announcement will be staggered across 3 blog posts, with the first of which focusing on the dashboard.
Instead of shaking up existing gameplay, however, it seems the new approach is for Dota 2 to have a better out of game approach for its players, allowing for easier communication and socialization, several options for new players to learn the game, and numerous other tweaks and fixes intended to provide a better experience.
Dota 2 Reborn will make use of Source2 as its game engine, completely replacing the original Source engine.
Ease of finding games is a big part of Dota 2 Reborn, any players will be able to start searching from anywhere within the interface through a “Play Dota” button that is always present, as well as a new option to include public lobbies for games. Custom games have also been shown to be included in Dota 2 Reborn, but the exact details of which have not yet been released. Custom games will be the focus of the next blog post that is scheduled to go out early next week.
Forming and communicating within a party is also intended to be easier, with the ability to broadcast that your group is searching for more, party-wide voice chat that persists during loading, and the ability to merge two parties together without needing to disband. Chatting outside of parties is also on deck to be improved, with several features and upgrades being implemented to make it easier to keep in touch with others.
Dota 2 Reborn will also provide guided bot matches to serve as a more involved tutorial to help new players learn the mechanics. The extremely simplified mechanics tutorial will still exist for players completely new to MOBAs.
DotaTV is also being targeted for improvements, with the full details available on the Dota 2 Reborn blog.
Do you think Dota 2 Reborn is a necessary upgrade for the game? Are you excited to see what else is in store?
