DOTA 2 Announced! Dropping Lower Case o

Well they finally went and did it! Valve has announced DOTA 2 is in development and will be arriving on the PC and Mac in March 2011. The biggest deal for me? No more lower case 'o' in the abbreviated title. For the uninitiated, Defense of The Ancients is an extremely popular Warcraft III mod which takes the hero idea from the core Warcraft III game and made a team base multiplayer game that has a ludicrous amount of heroes and RPG mechanic with teamwork being a core focus. It looks like DOTA 2 will generally carry on with the same gameplay mechanic of the original with a newer version of the Source engine. More details...

According to the Gameinformer story:

Valve's approach to Dota 2 is unusual in that the gameplay itself is remaining almost entirely untouched. "Our first reaction is to assume that [design elements are] there for a reason," project lead Erik Johnson explains. "IceFrog is one of the smartest designers we've ever met. He's made so many good decisions over the years in building the product. He virtually never makes a decision that doesn't have some reasoning behind it and a way to pick apart the logic behind it." This approach means that Dota 2 basically is DotA-Allstars with new technology.

Not ambitious enough to make changes? Well I'm sure Valve will add a lot of polish to the game but not doing anything new is a tad disappointing. What they will certainly do better with the inclusion of Steamworks is giving the game a better multiplayer platform.

The bulk of innovation in Dota 2, however, is ancillary to the gameplay itself. Valve is upgrading Steamworks (the company's backend technologies for matchmaking and other gameplay and community-related things) to allow them to create in-game rewards for participating in the Dota 2 community. The idea is to have everything a player does in or out of game tie back into their online identity. Like the improvements to Source, the Steamworks upgrades will be available to third-party developers who choose to use Valve's tools when Dota 2 launches in 2011.

Nice to read that and I hope these features eventually get implemented into other Valve game. Now that'll be rad. If you're a big DOTA fan, you might want to read Gameinformers exclusive here. Much of the beginning half of the article explains about DOTA so skip forward if you want to read about the new stuff.