Rock, Paper, Shotgun

From the looks of things, it appears as if one sneaky entrant in the Gamescom DOTA 2 tournament has been recording their screen! Here’s a quick video that shows quite a lot of doing nothing at a menu, but then from 1:28 onwards, it’s all in game action. The environment looks nice and lush, and the characters are quite bright and colourful. Definitely cut a line that plunges right into the middle of the MOBA-maelstrom of LoL, HoN and others. Also the commentators sound VERY EXCITED. Check out the footage below:
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With Valve’s DOTA 2 Championships about to happen tomorrow, the developer has also announced that it is taking sign-ups to the beta. Registration is open now. You need only head here, sign in with your Steam account details, and then click “Get on the list”. That’s it. Whenever the beta happens, they then promise they’ll get in touch. Meanwhile the championship will be streamed live from tomorrow morning, the first starting at 9am tomorrow morning (UK time), and then pretty much going on non-stop until Sunday, at which point anyone left awake/hydrated will be declared the winner. And that’s all the weather. Cheers to Chris.

As if from out of nowhere, Valve have released a trailer for DOTA 2 ahead of Gamescom. Essentially a class trailer, if you’re hoping for in-game footage that’s not happening yet. That’ll be happening during the live-streamed tournament taking place during the big German convention. But if you’re hoping for Valve’s world-class in-house animation, then bingo. An astonishingly gorgeous cartoon short explains the different ways to play the game, which you can see below.

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A number for you: $5 million.

A context for that number: the total prize pool for the tournaments dubbed ‘Season Two’ of League of Legends.
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I note there was a lot of surprise that Valve would offer a $1m prize for their Dota 2 tournament at Gamescom: maybe this goes a little way to explaining why that sum is perhaps not so extraordinary (y’know, other than the fact that Valve live in houses made of platinum).

Chinese DotA 1/StarCraft 2/Warcraft 3 team Catostrophic Cruel Memories, aka CCM, was earlier this week bought out by businessman Sicong Wang, director of Wanda Enterprises, for the sum of 40,000,000 Chinese yuan – that’s about $6.2 million. Whaaaaat.

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On the one hand this isn’t too much of a surprise, after how earnestly the rumour mill has been grinding lately. On the other – well, given how good Valve are at fooling folk, official confirmation that their competitive strategy game Dota 2 will indeed be on public display at Gamescom later this month is a pretty big deal. Oh yeah, and they reckon the game itself will be released “later this year.” Woo!
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Steam has announced some kind of thing that does a clever something or other that tweaks this thing and tinkers with this other thing, and the result is that downloads are faster. Or, at least, they will be. It involves caching at ISPs, more firewall-friendly protocols (downloads will be coming via good ol’ HTTP ) and, best of all, a system that means more incremental patch downloads, instead of having to re-grab big huge chunks of game. Here, I’ll let them explain – as well as share some bonus good news.
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Valve is already getting its head stuck into the F2P trough, so it was probably only a matter of time before they went from merely supporting F2P games to adopting the business model themselves. Their Head of Marketing Things To People Who Might Want To Buy Them Doug Lombardi was asked by French website Barre de Vie if Valve was working on their own F2P title. To which he promptly said, “Oui.”
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With Bellevue’s finest opting not to make an appearance at E3 earlier this month, we’ve all been left in the dark THE TERRIBLE FRIGHTENING DARKNESS about what’s next on the plate for Valve, and when we might see it. DoTA 2? Portal 2 expansions? Something, at long, long bloody last, to do with Half-Life?

Well, in August we might find out.
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The Defense of The Ancients 2 site has now gone live, and IceFrog has answered a bunch of questions derived from (presumably) the DOTA-playing community: it will support reconnecting, there will be no region limitations, there will be bot support, there will be a spectator function. There are also a few pieces of artwork from the original announcement, but no screenshots as yet. We shall be keeping an eye on this one, particularly in light of the potential funny stuff going on between Valve and Blizzard.

Blizzard has fired a warning shot across Valve’s sleek, streamlined bow over use of the DOTA trademark.

Blizzard game design lead Rob Pardo said in an interview with Eurogamer that since Defence of the Ancients came out of the Blizzard WarCraft 3 community, Valve trademarking DotA for the purposes of developing DOTA 2 “doesn’t seem the right thing to do”.
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