Fresh on the heels of its biggest event of the year, Valve is upgrading Dota 2 with a public launch of a new rendition of the game.
The developer will roll out Reborn—the codename for a freshly updated and significantly enhanced version of Dota 2—in the next few hours. Players have been awaiting the update since Valve announced it on June 13.
We are rolling out the Reborn update over the next couple of hours. Matchmaking is now only available in Reborn.
— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) September 9, 2015
The meat of the update includes a brand-new gaming engine with increased graphics quality, reduced latency, and improved compatibility with lower-end computers. Alongside a new engine comes an updated hero browser, dashboard, and spectating client, as well as custom games, which allow users to create new types of game modes, a feature popular in Valve’s other titles like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
The Reborn beta publicly launched on June 17. Since then Valve has been ironing out bugs to prepare for the full release. All matchmaking queues will now be available only in the Reform version of the game, meaning the old Dota 2 is essentially history.
Dota 2 saw a recent resurgence in its user base after The International—the game’s largest tournament of the year—on Aug. 3-8. The tournament’s prize pool boasted more than $18 million, with the winner, North America’s Evil Geniuses, taking home $6.6 million of the cut. Millions of viewers tuned in throughout the week.
With Reborn’s launch and the most successful International in the game’s history, you can likely expect those numbers to be even bigger next year.
