As Dota 2 turns 10 this year, Valve is doing something no other game developer has been doing with its live service games: ditching the Battle Pass.
Valve detailed its future plans for Dota 2 in the game’s official blog post Monday also included the retirement of the Battle Pass system. According to the company, most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass, and even when they do, they discover new maps, play with new items, enjoy UI improvements, and even accidentally land themselves in Tormentor. You don’t get any rewards other than dropping
“Most Dota players never buy a battle pass or receive rewards from it,” wrote the Dota 2 development team. “All Dota players can explore new maps, play with new items, and be accidentally killed by Tormentors. All Dota players benefit from UI improvements and new client features. New The community reaction to Frontiers has helped build confidence that we are reducing the amount of work we do, providing cosmetic content for the Battle Pass as well as information about various exciting updates to the game. It’s the right path for Dota in the long term, both as a community and as a community.”
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As a result, Valve is removing the Battle Pass system derived from an annual Dota 2 tournament called The International. The Dota 2 development team claims that this became an annual content update, stealing the development team’s time, ideas, features and resources that would otherwise have been used for more frequent updates in the early stages of the game. increase. In other words, Battle Pass has grown to be the biggest event of the year, but we didn’t get any new content updates for the rest of the year.
“When we realized this, we made the deliberate choice to run an experiment earlier this year. We took some of the resources that would normally generate Battle Pass content and instead replaced it with features and content that didn’t fit. “To the Battle Pass,” Valve said. “Work is still in progress for future updates, but the first update has shipped. If we had focused all our efforts on producing Battle Pass content, New He Frontier and patch 7.33 would ship this way. I couldn’t have.”
Valve said Dota 2 will continue to include content related to The International and its prize pool, but players won’t be required to acquire new skins or other accessories. That update will be released in September.
Dota 2 was one of the first free-to-play games in the last decade to introduce the concept of a battle pass system, pioneered by Fortnite and Rocket League. It’s also the first time they’ve done away with it, and it’s a big change considering how common battle passes are, even in non-free-to-play games like For Honor.
Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer at IGN. In the words of Calvin Harris, she expresses her love for Sonic the Hedgehog like a big deal. Follow her on her Twitter @SonicPrincess15.
