Valve Announces Departure From Dota 2 Battle Passes For Inclusive Content

Dota 2 has just witnessed a new shift that could shake the whole community, with Valve making an unprecedented move rarely seen before. In a most astonishing development recently, the devs have revealed a full departure from the game’s battle pass approach it has followed for quite a while. The change started from the recent New Frontiers update, as it initiated the beginning of the end for battle passes.

The official reveal on the Steam page discusses the past, present, and future of Dota 2, detailing how the devs got to making such a massive decision. The team notes how the features that would have been added to the overall game, like minigames, item sets, cosmetics, voice lines, and more eventually got eaten by the battle pass. Since it would be the main focus, the entry would have a relatively unproductive rest of the year.

This led to a momentous content drop every year, but it also greatly limited our ability to do things that were exciting and valuable for players but didn’t fit into the Battle Pass reward line,” mentions Valve in the announcement.

Thus, the devs started questioning battle passes last year, and experiments began in the New Frontiers update and patch 7.33 to change the development cycle. The positive community response and the inclusive features available to everyone compelled the team to dismiss battle passes entirely. It will now follow the approach focused on “building a wide variety of features and content for the game, delivered in different ways.” 

As per the announcement, Valve is already planning to release cosmetics this year in a new Dota 2 update, but “more diverse updates” are also reportedly in the brewer. These updates will not be locked behind a battle pass, giving every free and premium Dota 2 player an equal opportunity to relish the new content.

By freeing Dota’s update and content cycle from the timing and structural constraints of the Battle Pass, we can go back to making content in the way we know best: by coming up with fun ideas of all scales and shapes, and exploring them with you.”

While the financial future of Dota 2 is still a little unclear, the devs assured that The International-themed update will come out in September to commemorate the time of the significant event. The update will fund the prize pool directly instead of the old battle passes. The Interaction focused event will be given another name to support the other changes.

The battle pass in Dota 2 has served its purpose by adding in-game microtransactions for players who were interested in cosmetics and visual aesthetics for heroes but also halted the creativity of the team. The groundbreaking shift will seemingly change the way we played the game for years.

Regardless, the devs have seemingly broken a perpetual cycle of battle pass system that was only practical to a few users, adopting the initial development approach for its subsequent updates. Like the olden Dota 2 days, we can expect to bathe in new inclusive content some more.

In some related news, Valve banned over 40,000 cheaters using the recent honeypot patch to remove the bad actors from the title in a swift move.

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