Today we are rolling out a preload of the Reborn Update to all players that have not previously downloaded it. The Reborn Update will be coming to the main client for all Dota 2 players in the next day or two.
blog.dota2.com
This update brings great improvements to the interface and game engine but does it at a cost.
Nowadays a game like Dota 2 is like football in term of competitive & casual scene .. just picture having all the stadiums on earth rebuilt with new materials, it's likely some events get disrupted at least for a little while. And whether you're part of the professional scene, playing casually with your town's team or friends at the small stadium or even just spectating, you will be affected.
Valve has kept on maintaining the source 1 engine for a few months, mostly for the competitive scene, while source 2 was already in "beta", hopefully making the transition as smooth as possible ... Yesterday the Source 1 engine files were finally removed, meaning the end of it's effective life.
By not really releasing Dota 2 (it's still in beta!) Valve is mostly saying what model they chose.
Continuous delivery isn't something new to the software environment and it's definitely the best model to support a multiplayer Action RTS that strives for balance, game-play and User Interface perfection. We could argue it's even something we use in sports like football that is materialized by organisations like FIFA who contributes (sometimes questionably) to maintaining a coherent system.
For now outside a few crashes and bugs the loss is toward replays, if you bought a tournament ticket and expected to watch the replays later you'll find out source 2 can't open source 1 replays .. hopefully this will get addressed. I'm not a materialist and i'm sure we will be fine without all those replays but it's certainly a loss. Yet another loss of raw content. We could talk about content, copyright, patents and world heritage but it probably deserves it's own post.
