Home Gaming Christmas cancelled: There will be no Frostivus in Dota 2 this year

Christmas cancelled: There will be no Frostivus in Dota 2 this year

2 min read
19

WAAAAAAAAAH

One thing I really dig about modern day gaming is that some developers release content that coincides with the season or theme at hand. In Dota 2 for example, Valve gave us Diretide to commemorate Halloween and Frostivus to prepare for Christmas… or at least, that’s how things used to be. There was no spooky celebration this year, and it looks like Christmas has been cancelled too.

Dammit Valve, I thought you loved us! What excuse do you have for not giving us free stuff? Oh…

As we mentioned in September, there are a number of features in the works for Dota 2 that we’re really excited to share with you. Among them is a major improvement to Dota 2’s engine that we are aiming to release in the first half of next year. One of the main features in this engine improvement will be the ability to rapidly create entirely new game modes. You’ve seen some of this work with the Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha that began earlier this year. In the past, our Diretide and Frostivus updates contained game modes that were very time consuming to build and maintain, and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up after the release of the engine update.

With Diretide this year, we decided that it didn’t make sense to build another one of those resource-intensive game modes, for two reasons. The first was that the mode would quickly become obsolete when the engine changes arrive, and the second was that building it would have taken resources away from the work that needed to be done to ship the engine change itself. Now that Frostivus is on the horizon, we find ourselves facing a similar choice and, after some thought, we believe that once again the right choice is to not develop a Frostivus game mode.

Well, that makes sense. Valve must be working on something huge if we’re only going to see it sometime within the first half of next year. Don’t worry though, they’re not skipping themed content entirely at least.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t see interesting updates from us before the engine improvement goes out next year. We are already hard at work on our next major update, the New Bloom Festival in February, although we will continue to avoid building new game modes until the engine improvements come along.

Are you sad that there will be no freebies this year? Personally, I’m glad Valve are taking the time to focus on their vision for the game, and not just giving in to the community like they did for Diretide last year.

Last Updated: December 8, 2014

19 Comments

    • RinceThis

      December 8, 2014 at 12:43

      lol

      Reply

    • Admiral Chief BellatorMachina

      December 8, 2014 at 12:45

      LOL

      Reply

    • hairyknees

      December 8, 2014 at 12:55

      <3

      Reply

      • RinceThis

        December 8, 2014 at 12:58

        Shame, I am sure he doesn’t mean that! 0_O

        Reply

        • hairyknees

          December 8, 2014 at 13:04

          Pffft, rich coming from the guy who brought me, Noob comment for cabbage.”

          😛

          Reply

        • Admiral Chief BellatorMachina

          December 8, 2014 at 13:05

          WHY are you so….supportive and caring today?

          Reply

  1. RinceThis

    December 8, 2014 at 12:43

    Noob comment for cabbage.

    Reply

  2. ToshZA

    December 8, 2014 at 12:49

    “Volvo please fix” incoming.

    Reply

    • hairyknees

      December 8, 2014 at 12:55

      ? ? ?_? ?? GIF FROSTIVUS!

      Reply

  3. Eric

    December 8, 2014 at 13:05

    New Source Engine!

    Reply

  4. Matthew Holliday

    December 8, 2014 at 13:13

    but volvo, pls gief.

    although new bloom was announced, i just want items, since the TI4 booster stopped, i think ive had one item drop…
    theyv had overhauls of stuff going for a while though, so there will be some interesting things and stuff popping up soon.

    Reply

  5. MakeItLegal

    December 8, 2014 at 13:22

    Let’s hope we have a graphics overall , altho the gameplay is tops , I feel that the game could look at least 5 times better

    Reply

    • Grant [_G_] Hancock

      December 8, 2014 at 13:47

      Dota 2 is already at a disadvantage to LoL with respect to system requirements… I doubt that there will be any massive graphical changes to the game. I’m sure there will be improvements but the graphics will still need to be scalable to accommodate low-tech and high-tech rigs.

      Reply

      • MakeItLegal

        December 8, 2014 at 13:52

        Yes scale able ! But in the same breath let’s have some more options for those of us that planned ahead

        My pc doesn’t even get hot with everything set on ultra !

        Far cry 4 , for what’s it’s worth cranks my GPU in to the 80c mark , put the settings on meduim till I get some liquid Cooling going

        Can u liquid cool a gpu ?

        Reply

        • Alien Emperor Trevor

          December 8, 2014 at 15:23

          You can, with 3rd party coolers. Say goodbye to your warranty if you do.

          Reply

          • MakeItLegal

            December 8, 2014 at 15:54

            Always a catch … Was really hoping it would be easy to convert these summer temps and next gen games are taxing my pc hard

      • Haig Tait

        December 8, 2014 at 17:15

        i can tell you this for free. the number of people with low end pc’s far outweigh those with high-end pc’s. i think based on that we wont see huge overhauls to the graphics side of things, remember valve only have +- 300 people working at that company. Hence no diretide or frostivus oh well 😀

        Reply

  6. Hammersteyn

    December 8, 2014 at 14:37

    something something moba tl;dr 😛

    Reply

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