Home Gaming The Dota 2 Reborn Beta has begun!

The Dota 2 Reborn Beta has begun!

4 min read
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Yesterday, Valve shed some light on what players can expect from custom games for Dota 2. It was the second of a three part announcement detailing the new Reborn patch which will give the MOBA a big overhaul. I wasn’t expecting the last part of the announcement till tomorrow to be honest, but right before I climbed into bed last night, Valve shared the last piece of the puzzle. They also officially kicked off the new beta. HOORAY!

You can read about the new changes right here. It’s a bit lengthy, so I’ve gone and plucked out what I feel are the most notable additions and updates:

More responsive input: One of the ways Source 2 directly improves gameplay is by reducing the latency between issuing a command and seeing your hero react to that command. Our redesigned input system now allows the server to process mouse clicks and key presses directly into visible actions more quickly than before.

 

Enhanced performance: Source 2 was built to support a wide range of hardware. Dota 2 in Source 2 runs better on older laptops, and at the same time further increases performance on current desktops. Though Dota 2 may not require all of the resources of a high end machine, Source 2 has been built to be capable of driving modern machines to their limits. It can use all of your CPU cores, your 64-bit OS and memory, and includes support for recent and upcoming graphics standards like Direct3D 11 and Vulkan as well as virtual reality if the game demands it. Performance will continue to improve during the beta as we optimize it for more PC configurations.

 

IT'S SO PRETTY

 

Physics: Source 2 also includes new versions of our physics and cloth simulation engines which implement higher quality, more stable simulations. In the future, more advanced Source 2 cloth and physics simulation technology will be used to power Dota 2 Custom Games content.

 

Gameplay recording and editing: Record and edit your favorite Dota matches – ones you’ve participated in or any that you’ve downloaded. Animate dynamic camera moves, add or remove characters, and change map environments to showcase your wins or highlight an exciting team fight from a tournament.

 

COSMETICS

 

New backbone and relay protocol: In order to more efficiently and securely carry user traffic, we’ve created a new network backbone that connects our US, European, and Asian datacenter sites. Over the next six months we expect to double the number of links in this network. We’ve also created a new game server relay network protocol, which can quickly adapt to determine the optimal route to the game server and take best advantage of our backbone. We’re currently testing this protocol on a percentage of games played in the US. We have installed these relays at every data center, as well as additional edge locations in the US. In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out this protocol and additional edge locations to the rest of the world.

 

Better Connections: Typically, when clients connect directly to a game server, the route is determined by standard IP routing, which is often inefficient. When connecting with our relay protocol, clients choose the relay that gives them the best route. This means that we can move game traffic into Valve’s extensive worldwide network earlier in the route, resulting in packets spending less time traveling over congested public internet links and more time on our dedicated links. Once there, we can ensure routing is optimal and general internet traffic doesn’t crowd out game traffic. Our experience shows that often the direct route is not the best one. In the US, 40% of all clients get a better ping when they enter our network earlier by selecting a relay closer to them. The improvement is usually modest, but for a small percentage of players, the ping is significantly lower.

 

Custom Games

Physics? I can’t wait to see that in action the next time I play Techies!

I was hopeful that the new update and its network improvements would mean playing on European servers would be a lot better. I started up a lobby this morning to test it out, and while there is a bit of an improvement, it isn’t significantly better (in my opinion). Maybe this will change over the coming weeks. Also, there are no South African servers in the beta.

NO SA

Bummer! I hope that doesn’t persist till the new update launches officially.

The download weighs in at 7.1gb. Even though there are no SA servers, I would recommend grabbing it. There are a ton of custom games just waiting to be played!

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Last Updated: June 18, 2015

21 Comments

  1. How can Dota 2 be reborn when it won’t f***ing die????

    Reply

  2. Hammersteyn

    June 18, 2015 at 09:46

    7.1 Gig update O_o

    Reply

  3. oVg

    June 18, 2015 at 09:47

    E3 2015. The year of the magatons. More megatons the last week than all the E3s combined. This is what E3 is all about 🙂

    http://i.imgur.com/URJ7UXf.gifv

    Reply

    • HairyEwok

      June 18, 2015 at 09:51

      Nostalgia bro….. 2015 seems to be the year of the nostalgia’s

      Reply

      • oVg

        June 18, 2015 at 10:01

        Good point, it seems the older gamer is the target market once again . Even got cliffy B talking about what guns to make for 40 year olds lol

        For me, The Last Guardian bought back those PS2 memories 🙂 FF7 I can understand being a huge megaton but I have learnt not to get my hopes up with the franchise anymore.

        Fallout nuked my socks off, even the FPS games like DOOM got me excited and I hate FPS.

        So many games so little time.

        Besides I am still swooning over The Witcher 3,

        The Battle of Kaer Morhen BLEW MY FUCKING MIND LAST NIGHT 🙂

        Reply

  4. Matthew Holliday

    June 18, 2015 at 09:55

    set the download going last night, but forgot to turn “sleep” off on my pc…
    so ive still got 5gb to go…

    guess it doesnt really matter if we cant use local servers.
    i find the complaints about EU pings quite odd, since when i used to play on them befor SA servers, i would get a pretty stable 160ms. pings have generally degraded since, my local ping going from 30ms to 100ms constant now.

    Reply

    • hairyknees

      June 18, 2015 at 10:01

      My ping sits on 230-300 on EU O_O

      Reply

      • Matthew Holliday

        June 18, 2015 at 10:05

        i dont get it, i used to get 160 when i was still on my 1mb.
        guess its the down side of being the most played game on steam.

        Reply

  5. MossySloth

    June 18, 2015 at 11:51

    So if you download the Beta you can’t play on SA servers at all?

    Reply

    • ElimiNathan

      June 18, 2015 at 12:50

      You can still play SA servers through the old client. When you install the new one it will ask you which version of Dota 2 you want to launch when launching via Steam

      Reply

      • MossySloth

        June 18, 2015 at 13:13

        Great, thanks.

        Reply

  6. Skuifspeld

    June 18, 2015 at 13:22

    Perhaps this has been asked in another article but I’m interested to know – do you guys think that all of the work in Source 2 will be ready in time for TI5?

    Reply

    • Tiaan Pat

      June 18, 2015 at 15:07

      Nope i think there is still a lot of testing to do and they will most prob only go live after TI5 to prevent issues during TI5.

      Reply

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