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Dota 2 takes on battle royale in limited game mode

Dota 2 takes on battle royale in limited game mode

Dota 2 is the latest title to take on battle royale with a new Underhollow game mode.

Dota 2’s premier summer tournament, The International, is ramping up for 2018. The International Battle Pass (formerly, Compendium) has been a staple of Dota 2’s summer season since 2013.

Encouraging players to contribute to the overall prize pool, the Battle Pass has historically contained a number of exclusive hero items, map themes, and music packs. This year, Battle Pass owners will gain access to new game modes - and there’s more than a little PUBG to the first.

Same old rules

The Underhollow is a last-team-standing clash within a rapidly-shrinking environment full of scattered items to collect. Winner winner gets the cheese dinner. Sound familiar? The similarities end there, thankfully.

The Underhollow features a map filled with minions, traps, and the infamous Roshan - Dota 2’s biggest and baddest monster. Valve have described “cave-ins” closing off the map, it’s likely that sections of the stage will close off one at a time rather than the slow shrinking of a blue circle. Details like player-counts are still unknown.

Cavern crawl

Alongside The Underhollow, Valve are also offering Cavern Crawl (a meta-game for unlocking new items by playing specific heroes in regular play) and Mutations. The latter invokes random modifiers to unranked play including “the ability to resurrect teammates“.

The pass also contains a whole host of other options to incentivise players to chip in. Battle Passes are once more able to level up through purchase or progression, to unlock new rewards.

Dota 2’s Battle Pass system has historically been a wild success. Sales of the pass are used to fund the meteoric prize pools for The International. 2017’s spectacle peaking at over $24 million, and it seems Valve hope their spin on battle royale will help 2018 continue a record-breaking trend.

Valve isn’t the only big name with eyes on battle royale. Activision Blizzard’s recent financials expressed that the publisher has its eyes set on Fortnite’s success.

There’s currently no information on when this mode will become available, but The International Battle Pass is on sale now. The International 2018 begins August 20th.

Staff Writer

Natalie Clayton is an Edinburgh-based freelance writer and game developer. Besides PCGamesInsider and Pocketgamer.biz, she's written across the games media landscape and was named in the 2018 GamesIndustry.biz 100 Rising Star list.