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Since the launch of Dota 2 back in early July, the game has received very few substantial updates, and little to no new content. Regular sizable patches, previously released on a weekly basis, appear to have been discontinued several weeks ago after the launch, and a new blog post on the Dota 2 blog earlier this evening has revealed that content for the game be introduced in larger updates with a few main themes, in a manner similar to Team Fortress 2's patches. "The First Blood Update" is set to arrive on September 23rd and will introduce several new features to the game as Dota 2's first large content drop, including the highly requested Local Play, a new system which will allow players to set up LAN lobbies in order to play with friends without having to worry about inconsistent latency issues or poor connections from external servers.
The update's other main feature arrives in the form of "Captain's Draft", a new gamemode which functions as a partial hybrid of the "Captain's Mode" and "Random Draft" modes. Like Captain's Mode, each team will be assigned a captain who must select five heroes for their team while banning possibilities for the opposing lineup. However, the nature in which heroes can be chosen is more similar to Random Draft, as only 24 random heroes of the game's current roster of 102 will be available at random. In regards to in-game items, the "Backpack" system will be renamed to the Armoury, and it will also receive a small number of functionality improvements, allowing for items to be filtered in a fashion similar to those that exist in Team Fortress 2. A little while back, we highlighted a preview clip of a GLaDOS announcer pack during a ValveTime Weekly News Round-Up, and we are happy to see that the pack is set to release with this update in the form of a "Portal Pack", which also includes a pair of Portal themed wards (Space Core as the Observer, and Wheatley as the Sentry, of course) and a new themed HUD, all of which can only be obtained by purchasing the pack directly from the Dota 2 store page. The pack will be available once the update goes live, alongside a number of new cosmetic items from Polycount creators.
A number of other, more minor changes, are also set to be included, as shown in the patch notes include on the announcement page. We also recommend checking out the the Dota 2 website for a closer look at the blog post and the announcement page for more information ahead of the update's launch next week.
The update's other main feature arrives in the form of "Captain's Draft", a new gamemode which functions as a partial hybrid of the "Captain's Mode" and "Random Draft" modes. Like Captain's Mode, each team will be assigned a captain who must select five heroes for their team while banning possibilities for the opposing lineup. However, the nature in which heroes can be chosen is more similar to Random Draft, as only 24 random heroes of the game's current roster of 102 will be available at random. In regards to in-game items, the "Backpack" system will be renamed to the Armoury, and it will also receive a small number of functionality improvements, allowing for items to be filtered in a fashion similar to those that exist in Team Fortress 2. A little while back, we highlighted a preview clip of a GLaDOS announcer pack during a ValveTime Weekly News Round-Up, and we are happy to see that the pack is set to release with this update in the form of a "Portal Pack", which also includes a pair of Portal themed wards (Space Core as the Observer, and Wheatley as the Sentry, of course) and a new themed HUD, all of which can only be obtained by purchasing the pack directly from the Dota 2 store page. The pack will be available once the update goes live, alongside a number of new cosmetic items from Polycount creators.
A number of other, more minor changes, are also set to be included, as shown in the patch notes include on the announcement page. We also recommend checking out the the Dota 2 website for a closer look at the blog post and the announcement page for more information ahead of the update's launch next week.
