Valve announces Dota 2 Reborn, beta to launch next week

After months of speculation, Valve has finally announced a massive technical overhaul to Dota 2. Dubbed "Dota 2 Reborn," the developer is revamping and changing nearly every part of the game — starting with the engine itself.

While Valve simply makes reference in their news post on the Dota 2 blog to a "new engine," it's assumed that this refers to Source 2, the successor to Valve's legacy engine in use to varying degrees and through a number of updates since 2004's Half-Life 2.

This new engine should bring considerable performance improvements to Dota 2, but the upgrades aren't stopping there. There are even bigger changes coming to the game's user interface, which is seeing top-to-bottom revisions designed to make it easier to find friends, communicate between games, and spectate friends, other players and organized tournaments via in-game streaming and stat-tracking.

Valve is also looking to address Dota 2's increasing reputation as a game with a significant learning curve via greatly enhanced training tools, including guided bot games, instant hero tryouts and more.

Valve plans to release more information about Dota 2 Reborn's new custom game system early next week, with plans to launch the Dota 2 Reborn beta client late next week. The announcement suggests that the upcoming International Dota 2 Championships will be played on the current stable client, however, as Valve works with the fanbase to iron out the kinks in the new version of the game's tech.