Early Release Announced for DOTA 2

Valve has announced that their upcoming DOTA 2, a successor to a mod for Warcraft III, will be coming out sooner than expected. “Our original plan was to spend the next year or so in beta, adding new features and slowly growing the number of heroes until we reached a level of parity with Dota 1, at which point we’d release Dota 2 to the world. But the feedback we’re seeing everywhere is that people just want to play it,” IceFrog posted on the DOTA 2 blog.

The new plan for the game is to “take the current version of DOTA 2, which has The International set of heroes, and get it out there as fast as we can. We’ve still got some work to do in a couple of areas, so we’ll be keeping it invite-only for a (hopefully short) period of time,” the company said. We’ll have more information on DOTA 2 as it becomes available.