Games of Dota 2 are usually played with two teams of five. So what happens if you double that number? A lot of things, most of them involving killing and/or dying.
Valve pulled two surprises out last night during The International 5 (T15), its ongoing eSports event for its popular MOBA. The first was this very silly 10-vs-10 all star match played by Dota 2’s top players, which you can watch here:
Then during that chaos, they gave fans something even more exciting: beginning next week, Dota players using the recently reworked Dota 2 Reborn version of the game will be able to create custom game modes for up to 24 players.
Dota 2 is a fiercely competitive MOBA that Valve’s developers have spent years balancing and rebalancing to suit the standard 5-v-5 structure, so throwing so many players into a single match is effectively throwing the game’s finely tuned structure out the window. And that’s the whole point—it’s meant to be a bonkers for fun mode, which is never a bad thing to add to a game as intense as Dota 2. Watching the video up top made me think that this is the closest a MOBA has come to feeling like an all-out, all-items game of Smash Bros. I am totally ok with that.
Fans are still waiting on the next additions to Dota 2’s character pool. But I think the insanity of the impending custom matches will make that a tad easier.
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