Dota 2
2013 video game
Dota 2 is a 2013 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game by Valve. The game is a sequel to Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a community-created mod for Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Dota 2 is played in matches between two teams of five players, with each team occupying and defending their own separate base on the map. Each of the ten players independently controls a character known as a hero that has unique abilities and differing styles of play. During a match, players collect experience points (XP) and items for their heroes to defeat the opposing team's heroes in player versus player (PvP) combat. A team wins by being the first to destroy the other team's Ancient, a large durable structure located in the center of each base.
Development of Dota 2 began in 2009 when IceFrog, lead designer of Defense of the Ancients, was hired by Valve to design a standalone remake in the Source game engine. It was released for Windows, OS X, and Linux via the digital distribution platform Steam in July 2013, following a Windows-only open beta phase that began two years prior. Dota 2 is fully free-to-play with no heroes or any other gameplay element needing to be bought or otherwise unlocked. Valve supports the game as a service, selling loot boxes and a battle pass subscription system called Dota Plus that offer non-gameplay altering virtual goods in return, such as hero cosmetics and audio replacement packs.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dota 2” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.