As I type this, Dota 2 is the most popular game on Steam and is being played by 52,219 people. This is a game that's sort-of kind-of not-really in closed beta, one that has numerous holes waiting to be filled by proposed features, and which is still being updated all the time.
But given that it's easy to get in to the Dota 2 beta (you can even buy your way in), and given that you can pay for items in the Dota 2 store now, should PC Gamer review the game? We'd like to hear what you think.
This is a mounting problem in PC land. We experienced the same thing with both Tribes: Ascend and Minecraft: games that people could buy, but which were clearly unfinished. Dota 2 is now in a similar state. Valve have promised that the finished game will have a tutorial to teach new players how to play, and a system that rewards veterans for training the less experienced. Those systems don't exist yet. There are also still dozens of balancing tweaks and UI changes being made almost every week.
But if you can pay for the game and its in-game items, shouldn't we be providing advice on whether its worth your money? Especially when it's not exactly small amounts: this Courier Pack costs £45.
And if you think we should review it now, do you think we should re-review - with a whole new score - when the game gets significant updates?
Or should we just wait until it's closer to completion? Let us know in the comments. For context, here are the patch notes from the June 20th update:
GAMEPLAY
- Added Rubick!
- Bane: Fixed Fiend's Grip not ending if Kraken Shell dispels it.
- Chaos Knight: Reality Rift now puts the Chaos Knight behind his target.
- Clockerk: Fixed Hookshot stunning dead units.
- Gyrocopter: Fixed Homing Missle not giving any bounty.
- Invoker: Fixed Alacrity interaction with Magic Immunity
- Kunkka: Fixed Ghost Ship allied debuff dealing all the damage immediately when then rum wears off, rather than over the following 8 seconds.
- Mirana: Reduced size of Arrow 20%.
- Outworld Destroyer: Aadded visual indicator for Astral Imprisonment Length.
- Riki: Fixed sometimes not attacking his Blink Strike target immediately.
- Spirit Breaker: Fixed a bug allowing charging Razor without moving.
- Fixed Batrider and Outworld Destroyer having 1 too little armor.
- Fixed Chaos Knight having 2 extra armor.
- Fixed Lone Druid having 1.3 too little armor.
UI
- Added support for tournament spectating passes.
- Select All Other Units feature no longer selects any unit that is lacking attack capability (like Beastmaster's Hawk).
- Added a buff to indicate the duration of Death Prophet's Exorcism.
- Updated Aghanim's Scepter tooltips for Beastmaster, Necrolyte, Queen of Pain, Warlock, and Windrunner.
- Updated the Aghanim's Scepter store preview.
- Fixed bug where large replays were unable to download.
- Replay downloading is now paralleled to improve download speeds.
- Fixed item purchase message crediting the wrong player if the purchased item stacked with someone else's item.
VISUALS
- Added a custom particle effect for Skadi.
COSMETICS
- Added announcers and new couriers to the Dota Store.
- Added new items for Witch Doctor.
- Fixed a bug that caused new users not to earn random drops. Affected users will receive the drops they should have gotten when they finish their next match.
- Increased the number of backpack slots displayed on a single page of the backpack to 64.
- Increased the base number of backpack slots from 50 to 64.
- Increased the number of backpack slots that store users have from 500 to 640.
- Fixed a bug that caused the last slot in the backpack to not respond to drag n’ drop.
- Fixed bugs with dragging and dropping items between pages of the backpack.
BOTS
- Co-op bot matches will now randomly assign the human players to Radiant or Dire.
- In co-op bot matches, if a human disconnects before picking a hero, the bots will now correctly balance the teams.
- Fixed bots not selecting heroes into non-AP games.
- Fixed bots not deploying their couriers on Passive difficulty.
Source: PC Gamer (opens in a new tab)