http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/65085 wrote:It appears the rumor that Valve and IceFrog are working, specifically, on a new version of the popular "Defense of the Ancients" WarCraft III mod has a bit more weight today as a trademark filing for "DOTA" by Valve has surfaced (via Superannuation).
The mysterious IceFrog joined Valve last year and was put in charge of a team. While blog posts made by the developer indicated that his project at Valve would be of specific interest to DotA fans, it was uncertain if the project would retain the name or even be the same type of game. The project could just share the name or could be a full port.
If I had to speculate (I do), I would predict a free-Steam release of DOTA that is a re-balanced, re-tooled version of the WC3 mod with full Steamworks integration. It will be interesting to see if the backend features match those of Heroes of Newerth, which added several desired features like stats tracking, VoIP, and game re-joining.
Shacknews has once again asked Valve for a statement, but has not heard back. They're probably busy playing DotA...
Well they're definitely not lying. The patent is up the US Government's Trademark Applications and Registrations Retrieval website.
DotA has always been treated differently then a normal mod, but if a WCIII engine game is coming to steam and being integrated with SteamWorks like ShackNews speculated, will Blizzard have anything to say about it? Especially considering Steam competes with their new Battle.net 2.0 service.
More importantly, this seems to be Valve's first step out of the shoot-em-up genre. I wonder if Gabe is going to make that MMO for the Wii he expressed interest in awhile ago.