Dota 2 Reborn Custom Games Highlight, Beta Out Now

Valve has announced the availability of the Dota 2 Reborn Beta alongside an entirely new engine that now allows for custom games this week. The interface changes revealed last week can be found here in our earlier coverage.

With the new Source 2 engine under the hood, Valve's latest game development platform, it allows for more "rendering improvements, performance optimizations, higher fidelity content, and richer, more dynamic games."

Dota 2 Reborn now allows for custom games, with a game lobby just to facilitate this, and it comes with developer tools such as a map editor, model, texture and particle editors, and integrating Lua scripting for developers to customise their map creations.

Valve has also kick-started the custom games movement in Dota 2 Reborn by authoring some of the custom maps, such as Overthrow, which is a short team free-for-all game with different objectives. They've also promised new custom maps authored by them in the coming weeks and these custom games are a good starting point for developers for their own creations as they will be made available for that purpose.

The Dota 2 Reborn beta will be available as an option in the Steam client where players start their games and both versions, the legacy Dota 2 and the Reborn version will be available in the meantime, allowing players to switch between the stable and experimental versions. Progress is shared across the two and ranked matchmaking will be available soon.

More information is available for the new custom games and technical changes under the hood at the Dota2.com website.