Valve may have the rights to DOTA 2, but Blizzard has been working on its own internal StarCraft II mod titled Blizzard DOTA. Now it has been revealed that the mod is going through a reboot stage.
Blizzard DOTA was shown at last year’s BlizzCon, but senior game designer Jonny Ebbert explained that a lot has changed since then.
"Getting it right and just meeting the Blizzard quality bar, and questioning a lot of the assumptions behind the genre… is what we do at Blizzard," he said. "What we showed at the original BlizzCon, we’ve completely flattened it since then and completely rebooted it because we just thought there’s more we can question on this."
Ebbert didn’t elaborate further, but Executive Vice President and Co-Founder Frank Pearce did highlight accessibility as an important factor.
"One of the important things to note with that space is the DOTA everyone plays on Warcraft III is not particularly accessible to the novice," he said. "One of the game development philosophies we have at Blizzard is ‘easy to learn and difficult to master’. That mod for Warcraft III doesn’t really fit that description."
More Blizzard DOTA information will likely be revealed at this year’s BlizzCon in October.