Valve Launches New Tutorial for DOTA 2 Before Fans Could

A few weeks ago, a bunch of devoted DOTA 2 fans and streamers came together to try and fix DOTA 2’s notoriously awful tutorial, using fundraised money, the ability to make custom modes, and a whole lot of publicity in the hopes that Valve would notice them so they could skip over the usual 20-game limit you need to unlock custom modes. The goal was to have a real tutorial ready by the time the DOTA 2 anime came out on Netflix, so people who watched the anime and were inspired to try the game themselves wouldn’t have an absolute rat butt time.

Well, the DOTA 2 anime is out tomorrow, and while the player-made tutorial never manifested… Valve, as it turned out, had a similar idea. And they just announced that a new tutorial has been launched for the game, which not only gives players better ways to learn about how the notoriously complicated game works, but also integrates many of the tools and techniques that the player-made tutorial was going to use.
 

As the community knows, depth and discovery are hallmarks of Dota. They're why we play. However, that depth also brings a vast number of new things to process and absorb, and the first steps of Dota discovery sometimes feel overwhelming. It's true that the highs of Dota are surprising and joyous, but for new players it's often difficult to sift through all the information and find clear paths to positive results. Today's update aims to help with that.

So how does this new tutorial work? Basically, new players join a sort of special “new player que”, which severely limits the number of characters they can pick. Their shop is streamlined and more detailed, and most importantly, little “assistants” will bother them through the game, giving them warnings and tips on ways to play more intelligently, not unlike Clippy. It’s a pretty big list of changes, and you can see them all at the blog.

No word on if the anime is even good enough to make people interested in playing, though. Guess we’ll see.