Dota 2 In H1'2015 Will Receive Major Engine Update

While there's been signs for months that within Valve's Dota 2 game that it's transitioning from the Source Engine to Source Engine 2, it looks like Valve's next-generation game engine will be fully utilized within this multiplayer online battle arena game in 2015.

Signs of Source Engine 2 for Dota 2 have dated back to August while today on the official Dota 2 blog is a brief statement that a major engine improvement is coming next year. "As we mentioned in September, there are a number of features in the works for Dota 2 that we’re really excited to share with you. Among them is a major improvement to Dota 2’s engine that we are aiming to release in the first half of next year. One of the main features in this engine improvement will be the ability to rapidly create entirely new game modes. You’ve seen some of this work with the Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha that began earlier this year."

The Dota 2 blog explained about making it easier to create new game modes, "In the past, our Diretide and Frostivus updates contained game modes that were very time consuming to build and maintain, and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up after the release of the engine update."

The engine update being talked about for H1'2015 is almost surely Source Engine 2. Source 2 engine rumours have dated back to 2012 and was confirmed by Gabe Newell back then that the next-generation engine was indeed under development. It was in August that the Dota 2 Workshop Tools were to a "new engine" in what was generally viewed as a soft-release of Source 2. Source Engine 2 will bring better Linux compatibility and improved OpenGL support but we'll need to wait until H1'2015 until finding out more details.