Diretide was delayed due to major update, says Valve in apology

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Valve have finally let the community know what’s going on with Diretide, a full eight days late. While apologising for the lack of it, a full eight days late. It turns out that we will be getting it – but not just yet.

The latest post on the Dota 2 blog (titled “Not My Best Work!” in what is possibly the understatement of the month) details Valve’s thought process throughout. The abridged version is that they had a major update planned which they thought would be out for Halloween, and they didn’t think the community would want them to stop working on said major update just to get Diretide out (as Diretide will apparently require a lot of work due to the changes made to the game in the past year; it’s not a case of flicking a switch).

Apparently, they didn’t realise this might upset the community, and as they were busy on this major update they didn’t think it was important to tell the community anything about this. And then the update wasn’t actually ready for Halloween.

When the community started going apeshit, they still didn’t tell the community what was going on, because… well, in their words: “You were already mad and disappointed in the lack of Diretide. Telling you that you weren’t getting it at all wouldn’t have really helped much. Now we started thinking in terms not of “what should we say?”, but in terms of “what should we do?””

So yeah, they thought it was much better to just leave you hanging. Apparently, what they should do turned out to be “post up an apology and claim it’s because of an update we’re still not talking about.” Valve reckon we’ll be very happy when this update arrives, and will totally understand why it was more important than Diretide.

We will be getting Diretide, though. Valve say this mystery update is in final testing, and people are hopping over to work on Diretide as they finish up work on that. Diretide will therefore be appearing in the next update, and Valve reckon some of the changes they’re making to it will make it “more fun than before.”

Short version: Valve are working on a big update. Valve didn’t think we’d get upset about Diretide. We will now be getting Diretide along with this big update.

Still – what’s this major update likely to be? If it’s that big and that likely to make us happy, I can’t imagine it’ll be anything less than a new hero. Maybe two. Either way, my money’s on Legion Commander appearing in game sometime soon.