‘Dota 2’ Summer Client Update Brings Visual Overhaul, Reporting Tweaks

Dota 2 has had a visual overhaul and now features a giant snail.

Valve has released a surprise patch for Dota 2, known as the Summer Client Update, which brings a ton of quality of life changes including some massive visual improvements, an overhauled behaviour and reporting system and an actually usable user interface for the armoury.

The update can be seen as a bit of a spring cleaning type patch, just one that has arrived at the end of summer. There’s no gameplay changes to go through and no balance tweaks, but all of these updates will make Dota 2 significantly better and easier to play.

The most noticeable change for everyone will be how the game looks, with Valve adding some fancy new tech such as shadows to the game. Shadows, including shadows from clouds, particle lighting and tone mapping (basically the contrast in the game) have all been overhauled, and when put together appear to make a massive improvement to how Dota 2 looks. It may not be super noticeable if you jump into the game, but looking at the comparison shots on the update page will show you how much of an upgrade this is.

Next up in the changes is the behaviour and reporting system, which has been overhauled and might be a little more useful now. Finally commends will be factored in to matchmaking, so your more likely to join up with players you have commended and less likely to meet those you disliked or reported.

A new communication score joins your behaviour score with this new addition being tied specifically to your comms in game. Also behaviour score now might have an impact on people being terrible, as a low score can remove your access to ranked play, pausing and even item drops. So basically, if you're a terrible person in game, you get less fun things to do.

If you do come across such a person in a game there’s now new ways to report them and the in-game report limit has been removed to try and weed out the repeat offenders. And finally like many other games Valve is adding real time chat monitoring to identify and mute toxic players as the game is going on.

The final area of improvements arrive for the armoury where you keep all those cosmetics. The user interface of this system has been totally reworked to make it usable, unlike the cluttered and complicated mess that it has been for years. The new system makes it obvious what you own and what you can buy, can identify duplicate items and generally looks a million times better than it did.

To make the most of this new look armoury Valve has also released a new Collector's Cache chest that features a load of pretty cool sets, and then one terrible anime style Marci set. It’s available right now for $2.49.