Dota 2's The International 2017 Battle Pass is now live
It's already approach the $2m mark.
Valve has just launched the Battle Pass for Dota 2's The International 2017, and if you've got the game installed it should be available right now or after an update. As usual, those who buy into it will get a bunch of goodies or access to goodies, chief among them this year being the Siltbreaker multiplayer campaign.
Dubbed "a cooperative adventure into the blackest depths of Dark Reef", Siltbreaker won't be available until later this month, but it's a campaign which will task players with battling through "a diverse landscape of loathsome monsters, cunning traps and other lethal terrors". As the general theme over on the Battle Pass page suggests, it'll have a subaquatic theme. Siltbreaker will boast two acts, with the first due "later this month" and the second in July.
There's tonnes more, naturally. This year's Team Quests will usher in a new type of mission, where players complete single- and multi-game goals together. Meanwhile, you'll now be able to play a trivia mini-game will waiting in the queue, and there are Prestige Towers, which combine the Battle Level totals of any given team and replace the game's normal defensive pillars. I'm not sure whether this is just cosmetic, but either way, the more points your team has the better it will look.
There's a huge amount of stuff to wade through over on the website, so you'd be well advised to pore through it if you're hoping to partake. As usual, 25 percent of all Battle Pass sales go into the prize pool for The International 2017, and the pool is currently sitting on $1,977,396 (and rising, naturally).
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Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.