Dota 2 Diretide impressions - does Valve's new game mode trick or treat?

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Undying is slaughtering zombies, Phantom Lancer is tearing through ghosts, and Roshan is ramping around the map carrying a big bucket of sweets. What the hell has happened to Dota 2?

Your first game will be enormously confusing, so allow me a moment to explain it to you. A game of Diretide is split into three parts on a specially-redesigned version of the standard Dota map. The map has a bucket of sweets where your side's ancients normally spawn, severed hands wandering around in place of the usual wildlife, and each side's creeps come with Roshlings in place of siege units. Don't be fooled by the name - they're not cute and cuddly. They're huge, stompy, and almost as tough as their paternal namesake.

When a Roshling dies, it drops candy. The aim of the first part of the game is to collect as much of that candy as you can by grabbing it and dropping it in your bucket. When you do that, your team gets gold and xp. But there's a caveat -- carrying candy reduces your health. Holding more than a few bits at once means that you're be splatted into the ground with one hit once the enemy team reach you, and you can be sure they'll reach you. If you die, all the candy you were carrying spills out onto the ground.

I'd love to see some of the professional teams battle it out in a friendly Diretide tournament, but even for casual players, the shower of loot that Diretide brings should be welcome - you'll get at least one item for every game you play, and if you win the first part, you'll get two.

But what's impressive beyond that is how much fun it is to play. If Valve's goal was to create a new game with the same heroes on roughly the same map that's almost as entertaining as regular Dota 2 and much quicker, then they've succeeded.

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