ValveTime

The last week was a particularly busy one for Valve, as they released a series of new updates for a variety of products. Steam received Trading Cards, Dota 2 received more compendium stretch goals and Team Fortress 2 recieved...more hats. Robotic hats. There was also a lot more news that you should check out in this week's ValveTime Weekly News Round-Up. Thanks for watching.

This week's Dota 2 update shipped a little later than usual in order to avoid complications with the ongoing International 3 Western Qualifier. The update includes a series of gameplay tweaks relating to Elder Titan and Ursa, while a few modifications related to memory management were made to help improve the game's performance. Lobby and tournament games now support up to 6 broadcast channels, which has been increased from the previous limit of 4, allowing even more commentators and language options to be available by spectators viewing online matches or replays. A new cosmetic item set was released for Queen of Pain as a reward for purchasers of the recently released "Premier League Season 5" ticket. This item set is unique however, as the appearance of the "Wicked Succubus Set" can be upgraded and improved based on the amount of tournament matches the owner has viewed. The three different levels and their cosmetic differences are shown in the below image.

A pair of new cosmetic HUDs, namely "The Powered Star" and "Stone Ruin", were also added as ticket purchase incentives for the "StarSeries Season VI" and the "Premiere League Season 5", respectively. These HUDs were included alongside a wide series of unreleased alternate HUDs, including the "International 2013 HUD" promised to all Compendium owners after the newly added Stretch Goal 3 was completed earlier this week. Additionally, a new announcer pack was also added to the game files, this time themed after the extremely popular community personality "Pyrion Flax", which has apparently been sitting in the Steam Workshop for many months. The announcer pack also features an accompanying 'Mega Kill' version for all you triple killers out there interested in hearing Pyrion Flax scream at you through your speakers in celebration. For more information on this week's Dota 2 update, head on over to the Dota 2 Wiki for the official changelog, or check out Cyborgmatt's blog for his full patch analysis.

After nearly half a year without a major Team Fortress 2 update, Valve have announced "Robotic Boogaloo" - the most recent sizable patch for everyone's favourite war themed hat simulator. The update, which was announced on the Team Fortress blog alongside the release of a brand new short teaser trailer and comic, is being described as "the first entirely community-created update" and includes 57 brand new community developed cosmetic items, many of which are robot themed replicas of existing hats and miscellaneous items. Every element of the update was created by the community before being evaluated and accepted by Valve including the website pages, the teaser trailer, the comic, all artwork and all in-game models. The new items are all available from the RoboCrate, a robot themed crate the community have been collecting en masse since it was added by Valve in late April 2013.


The update website uses original community created artwork uploaded to the Steam Artwork section to highlight a series of individual items included with the patch. The update is now available, so head on over to Team Fortress 2 if you feel like checking it out. While you download the update, don't forget to watch the impressive update teaser trailer included on the main announcement page, which was created by community member "MrPopulus89".

If you thought Dota 2 took the spotlight in previous weeks, you'd better get yourself ready for this week's ValveTime Weekly News Round-Up! In the news this week, the International 3 tournament received several major updates while the SteamDB community unearthed something known as the "Steam Trading Card Beta". If you're interested in virtual reality and/or Linux, you'll want to check out Half-Life 2 as a set of updates earlier this week introduced beta support for Ubuntu and the Oculus Rift. Stay tuned for more ValveTime videos, news and reviews coming soon.

Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have all been updated with Linux support. With this Gordon Freeman's entire saga (to date) is now available on Windows, MacOS and Linux. With Portal having arrived on Linux last week and Left 4 Dead 2 at the end of April Valve are getting all their big titles ready for Linux for their upcoming SteamBox platform.