Valve has revealed the details and pricing for this year’s Dota 2 Battle Pass, the purchasable content bundle that is released each year before the game’s International tournament. This year’s Battle Pass will most notably be adding a brand new cooperative multiplayer campaign to the game, a first for Dota, alongside the usual array of other boosts and rewards.
The new campaign, called “Siltbreaker”, will take players down to Dark Reef, the notorious undersea prison tied inextricably to the lore of Slark, the fishy assassin of Dota 2 infamous for being the only creature to ever escape from its watery clutches. Siltbreaker will be spread across two acts, with Act 1, “The Sands of Fate”, coming out later this month, and Act 2, “A Vault in the Deep”, slated to release in July. It will be a cooperative experience, allowing players to either party up with friends or queue up with strangers through the game’s matchmaking, before battling through “a diverse landscape of loathsome monsters, cunning traps, and other lethal terrors”.
The Battle Pass, introduced in last year’s tournament as a new addition to the Compendium, gives players who buy it access to a whole slew of in-game goodies including cosmetics, XP boosts, and quests, as well as new ways to interact with the tournament through esports fantasy drafts, match outcome wagering, and hero arcana voting. Part of the proceeds from all Battle Pass sales go towards funding the prize pool at each year’s International, which has climbed dramatically in each year of its existence from $2.8 million in 2013 to $20.7 million at last year’s tournament.
You can learn more about this year’s Dota 2 Battle Pass and The International 2017 tournament over at dota2.com.