LinuxGameNetwork
In a statement last month, Valve publicly said that they were working on their own standalone version of Auto Chess, the popular Dota 2 mod. In the statement, they tell the story of how they wanted to work together with Drodo (the original creators of Auto Chess) but could not come to an agreement. So Drodo went back to China to work on their version of Auto Chess, while Valve would continue independently on what is now Dota Underlords.
The drama really heated up this past week during E3 for a couple reasons. Firstly, Drodo's PC version of Auto Chess is now slated to be an Epic Games Store exclusive, likely because of the connection with Tencent. And in addition, Riot Games announced that they also want a piece of the action by announcing a new game mode they call Teamfight Tactics.
Likely in response to all this, Valve has announced that Dota Underlords is now in a closed beta starting June 13th. Any Dota 2 players with an active Battle Pass will get access to the beta right away with a full open beta planned for next week.
Once the open beta begins, Dota Underlords will be free-to-play and available on every platform under the sun: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux. Check out the official post for a bit for info.
I'll likely be streaming Dota Underlords off-and-on this weekend. If you see the purple banner at this page, you'll know I'm live.
Update (June 15th, 2019):
Valve is certainly acting fast and have already pushed an update to the beta. Most notable, the Vulkan renderer is now active by default and there's a new 'minimal' shop UI that won't take up the whole screen on PC.
Check out the full patch notes.
