"RPS: What would you say is the major difference between this and the original, outside of the graphical stuff?

Erik Johnson: The things that we’re most focused on is the experience of getting into a playing a game of DOTA. We want people to be able to play this game with their friends really well. Icefrog’s been building this game by himself for six years and there are a number of limitations in being a modder on any platform. Now we have a pretty large team that’s building this game at Valve, the number of things we can do is a lot greater.

RPS: It seems a profoundly different prospect to TF2, which found a bunch of ways to be a sort of gateway experience to online shooters. Can you talk about whether you’re doing anything similar with this?

Erik Johnson: Well, we think that DOTA 1 proved that the game has pretty broad appeal. There are tens of millions of people who play DOTA 1 today, and for us that’s a great indicator that there’s a lot of good things going on in the product. We’re not going to jump in and change all of those things, because they’ve been tried and tested. But DOTA 2′s a product like a lot of our products, it’s going to have a long life after we ship. We’re going to keep building on it, experimenting and learning things.

RPS: I guess there isn’t really the scope to feel you’ve done well individually even if your team loses, as there is in TF2 or even CS to some extent – this is purely win or lose, it’s pretty absolute, right?

Erik Johnson: It’s closer to absolute. The game is built in a way where it rewards the team that works well together pretty heavily. Individual skill is great, but if your team isn’t working together well, the other team is going to come out on top. Left 4 Dead probably has more of a similar feel – if you someone on your team who’s bring the team down, or you’re not communicating well as team, that’ll really hurt you.

RPS: But you’re surely hoping it will trump rivals in this genre, in terms of pro-gaming take-up?

Erik Johnson: I don’t really know, as a goal, how we would act on something like that. We think those other games are great – they have huge followings of people that really love it. Some of those people might like our game and want to try it, and that will be great, but gamers will play as many great games as exist, it seems. It’s not a zero-sum deal. If it turns out that a bunch of professionals want to play our game, great. If not, then we’ll be asking them what we can do for them to want to play it."