According to Johnson, ”DOTA2 will have LAN mode. There are some systems that LAN mode requires that we haven’t finished yet, mainly because we’ve been focused on matchmaking. We know how important this feature is for the community.”
However, Johnson could not give a solid release date for the game.
”The gating factor on getting everyone playing DOTA2 right now is mostly about us having enough server capacity to support the DOTA audience. Our release date is not tied to The International, but we do have a goal of everyone being able to view the matches live inside the game,” he explained.
Johnson then reassured modders that their work would be supported, stating, ”We have a long history supporting the mod community around our own games, so we’d like to continue that with DOTA2.”
He also targeted latency as one of the biggest problems that the developer would be targeting, especially after the embarrassment of serious lag during last year’s International and subsequent tournaments. ”The solution is that we need to get more servers out into the world to host players,” Johnson related, then promised, ”Our goal is for everyone around the world to have sub 100ms latency to our servers. We will continue to deploy servers around the world until this is true.”
The project boss, however, did not confirm nor deny the rumor that DOTA2 would be a free-to-play game supported by microtransactions. ”We do not have anything to announce on this front. We’re still working on it,” Johnson evaded.
Defense of the Ancients 2 is still targeted for a 2012 release on PC.
