Valve Software is a company which has been heaping much love on Mac gamers over the last few months, and whose much anticipated physics-based first person puzzler Portal 2 will be debuting early next year on both PC and Mac simultaneously. It’s about to get even better: they’ve just announced their next game, Dawn of the Ancients 2, coming sometime in 2011. Even better? It’s coming to the Mac.
Dawn of the Ancients 2 is a sequel, bizarrely enough, to a mod for a game that Valve didn’t have anything to do with: Blizzard’s Warcraft 3. It appears to be a sequel mostly in name, though: apparently, the core game remains virtually untouched, including the heroes, items, skills, upgrade paths and maps. It’s a stand-alone remake of Dawn of the Ages in a new version of Valve’s Source engine.
It seems in many ways like Valve intends this to be their next Team Fortress 2: a team-based multiplayer title that they can tweak, add content to and radically expand over the course of many years. As part of that, Valve is really trying to get the community involved… so much so that they are incentivizing community involvement with in-game rewards. For example, if you “coach” a new player, you might get an in-game item for your troubles.
Sounds amazing. Expect Dawn of the Ancients 2 to land on Steam sometime in 2011.
