In a rare peek behind the scenes, Valve’s latest blogpost, “Between the Lanes: Nest of Thorns”, offers a candid breakdown of how Crownfall 2024 came to life and why it’s one of Dota 2’s most celebrated events since Diretide.
The blog is more than a postmortem, although sounds too close for comfort to be an experimentation on other Valve employees. Jokes aside, the post details on the community feedback and chaotic progress of how Crownfall came to be.
Image Credit: Valve
Shockingly enough, the Dota 2 team behind Crownfall’s development didn’t start with a polished vision at all. Instead, they embraced the engineers’ chaos, iterating and testing from start to finish. Everything from the fun Tidehunter fishing minigame to Tusk’s pub brawls were all a beta test until they found something within these activities that clicked with the players.
As such, they came to the conclusion that what stuck was everything. Of course, throughout the Crownfall development, it was never all sunshine and rainbows, but they stayed true to real metrics, the player data and volume of repetitive retries. Additionally, they also kept track of feedbacks from the Dota 2 Reddit on players’ consensus of their mini-games.
By the time they reached Act IV, Valve had learned enough to go all in, a full-on boss fight against Queen Imperia. However, they realized a boss fight based on destroying a fixed quantity of monsters and upping the difficulty after each wave, just doesn’t cut it. There was no sense of objective in this mechanic, nor was there any stake involved going into the fight versus Queen Imperia herself.
Eventually, they found the secret sauce of the Crownfall Act IV that clicked. Valve employees themselves were the first test subjects of the Dota 2 team’s first iteration on Act IV. They noticed players were starting to discuss their builds and their best ways of winning the boss fight, and even looked forward to repeating the same trial again and again. Just because they believe they could do better.
And just like that, the addictive adrenaline rush from the boss fight against Queen Imperia was created.
The blog doesn’t shy from showing the progress, the lab tests (among Valve employees) and the mess. Early versions of Nest of Thorns were unplayable and boring. Too empty, too hard, and not fun enough to be Crownfall’s final event. But Valve’s iterative process-play, fail, tweak and repeat eventually paid off.
It was at the moment when someone lost and said, “Can I try again?” which was the turning point. From there, the mode snowballed. Unique hero builds, high replayability, and that one wave of spiders everyone hates cemented Crownfall Act IV as an instant classic.
Hysterically, Valve underestimated and assumed players would take days before unlocking Act IV. However, one player did it in merely sixteen hours after the update went live, surpassing our calculations on how long it would take to complete Crownfall .
Nest of Thorns has since been played nearly a hundred million times. It’s proof that a PvE mode can thrive in Dota 2, not just as filler but as an annual event. In the end, Crownfall wasn’t just a Battle Pass substitute. It was something better and hopefully, something we can expect to see in 2025.
Nest of Thorns played over 100 million times (Image credit: Wykrhm Reddy)
As per Valve’s tradition, there’s no simple post as this blog has sparked speculation on the next upcoming Dota 2 hero. While Kez was introduced alongside Act IV and its storyline, there’s another character that had just as much refined skills and mechanics to eventually be considered a Dota 2 hero.
It’s all eyes are on Queen Imperia, the Skywrath royalty and treacherous Shendelzare’s sister. As a boss too detailed to remain non-playable, her distinct abilities and lore make her a prime candidate to be 2025’s latest Dota 2 hero. Nevertheless, these are all simply speculations based on the blog post’s unusual emphasis on Queen Imperia’s boss fight, so do take this with a pinch of salt.
Additionally, there’s a hint at some kind of Ghost Pirate in the text, so who knows. It’s all a lot of fantastic info from Valve about Crownfall, Nest of Thorns, and Dota 2 development in general.
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