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Hi, and welcome to a special May Day Bank Holiday Monday edition of the ValveTime news.
Each week, we'll bring you the biggest talking points regarding Valve Software and the community.
Now, the news:
Another brand new hero was introduced into Dota 2 in this week's update.
Elder Titan is a melee strength hero who is regularly played as a durable initiator
capable of starting team fights from a great distance using his "Echo Stomp" ability,
which, when combined with his mobile "Ancestral Spirit" unit,
can temporarily knock out all enemy units for up to 5 seconds
should they be caught in either of the separate 275-unit radii.
His ultimate, dubbed "Earth Splitter," allows Elder Titan to send out
a massive 2400 unit long shock wave which explodes after 3 seconds,
which causes all targets caught in the blast radius to lose 35% of their maximum health
while being slowed by up to 50% for 5 seconds.
The character is also voiced by Jim French,
whom many of you may know as Bill from the Left 4 Dead series or as Father Grigori from Half-Life 2.
[Elder Titan] The great symmetry lies shattered.
[James] A variety of cosmetic item sets were also added to the Dota 2 store, including costumes for
Alchemist, Centaur Warrunner, Keeper of the Light, Lina, Mirana, Phantom Assassin, and Sand King.
While the update did not include any new unreleased files for upcoming heroes,
the community has speculated that Legion Commander will be the next hero to be included in the game,
as she recently appeared in the background of Elder Titan's character art.
This method of previewing the next scheduled hero in the background of character art
has been a running theme for Valve in recent months,
as it was also true for Elder Titan and Skywrath Mage.
Steam Greenlight received a surprise update earlier this week after Valve added four new Greenlit titles to the service.
Three new game titles were added alongside a singular software title.
Substance Designer 3, a software tool for texturing 3D models, and Venetica, an action-adventure game,
are both now available in the Steam store,
while Edge of Space, a 2D sandbox game, and Papers, Please, a "dystopian document thriller,"
are both currently in beta.
For more information regarding these recently Greenlit titles, including links to their individual Steam pages,
head on over to ValveTime.net via a link in the video description.
As promised last week, Valve have released the Left 4 Dead 2 beta,
a separate test client of the full game which features the extended mutation system and Linux support.
If you already own a copy of Left 4 Dead 2 on your Steam account,
the beta will be automatically placed into your Steam library.
Simply look for a game titled "Left 4 Dead 2 Beta" and install it.
The release arrived alongside an accompanying blog post on the Left 4 Dead website,
which also announced that four custom mods,
namely City 17, Diescraper, Back To School, and Urban Flight,
have all been added to official Valve servers in order to make it easier for players to enjoy these high quality campaigns
on safe servers with low ping.
Portal 1 also received an official Linux beta earlier this week,
which was released a day before the Left 4 Dead 2 Linux client.
The separate Linux test client can be downloaded to your Steam library
if you already own the game and are running Steam on a computer with Ubuntu installed.
All four of aforementioned Left 4 Dead 2 custom campaigns are available in the Steam Workshop,
a link to which will be provided in the video description
alongside links to our full write-ups for both beta releases.
The seventh and final episode of the Portal-themed live action comedy fan series "Aperture R&D"
was released last week shortly before our Round-Up episode went live on Sunday.
We highly recommend you check it out, and we look forward to hopefully
seeing more live action Portal-themed content from "Wayside Creations" sometime in the future.
It was a relatively busy week for our media team as Adam Foster,
a community modder who was hired by Valve back in 2008,
emailed us to announce the surprise return of his famous Half-Life 2: Episode One mod "Minerva: Metastasis,"
which was released on Steam in the form of a Director's Cut on Tuesday of this week.
If you would like to see what we thought of this re-release, be sure to check out our full video review,
which is now available via an annotation link on the screen
alongside a link to a short preview video we created to celebrate the re-launch.
We also managed to release the fourth episode of ValveTime TalkTime this week,
even though it was a little delayed thanks to the Minerva surprise.
In this most recent episode of TalkTime,
we talk about what we think Valve need to do in order to make Half-Life 3 a success,
then we argue a lot about what should or should not be included in the next game.
We'd really appreciate it if you could head on over and check it out via an annotation link currently on screen.
Don't forget to leave your questions in the comments below as TalkTime Episode 5
will be a question and answer session in which we will try
to answer a cherry-picked selection of fan questions on a variety of subjects.
That brings us to the end of another week of Valve news.
We mentioned at the start of this episode that the video was a "May Day" Bank Holiday Monday Round-Up special,
but what exactly does that mean?
Nothing! Absolutely nothing!
Happy May Day Bank Holiday everyone...
I don't understand these jokes!
Thanks for watching!
Don't forget to check out all of our other videos from this week.
Have a good one and bye for now.