DotA 2 is announced

Thus, it has happened.  An official DotA 2 will be available sometime in 2011 created by Valve since Icefrog joined them not too long ago.

If you've been keeping up on the whole Dota-ish games, you know that 2 other games came out recently that are essentially "DotA 2's": League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.  This is mainly why I'm not too excited about this game.  It'll probably cost $30-50 and the gameplay will be essentially exactly the same as DotA.  Project lead Erik Johnson states, "our first reaction is to assume that [the design elements are] there for a reason... IceFrog is one of the smartest designers we've ever met. He's made so many good decisions over the years in building the product. He virtually never makes a decision that doesn't have some reasoning behind it and a way to pick apart the logic behind it."  Thus the main changes you will see is with Source Engine and that it'll be on Steam; both are major upgrades from the pitiful battle.net and dated WC3 engine.

The game will most likely have voice chat, matchmaking, achievements, skins, etc, but will it address the problem that DotA had since day one?  This problem is the ridiculous learning curve which is more like a stepwise function than an actual curve.  I say probably not, but you never know.  Valve is a great company with many talented people on board, thus they might work around this issue.  Otherwise, this game should be called DotA Source instead of DotA 2.