This Free Steam Game Has Over 1,800 Hours Of Content

Steam really does have everything a PC gamer could want confined within its virtual walls, with more than 100,000 individual titles hosted on the platform as of early 2024 (though it’s probably considerably more than that now). Whether you’re into cozy indie titles or the latest AAA epic, you don’t have to look for too long to find something that’s worth your precious playing time.

There are also a wide selection of free-to-play games, with titles like Counter-Strike 2, Warframe and PUBG: Battlegrounds drawing in millions of players with each passing day. There is another game that the platform is arguably more well-known for, and though it has been less in the spotlight in recent years, it still has the potential to absorb thousands of hours of your life.

This Free Steam Game May Take Over Your Life

If you were around and playing games in the back half of 2013, then you’d have a really difficult job avoiding Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) developed by Valve themselves. Though League of Legends steals much of the spotlight these days, the two rivals were locked in a battle for years, one which Dota 2 won in some respects for a while during the early years.

If you have played a classic MOBA before, then you’ll know roughly what you’re looking at, with this (and several other games) being born out of the extremely successful Defense of the Ancients Warcraft III mod, for which this serves as a technical sequel. Valve even hired the original designer of the mod to create Dota 2 inside the Source Engine.

It’s one of those games that goes one of two ways when players decide to give it a go, either proving too overwhelming a learning curve, in terms of the technical details players have to learn, or immediately digging its claws in thanks to a heady blend of competitive gameplay and very fast-paced combat.

1,800 Hours For DOTA 2 Is Probably A Conservative Guess

The website HowLongToBeat reckons it takes 1800 hours or so to learn all of the intricacies included, and with updates changing the game all the time, that number really just keeps climbing the more you play. If you haven’t tried the genre before, it can be one of the less forgiving ways to start, but once you’re over that initial hurdle, there is something magical there.

Dota 2 is a huge part of gaming history, and one that players should try and explore at least once before writing it off.

Systems

Released

July 9, 2013

ESRB

r

Engine

Source 2

Multiplayer

Online Co-Op, Online Multiplayer