sikle on Axe’s return: “I suspect they’ll steal someone else soon.”
Team Spirit analyst Mark “sikle” Lerman discussed changes to Dota 2’s files on his personal Telegram channel and speculated about future events in the game.
The quote is reproduced with the source’s spelling and punctuation intact
Are there MORE bots coming our way?
1. There’s a separate folder for effects: dark_carnival/automotonswhich contains all sorts of bells and whistles, flashes, and additional effects for the robots. There’s also a separate folder for their footstep sounds: sounds/physics/movement/automaton/. Why create a general folder if you plan to use the automaton only for Axe? His robotic impact sounds and other effects are already labeled individually by his name, not under a general folder.
2. For the Culling Blade, there’s a separate robot kill sound: sounds/weapons/hero/axe/culling_layer_auto.vsnd_c. <...> You can only hear it if you kill another Axe.
3. In Axe’s model, there’s an animation group labeled “automaton.” The animations themselves aren’t new and appear in other groups.
4. Remember the robot clockwork.
5. In 2024, they added a whopping 10 sound effects to Ringmaster depicting his glitches. Interestingly, 5 of them are used for Axe, and all of them are found in his Hero_Axe.Automaton.Foley set (“Foley” = a set of sound effects). Did he borrow them? <...>
As much as we’d love to see a release today, there are suspicions that someone else will be stolen soon.
The “_bb” at the end of the filenames definitely refers to Bristleback. He’s next.
Earlier, Valve restored the ability to select Axe, but was forced to remove him again due to numerous critical bugs in the new model. Within two hours, the developers fixed the issues and brought the “automaton” back to all game modes.
Photo by Mark “sikle” Lerman.
