The next Dota 2 hero is a ghostly gunslinger named Muerta

Dota 2 (opens in new tab) has announced a new hero at world championship The International 11, with the revenant gunslinger Muerta set to bring the moba’s hero total up to 124 early next year. She’s a black-and-gold creature, maybe some kind of automaton, that wields a pistol and deals in travel between life and death. For now, all we’ve got is a trailer (opens in new tab), but that trailer’s packed with some neat details.

“An enduring revenant reveals herself with promises of a ruinous reckoning to follow. Pierce the veil between the living and the damned as a new hero — Muerta — arrives to haunt the lanes in early 2023,” says the official description.

With a flowery aesthetic that blends the aesthetic skulls of Mexico’s day of the dead with a profoundly video-gamey neon, and Spanish-speaking players are already sounding off in video comments with excitement and requests for a Spanish-language voice pack for her. Muerta promises to be a hero that has a lot in common with the current Dota 2 stable—at least lorewise. 

Because it turns out she’s been teased since at least February, when the Revenant’s Brooch item was added to Dota with the description “The cursed brooch of a fallen guardian who stalks forever between the veil of life and death.” In the trailer, what is presumably Muerta’s portrait on a candle-lit altar is wearing the Revenant’s Brooch. Given the focus of that item on attack damage and speed, and Muerta’s wielding a gun, my money’s on an auto-attacking Carry-role hero that can use or make use of ethereal effects. 

Muerta’s design, coloration, and visual effects have a lot in common with Death Prophet and Wraith King, two other spirit-themed characters who regularly return from the dead. Also, I think she’s the first normal-human-sized hero to use a gun? The others are all little Keenfolk like Sniper, Gyrocopter, and Snapfire.

Last year’s new hero was Primal Beast, a big angry crocodile thing.

In other Dota 2 news, Valve has announced in a deeply and profoundly strange video that there’s an announcer pack on the way for Portal 2’s Cave Johnson, the strangely upbeat CEO of Aperture Laboratories played by J.K. Simmons. You can watch it on YouTube but I’ll embed it below.