Monday Night Combat found success on the Xbox Live Arcade before moving over to the PC a number of months later. The game combined a simplified take on the DotA formula with third-person shooting and wrapped it all up in a hyper-stylized take on American sports. Uber Entertainment has now announced its next game, and the developer is ready to dive deeper into its own creation.

Super Monday Night Combat is part sequel, part reimagining. The game will be free to play, and will add greater emphasis on teamwork while giving you a persistent leveling system. You'll be dying much less in the game, so expect to spend less time respawning. The trade-off is a deeper, more strategic game.

The team knew things were going well with the action-oriented Monday Night Combat, and it was time to deepen the experience. "Let's put a little more of the strategic elements back. We're pushing more of that bot mechanic and leveling up and getting more powerful," John Comes, Uber Entertainment's creative director, told Ars.

The game is going to be treated like a service, and less like a single game launch. You can expect more heroes to be added on a continual basis, as well as other content. Gamers will be able to purchase cosmetic additions to their characters, and for-pay content will be rotated in and out of play so gamers who don't pay will still be able to experience much of the content.

The reduced lethality will also change the flow of battle in a major way. While an assassin could take you out of Monday Night Combat rather quickly, and respawning was a constant fact of the game, Super Monday Night Combat is designed to keep you in the game and working with your friends. "You stay alive a lot longer, and it's not about kills and deaths as much as team play," Chandana Ekanayake, Uber's Art Director and Executive Producer told Ars.

The team is leading on the PC, but they're also exploring the option of releasing the game on consoles. "When we were working on the PC version of Monday Night Combat, we added a lot of updates. That's the way we like to develop, we come up with an idea like 'throw a giant chicken in!' and we can make it happen," Ekanayake said.

The PC allows them to add new content in the game on a whim, something that's missing on the locked-down consoles. In fact, the original Monday Night Combat sold more on the 360 than the PC—although the team was happy with the game's success on Steam—making the move to PC only for the time being and making it free to play a bit of a risk. "We honestly believe if we put out a solid, polished game and we keep updating it, that the money to support ourselves and keep doing what we love will be there," Ekanayake explained.

These additions are all exciting for fans of the original. How many times have you been working on your strategy only to be taken out by the Assassin in a one-hit kill? The game straddled action and strategy, and some times it felt like the middle fell out. The move towards strategy should create a deeper, more satisfying game. There are plenty of shooters out there, but a third-person strategy game with heavy DotA influence? That sounds exciting.

"We worked at the EA, Ataris, and Activisions of the world, and we're a small group, about 20 right now, and we want to make the games we want to play. This free-to-play strategy for us is about that freedom." Ekanayake told Ars.

The free-to-play strategy leaves plenty of room for updates to characters, taunts, and even weapons, but we've been assured you can earn items through playing the game and items will be rotated in and out for players who don't like paying for add-ons. Even if you don't pay, you'll find much to enjoy in the game.

A closed beta is planned to begin in the coming weeks, with a PC release aimed for late this year or early 2012. We can't wait.