The history of the MOBA genre is one of mods and iteration. The most popular and still standing games today are the result of various remakes and adaptations to tackle copyright issues. Now there is another absurd step in the story: the makers of Auto Chess make a MOBA. ‘A Auto Chess MOBA is a game based on a game, based on a mod of a game, which in turn is based on a mod of a game.
Announced on January 8, publisher Dragonest announced that it will be developing a new MOBA game based on his game Auto Chess. At first glance, this is a fairly simple story. Go one step further and ask ‘what is Auto Chess“And now we turn the rabbit hole down.
Take things back to Star craft and the fiery muddy scene around it as well as the expansion Bread War, and you will find a game type called Aeon of Strife. It was a pretty simple game: pick a character, attack the enemy base, destroy it to win. Units would automatically spawn in designated ‘lanes’, and this mimicked a larger battle where heroes fought on the field and destroyed to build up personal resources, eventually becoming powerful enough to destroy the hostile team.
Another Blizzard game, Warcraft 3, had a similar fiery modding scene, and here is the Aeon of Strife concept would be formed in a more recognizable comparison with what MOBAs are today: Defense of the old, of DotA. DotA gradually dominates the custom game scene, thanks to a roster of heroes with items, special abilities, and surprising depth. It was hard to find a game from The life of a farmer or Trolle v. Elwe amid the flood of DotA.
Like all popular genres, followers soon followed. Riot Games established League of Legends, the enigmatic developer IceFrog is off to Valve to kick off Dota 2, and Blizzard struggled with Valve on the naming of Dota, finally creating their own all-star MOBA Heroes of the Storm. There was many, many other MOBAs also, but it was the most important and most relevant for the following.
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While the Blizzard games have inspired the mud so far, Valve’s own games in Dota 2 created a new genre through a mod called “Dota Auto Chess. Instead of downloading lanes and fighting for gold, players placed units on a grid and watched their armies fight against others, combining them in a way similar to poker. It exploded in popularity, and soon others wanted to create their own version of what are called ‘autobattlers’.
Riot Games came in hot Teamfight Tactics, Valve develops its own version called Dota Underlords, and Blizzard has vaccinated a motorbattler-like mode Herdsteen. The original studio made Dota Auto Chess, Drodo Studio, is now left to create its own standalone version, only without any of the assets of Dota 2—And so it made Auto Chess.
Now, Auto Chess get a MOBA with a day-night cycle and destructible terrain. Even when I look at the images of his hero series, I notice characters who are definitely rough derivations of Tusk, Slardar and Mirana. But then Slardar is just a rough offshoot of a Naga from Warcraft, and even if I play Dota 2 today I sometimes call Mirana ‘POTM’, or priestess of the moon, a Warcraft name.
The endless spiral down of concepts Star craft, and perhaps more relevant Warcraft, is fascinating to me. Some of WarcraftThe archetypes are fairly common in fantasy, such as the ripener or giant tree keeper, but now they have dripped through various filters, avoiding copyright issues and battles over intellectual property.
MOBAs are not entirely unique in this regard; turn to the FPS genre and you can see the gender of Brave down door Counter-Strike and Half life, or the idea of a Ryu-style character over the years of various fighting games. Mods and iteration are how competitive games evolve, and this has resulted in some spectacular results. (I have to believe it, otherwise all these hours of Dota 2 was free.)
Still, I’m really curious about the Auto Chess MOBA. How familiar will it feel? Where will certain characters remind me of them Dota peers, and where will they break from the mold? If I have one hope, it is that it will have mod support that will somehow generate a new genre fad, dragging the rabbit hole that started decades ago with a simple mod even deeper.