The history of the MOBA genre is a history of mods and iterations. Their most popular and still existing games today are the result of several reimaginations and adjustments to avoid copyright issues. Now, there is another absurd step in history: the creators of Automatic Chess are doing a MOBA. THE Automatic Chess MOBA is a game based game, based on a game mod, which in turn is based on a game mod.
Announced on January 8, publisher Dragonest announced that it would be developing a new MOBA game based on your game Automatic Chess. Apparently, it’s a pretty straightforward story. Take it a step further and ask “what is Automatic Chess, ”And now we are spiraling down the rabbit hole.
Take things back to StarCraft and the fervent modding scene around it and the expansion Brood war, and you will find a type of game called Aeon of Strife. It was a very simple game: choose a character, attack the enemy base, destroy it to win. The units would automatically spawn on designated “lanes”, and that kind of mimicked a bigger battle, where the heroes in the field were fighting and destroying to accumulate personal resources, eventually becoming powerful enough to destroy the enemy team.
Another Blizzard game, Warcraft 3, there was an equally fervent modding scene, and here the Aeon of Strife concept would be shaped in a more recognizable comparison with what MOBAs are today: Defense of the ancients, or DotA. DotA gradually dominated the personalized game scene, thanks to a list of heroes with items, special abilities and surprising depth. It was difficult to find a game of Peasant life or Trolls vs. Elves amid the flood of DotA.
Like all popular genres, imitators soon followed. Riot Games established League of Legends, the enigmatic developer IceFrog went to Valve to kick Dota 2, and Blizzard fought with Valve on the appointment of Dota, eventually creating his own all-star MOBA Heroes of the Storm. There were many, many other MOBAs also, but those were the most prominent and most relevant to what came next.
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Although Blizzard games have inspired modding so far, Valve’s own custom games in Dota 2 gave rise to a new genre through a mod called “Dota Auto Chess. “Instead of attacking the tracks and fighting for gold, players placed units on a grid and watched their armies fight against others, combining them in a similar way to poker. It exploded in popularity, and soon others were looking to create their own version of what was being called “autobattlers”.
Riot Games has successfully arrived with Team fighting tactics, Valve developed its own version called Dota Underlords, and Blizzard grafted a similar autobattler mode on Hearthstone. The original studio that made Dota Auto Chess, Drodo Studio, was left to create his own standalone version, only without any of the features of Dota 2– and did so Automatic Chess.
Now, Automatic Chess is receiving a MOBA with a day-night cycle and destructible terrain. Even looking at the images of his formation of heroes, I am noticing characters that are definitely rude branches of Tusk, Slardar and Mirana. But then Slardar is just a rough offshoot of a Warcraft Naga, and even when I play Dota 2 today, I sometimes call Mirana “POTM”, or Priestess of the Moon, a Warcraft name.
O infinite spiral down of concepts of StarCraft, and perhaps more relevant Warcraft, it’s fascinating to me. Some WarcraftArchetypes of are quite common in fantasy, such as the ice wizard or the guardian of the giant tree, but now they have gone through various filters, avoiding copyright issues and intellectual property battles.
MOBAs are not entirely unique in this respect; go back to the FPS genre and you can trace the lineage of Valorant Right below Counterattack 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 they have resulted in some pretty spectacular results. (I have to believe this, or else all those hours of Dota 2 went for nothing.)
Still, I’m very curious to really play the Automatic Chess MOBA. Is it familiar? Where some characters will remind me of their Dota counterparts, and where will they separate from the mold? If I have any hope, it’s that it will support a mod that will somehow generate a new gender craze, dragging the rabbit hole that started with a simple mod decades ago even deeper.