Remember auto battlers? Yeah, me neither, but it was a pretty big deal for a little while. Starting with the Dota 2 mod, Dota Auto Chess, auto battlers became what might be video gaming’s first fad in 2019 when Dota Auto Chess spun off to become its own studio.
From there, Riot Games got in on the auto battler bandwagon with Teamfight Tactics, and then Valve with their own official version of Dota Auto Chess called Dota Underlords. Blizzard followed suit with Battlegrounds, their own unique take that they paired with Hearthstone.
Strangely enough, it seems that Teamfight Tactics is the most successful of the bunch, but that’s likely more to do with the fact that League of Legends is still one of the biggest games of all time and less to do with auto battlers being a popular genre any longer. Auto Chess, the standalone game released by Chinese developer Dragonest Games, is popular in China but never really caught on with Western audiences.
But the point here is that Auto Chess was born from Dota 2, a MOBA, and now Auto Chess is making its own MOBA. Time is a closed circle, as they say.
The announcement was made January 8 by a completely straight-faced Dragonest CEO Loring Lee, who at least acknowledged that moving back into the MOBA genre seemed like a losing proposition. “Market competition for MOBA games is so fierce today,” Lee noted, but then explained that “making a MOBA game is our faith.”
Religion seems like the perfect reason to unironically spin Auto Chess back into a MOBA.
Auto Chess MOBA will feature destructible terrain, a day/night cycle that will affect player vision, and it will have all heroes available to play from the start, which leads us to assume that all monetization will be based on cosmetic microtransactions. There’s no release date yet for Auto Chess MOBA, but unlike auto battlers, it doesn’t look like the MOBA genre is going to disappear before Dragonest is done shoe-horning Auto Chess back to where it started.
Source: Dragonest, Kotaku
