

There are a few gameplay concepts unique to Auto Chess as a genre: Matchmaking is reportedly better as well due to dedicated systems. Some units are unavailable as of now but will be made available in the future updates.
DOTA AUTO CHESS MOD
Those familiar with the popular Dota 2 mod will feel right at home, with plenty of Quality of Life improvements on UI readability and gameplay-smoothing to keep players comfortable. Meanwhile, Riot Games developed their own take on the genre, Teamfight Tactics, as a new gamemode for their popular game League of Legends.Īuto Chess is almost a 1:1 of Dota Auto Chess in terms of gameplay. After Valve and Drodo failed to reach an agreement on developing it into its own game, Drodo worked with Chinese studio Dragonest to create their own standalone game, Auto Chess:Origin, while Valve created Underlords instead. The original Auto Chess (widely known as "Dota Auto Chess", or DAC) is a mod for Dota 2 by Drodo Studios. The development of these games has a bit of a story to them. In fact, many Hearthstone players have been playing these games. For those familiar with the card game, it can be described as a "draft" style game and fills a similar niche. The typical game runs around 30-40 minutes. At the end of each lost round, players lose health based on their units' performance, with the last man standing crowned the winner. Each round, players gain currency that can be used to buy more units, while duplicate units can be merged together for a stronger unit. Players compete in a pool of typically 8 players, fighting one random opponent's board or neutral enemies every round. It is still actively supported by its developers however, and receives frequent updates.Auto Chess-like games, also called auto-battlers, are a new and popular strategy subgenre that involves purchasing units with set skills and behaviors, then placing them on a board and letting them auto-battle opponents' units. Auto Chess does enjoy some relevance thanks to its availability on PlayStation consoles, but its visibility has greatly waned.

Not all of those new titles have held up over time, however.ĭota Underlords was abandoned by Valve almost immediately after its launch, while Riot’s Teamfight Tactics has become the top auto battler in the west. This prompted a rush to create auto battlers, with Drodo Studio eventually creating Auto Chess, Valve making Dota Underlords, Riot Games making Teamfight Tactics, and many other imitators also being introduced. Instead, Drodo Studio began work on a mobile lookalike that maintained the look and feel of Dota Auto Chess but was without Dota 2’s characters and branding.

Creator Drodo Studio rejected an offer from Valve to create a standalone version of the game. What happened to Dota Auto Chess?ĭota Auto Chess faded in popularity after creator Drodo Studio began work on a standalone mobile version of the game.ĭota Auto Chess prompted a boom in the popularity of Valve’s MOBA, but its popularity fizzled out as quickly as it rose. The original Defense of the Ancients was a custom game mode for WarCraft 3, and while Dota 2 has evolved much since then, many of those same roots remain. While the game is its own entity at this point, Dota 2 itself has a lot of its aesthetics tied to the WarCraft series. Ultimately, Dota 2 fans can’t complain too much. There are also a number of gameplay differences set to differentiate the Auto Chess MOBA from competitors. Warding will seemingly work differently and there are two Roshan-like objectives along the river. Later on, a massive AOE stun is shown that has very similar aesthetics to Tidehunter’s Ravage. On top of this, the purple archer has a Multi-Shot ability almost identical to Drow Ranger. It has trees that are key in avoiding detection by enemies, a day-night cycle, and more features that are seemingly lifted directly from Dota 2. It has asymmetrical lanes, with the bottom lane being longer for the bottom team and the top lane being longer for the top team. Having a three-laned map is standard in MOBAs at this point, but the Auto Chess MOBA doesn’t stop there.
