The creators of the auto battler genre have revealed that they're going back to their roots and bringing their unique cast of characters to the MOBA genre in a new game called Auto Chess MOBA. Of course, before becoming a fully-fledged game all its own, Auto Chess was a mod inside Dota 2, which is one of the gold standards of the MOBA genre. The characters from the mod have been reinterpreted by developer Dragonest into their own original creations, and those heroes will now compete in a game directly competing with its original inspiration. Of course, the entire MOBA genre originated from a mod within Warcraft 3, making these characters the end result of a decades-long round of gaming industry telephone.
This doesn't even get into the suite of auto battler games produced by the same publishers behind the MOBA genre's greatest hits. There was League of Legends offshoot Teamfight Tactics first out of the block, with Valve releasing Dota Underlords in quick succession. Warcraft 3 publisher Blizzard even created a mode replicating Auto Chess' gameplay for their Warcraft digital trading card game Hearthstone. While the genre is not as all-consuming as the MOBA was in its prime or as popular in the mainstream as battle royale games, the top games in the genre (including the Epic Games Store-exclusive Auto Chess) still have large audiences playing to this day.
In a video released earlier this month, Dragonest CEO Loring Lee announced the development of Auto Chess MOBA, taking the cast of characters from Auto Chess and bringing them back into the realm of MOBA. The game laid out by Lee will be built on a foundation of fairness between players, which translates to the same free heroes model that Valve employs with Dota 2. Instead of paying for heroes with real money, everyone will be on the same playing field when it comes to gameplay, although there will undoubtedly be cosmetic rewards to dive into if one is so inclined.
Outside of the ridiculousness of Auto Chess MOBA's Inception-esque origins, it does make sense that Dragonest would want to return to the MOBA genre. They've worked on games in that space in the past on mobile, and Lee even points out that a few of their mechanics have made their way to other games in the genre over time. With a known franchise behind them, the team will now be able to put that innovation to good use in a game with a built-in audience and a big chance at success.
It is undoubtedly a hilarious endeavor to track the lineage of various characters that are soon to be in Auto Chess DOTA back to their Warcraft roots just to see where things were changed in order to avoid copyright infringement. The modern touches of the new designs ride up against decades-old ideas and bizarre choices brought on by compromises of the original MOBA mods. While other genres certainly have their fair share of ideas being thrown back and forth over the years, MOBAs are unique in just how much DNA is passed from one generation to the next, and one can only hope that Dragonest includes a custom games option that can bring on the next mutation in this long string of video game minutia.
Source: Dragonest/YouTube