This spring, Dota Auto Chess has become a major phenomenon in the market of free-to-play PvP games. The game, which started as a mod, managed to get not only a native version, but also two clones — from Valve and Riot Games. Together with the game producers, we analyze the reason for the popularity of the game.
The original Dota Auto Chess
A brief introduction
Initially, Dota Auto Chess is a mod for Dota 2. It was released on January 4, 2019 by the Chinese Drodo Studio. At that time, the studio consisted of only four people.
The mod quickly gained wide popularity. It turned out to be so successful that it even affected the performance of the "mother" game. Thanks to Auto Chess, Dota 2's audience grew by a quarter (Newzoo estimated downloads at 7 million).
Then Drodo Studio signed a contract with the Chinese publisher Dragonest Game to create and launch a native version of the game, which will have nothing to do with Dota 2. In May, it was released on Android as Auto Chess, and in June it was announced for the Epic Games Store.
In the spring, Valve, which failed to reach an agreement with Drodo Studio on a partnership outside the Dota Auto Chess framework, announced plans to release its own multiplatform version of Auto Chess. In the summer, the game was released as Dota Underlords.
In mid-June, Riot Games also announced its ambitions in the genre. The American company announced the preparation of an official mod for League of Legends called Teamfight Tactics. In the beta version format, the game was released on the 25th.
What is the game about
This is a multiplayer game for eight participants. The user's task is to kill all competitors, bringing everyone's health bar to zero. This is not so easy to do.
The Auto Chess game session is divided into phases. There are two types of them in total: the purchase phase and the battle phase. They alternate.
In the purchase phase, the user purchases units for gold and puts them on the playing field.
In the battle phase, an opponent is randomly selected from the other seven participants in the game session. After that, the two-player squads fight in automatic mode. The winner of the phase is the user whose squad destroys all the opponent's units.
The more units of the winner are left alive, the more damage the loser will receive. However, you will not be able to defeat anyone the first time. Dozens of battles take place in one session.
It is the purchase phase that gives depth to the rules in the first place. The store's assortment is not only limited, but every move is random. That is, it will not work to buy who you want.
Plus, units, firstly, need to be pumped by merging them, and secondly, take into account their class and race when putting on the field. Their effectiveness on the battlefield depends on the latter.
Mobile Auto Chess from the authors of the original mod
The round table
We talked about the non-obvious features of the game, which are not visible to the average player, with three producers who devoted more than a dozen hours to the new genre.
Thanks to what successful design solutions has Dota Auto Chess become so popular?
Artur Mostovoy, producer of Azur Games
I will highlight four main factors.
1. Multiple synergy options
The game allows you to build a strategy separately or in combination on races, classes, skills, the location of heroes on the board and objects. At the same time, there is quite a lot of content — hence the great variability in the development of the match and the dissimilarity of the subsequent one from the previous one, as well as a large number of possible winning strategies within each match. This effect is also enhanced by the shared ultimate hero pool for all players. Having tried it once, the player tends to try again, experiment and see what happens. It's addictive.
2. Protection against a series of defeats
Firstly, a bonus gold is given for a loose streak every round to help even out the situation economically if you constantly lose rounds (this rule varies depending on the title, for example, in the Tencent autobattler the situation is reversed. — Ed.). Secondly, the free sale of heroes is 1:1 (the rules of sale may differ in different versions of the autobattler. — Ed.) allows you to quickly reorient an ineffective strategy right during the match and buy other characters, assemble another line-up. You don't feel helpless if something doesn't work out — there are tools to try to recoup.
3. Ways of competition
You can improve your hand's chances not only directly — through synergy and reinforcement — but also indirectly. Namely, to spy on who is trying to collect what and through what strategy is playing, and then steal the heroes needed by opponents from the pool, causing their rage in the chat and ruining their plans. Enemies do the same thing to you— it's invigorating.
4. The game has a gentle difficulty curve
It's easy to start playing and even do something thoughtlessly, and at first it will work out. Then you get into the mid- and late-game, you realize how much there is in the game at the level of metagame and variability, you lose, delete the game, study the game, read the FAQ and guides, watch videos and watch your opponents. So, you gradually get involved, you start trying to play more meaningfully and, perhaps, win. At the same time, the onboarding of the mod inside the session itself is not that very good — even many basic things need to be understood with extra effort.
Fuad Kuliyev, producer at R&D Wargaming and founder of Lesser Evil Games studio
In my opinion, there is a successful combination of several factors.
First
The difference between Dota 2 and Dota Auto Chess in terms of hardcore, allowing players who do not want to strain themselves during the next game, want to play something non-stressful, but at the same time tied to similar mechanics and the same setting, causing a deceptive feeling that this will help to immediately enter the rules.
Second
Currently rare deck-building mechanics, undeservedly borrowed little from the world of board games.
The third
A successful combination of hardcore elements (long session, complex rules) and casual elements inherent in mobile phones (autoboy and collecting as the main process of the game).
Fourth
The game has great potential for strategic gameplay. There is a significant difference between early, mid and late game. For example, from the middle of the session, the player is forced to single out strong opponents to win, monitor their peaks in order not only to assemble a strong squad, but also to purposefully shit on the contenders for victory.
Alexander Pashin, producer at Amphibia Volantis
The main key to success is the exciting new mechanics, which took a lot from the popular genre of battler on mobile platforms.
As in Heroes Charge, Idle Heroes or Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, there are collectible mechanics here. That's just it is taken out of the meta directly into the gameplay.
The latter is a hefty plus of the game. Here everything ends in one session. You sat down, collected a collection of gacha that does not require real currency, closed the session, and the story ended there. Next time, you put everything back together from scratch.
Dota Auto Chess took no less from poker. It can even be called by this name, adjusted for more complex rules.
See for yourself: there is a conditional deck, from which each turn you and the rest of the players are randomly offered something. Then, from the suggested pool, you try to put together a combination that will bring you victory.
It is important that, as in poker, Dota Auto Chess has a limited deck for everyone. However, the key difference from the same Texas Hold'em is that the player sees what is in his hand and in the sleeves of the opponents. Therefore, the tactics are based, among other things, on tracking and forecasting — who and what will be missed now or in a few moves.
Dota Underlords from Valve
What personally hooked you the most in terms of design and did you take it "on a pencil"?
Artur Mostovoy, producer of Azur Games
1. Everyone is playing in the open
You can see at any time who is buying or selling what, how they arrange the figures and which ones they improve, how much they have accumulated and what level they have reached. On the one hand, it seems to make life easier for the player. On the other hand, there are not one or two players on the map, but as many as eight. It is not easy to keep up with the development of the situation on each front, both in terms of mechanical actions and from the point of view of analyzing and memorizing actions. This in itself is such a ceiling for development within the skill, working with attention and memory.
2. Shared pool of heroes
What you get depends on which heroes your opponents took or sold. Through the analysis of other people's peaks, you can determine a priority strategy for yourself, which will allow you to quickly transform unsuspected heroes into stronger ones and quickly find the right units. This is such a small detail that organically pushes you to minimize tunnel vision, keep an eye on your opponents and at the same time helps you understand how best to play in the moment for a potential victory.
3. Sale and the opportunity to quickly "change shoes"
Purchased units can be sold at the same price. You play for 10 rounds with one strategy, strengthen and develop it in every possible way. And then, tactically or simply for reasons of "nothing works", you sell everyone in one move and change your strategy. This works a little worse in leyte, where everyone has already upgraded units, but in the early and middle stages of the game the feature is cool, because it does not stop you at the match-making level, but allows you to turn the game around almost at any moment. In addition, there is never any certainty that the next move with the same opponent you will play against the same hand as before. There is a kind of constant element of freshness, multiplied by the randomization of the opponent every turn. This feature also opens the way for the most epic twitch-worthy cam-backs.
4. Variability of economic development
You can accumulate resources, thereby increasing the subsequent rate of their accumulation, and then come out with a strong unexpected hand. Or buy up almost everything you see and try to combine, choosing a strategy on the go with interesting bundles. Or you can roll in search of certain characters and spend gold on it, or actively pump in the level to increase the rarity of the falling heroes and the limit of heroes on the board. Coupled with the synergy at all other levels, all this creates a huge space for experimentation and searching for optimal ways of development within the session.
Fuad Kuliyev, producer at R&D Wargaming and founder of Lesser Evil Games studio
Dota Auto Chess is very close to board games in the deck building genre. I love this genre and, as I noted above, I am sad that it is little represented in other formats. Previously, among the exceptions, it was worth mentioning only last year's Slay the Spire.
Dota Auto Chess is an almost perfect adaptation of such projects. On the one hand, it has retained the core, the basic mechanics of games of this genre. With another —
I supplemented it with aspects that are possible exclusively for video games.
In a nutshell about deck building games. Despite the similarity in the name to the process of collecting a deck in collectible card games, this is not about that.
Deck building games imply that the process of collecting a deck is part of core gameplay, not meta. That is, the deck is assembled and modified right during the game.
The latter, in fact, happens in Dota Auto Chess, if you count a squad of heroes as a deck. At every moment of time, the player makes decisions: whether to play a global strategy, collecting a deck that corresponds to his image of the ideal, or solve momentary problems by buying that warrior over there, because stupidly there are no tanks.
Alexander Pashin, producer at Amphibia Volantis
It's not worth copying something from Dota Auto Chess directly. It makes sense to make a clone here only in one case, if you have a strong brand, a franchise. Something of the Fortnite level. If you have a small studio without the possibility of attracting astronomical budgets, you will not be able to take a lot of things "on a pencil".
For this reason, if you cling to anything, it's not to the game as a whole, but to its approaches, to design, to balance, and well-adapted mechanics. That is, to how cleverly the authors of the game connected the mechanics of the buttler and the mechanics of conditional poker.
So it is worth first of all looking at the conceptual solutions in which the player:
- each move can acquire a limited number of pieces, from which it must build combinations within one session;
- he can plan his actions (buying units, pumping them and pumping inventory) due to the fact that he sees the figures and the progress of other participants in the session;
- He must take into account the class, race and specialization of units when planning if he wants to maximize the effect of the deck;
- He must take into account and calculate the luck factor, since the distribution of cards is probabilistic.
What are the main problems of Dota Auto Chess right now in terms of design?
Artur Mostovoy, producer of Azur Games
1. Onboarding
In addition to a small FAQ on the mod page, a comic book of four pictures at the start and a table with heroes (the button should also be noted), the game does not teach you much (I'm talking about the original Dota Auto Chess). This can be a high entry threshold for players who are not ready to study and search for information on their own, as well as for some kind of suffering at first.
2. Opacity of the mechanic
Without practical tests, it is not entirely clear what to expect from certain things and elections. For example, how do units move around the game board — why does someone jump behind their back, and someone rushes ahead? Or what is the attack distance of both the heroes and their skills? By what logic do they apply them? What is the principle of choosing goals, and so on. For some, this is an interesting mystery and a subject of thought, like the unsaid ent in Dark Souls, and someone will turn around and leave.
3. Balance and economics
The project is quite fresh, and this is an expected moment. Some heroes or items are not yet fully balanced and may be stronger than others no matter what, but they are cheaper at the same time. Somewhere, the random effect may be too strong — for example, in the very principle of dropping objects. This may make it seem that your influence on the game is lower than you would like.
4. Engine Limitations
Dota Auto Chess is a mod, so technical and technological limitations are predictable, but not all players approach this with understanding. For example, the gameplay is controlled by a special courier unit from Dota 2, whose skills carry out the actions necessary for the player. It feels a little clumsy. Sometimes the combat mechanics are bad and strikes may not take place or targets may be randomly re-selected, from which there is a risk of draining the round and then sitting, bombing in misunderstanding.
Fuad Kuliyev, producer at R&D Wargaming and founder of Lesser Evil Games studio
First
A very long game session. In other cases, it can take up to an hour. It's a killer long time for such an almost casual game. At some point, the player may wonder, after estimating the amount of time drained into the game, whether he is playing the right Dota.
Second
A very high level of randomness. It is clear that casual gameplay is formed due to it. However, in the game it can sometimes reach the point of absurdity when on one board the team of Player A blows the team of Player B dry, and on the other board everything happens the other way around due to the successful achievement of goals for the abilities of units.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that units fall out to players by chance, artifacts fall out by chance, targets for attacks from units are random, many units also move by chance, and so on.
Because of this, the strategy in the game often does not work, which upsets many.
Alexander Pashin, producer at Amphibia Volantis
The game has two big problems.
The first is the length of the session. Auto Chess can be called hardcore primarily due to the fact that it requires a lot of time, even within just one session.
Even when playing the mobile version, a user who did not lock up the game at the beginning is almost guaranteed to spend 30 minutes on the project. For top players, the session can easily take up to 40 minutes.
The second problem is monetization. The game is based on an equal chance of victory for all participants in the battle. For this reason, any classic monetization, where you can strengthen your units for money or get some kind of bonus, will instantly break the gameplay.
The only possible option for the team is to sell skins, avatars, chat emotions, and so on.
This is an understandable strategy, but it works in games only under one condition: if the game has a very large number of users, if the game is very popular. If there is no constant organic influx of users, the team will not earn anything.
Drodo Studio, unfortunately, does not take into account the experience of Riot Games. League of Legends is built on the sale of skins, but in the game at the start you can buy consumables for runes, which will give a small boost in the speed of gaining experience. There are also regular promotions in the game that work well for monetization.
Teamfight Tactics from Riot Games
Will the mechanics of the game become popular outside of the Dota party?
Artur Mostovoy, producer of Azur Games
There is every chance of that. Already, this trend is being reinforced by articles on resources like VentureBeat and the allocation of the mod to a separate section on Twitch. At the end of April, the project had 11,000 viewers, which is slightly less than Apex Legends and Overwatch. At the same time, Auto Chess has overtaken the recently released Sekiro and one of the popular shooters Rainbow Six Siege. And the good starting figures of the project have already led to the presence of a dozen low-quality clones on mobile platforms. The appearance of high—quality clones of the project, adaptations, or even an official transfer to mobile with its huge audience is a matter of time.
If we analyze it, the advantage of doters here for the most part is that you do not need to download the Dota 2 client. Auto Chess itself will still have to be downloaded inside the client. In this case, this is the specifics of modding and in a hypothetical individual product, the issue is resolved automatically.
You don't need to be able to play Dota 2 to learn how to play Auto Chess. The connection with the characters and objects from the game is formal (several thousand hours spent in Dota 2 do not really help in Auto Chess, I speak from my own experience).
It is impossible to say what parameters and skills each individual character has with the most successful application without playing, except to roughly assume the archetypes. However, this can also be done by visual perception.
The recipes of the items are partially inherited, but the parameters are slightly different, and the items work differently taking into account the autoboy, so you still learn almost from scratch.
Fuad Kuliyev, producer at R&D Wargaming and founder of Lesser Evil Games studio
Now yes. Moreover, as I have already said, deck building in different versions begins to sprout in game development.
If we talk specifically about the variation of mechanics proposed by Dota Auto Chess, then, I'm afraid, everything has already become clear. The flywheel has been launched, and three major variants of Dota Auto Chess (Auto Chess from Drodo Studio, Dota Underlords from Valve and Teamfight Tactics from Riot Games) will make the mechanics popular regardless of whether it is worthy or not.
Alexander Pashin, producer at Amphibia Volantis
It's easy if the developers of new games within this niche understand: you can't directly copy the original product.
For success, it will be enough to competently rethink the proposed poker mechanics with a large amount of combinatorics, simplify it, and reduce the number of players within the session.
Chess Rush by Tencent
Three tips for a developer who is just about to get to know the game and figure it out.
Artur Mostovoy, producer of Azur Games
The first tip
The best way to figure it out is to play and look at everything from the inside. So go ahead, download the Dota 2 client. Did you ever think that this fate would befall you?
The second tip
The project is not that rich in features, as far as it can be generally true for a mod. But pay attention to what things outside of core gameplay the developers chose to add to Auto Chess first and what they are working on in the updates. Guess why.
The third tip
The main thing is, don't start playing Dota 2 itself. Analyze publicly available or at the decomposition level metrics and evaluation tools — CCU and installations, videos and views, ratings and what is written in the review, the duration of the session and especially how it changes as the understanding of the game grows.
Fuad Kuliyev, producer at R&D Wargaming and founder of Lesser Evil Games studio
The first tip
Collect different combinations of races and classes all the time, fight the desire to repeat past success.
The second tip
Pay attention to the abilities of the heroes and their influence and mechanics, how even a basic tidehunter or kunka can change the result.
The third tip
Keep an eye on how other players' builds change as the game progresses, depending on which combination of races/classes is redeemed or sold back.
Alexander Pashin, producer at Amphibia Volantis
The main thing to pay attention to is how many aspects and exactly how the game requires the user to keep in mind at the same time.
The first aspect is working with gold inside the session
In Auto Chess, cash flow management is implemented very coolly. The player either saves money in the account, but then he creates a deck more slowly and pumps it more slowly, or the player immediately spends all the money on cards, but thereby receives a penalty to the number of the squad.
The second aspect is tracking the actions and decks of other players
The game can be called poker in the open. The player sees which decks the opponents are forming, which units they are buying. This provides great opportunities for developing a strategy.
The third aspect is building a combination of units in your hand
Units in Dota Auto Chess are complementary to each other. There are races, there are classes. You should understand that you definitely need tanks / dd / supports on the field (although there are also mono-codecs on the same knights, for example), and units of the same race to activate their bonuses. This is an additional combinatorics that is very layered.
The fourth aspect is the location of units on the battlefield
It is typical for battlers, there is nothing complicated or original about it, but it is worth considering, because, all things being equal, it is crucial.