MOBA Spin-Off Auto Chess Is… Becoming Its Own MOBA

Drodo and Dragonest, the creators of MOBA spin-off Auto Chess, has revealed it is creating a MOBA game of its own, similar to League of Legends and Dota 2.Announced in a tweet, Drodo’s MOBA approach appears to be fairly conventional of the genre, but it will feature some refinements such as the ability to destroy objects such as trees on the map, adding an extra layer of micro-level tactics to the game.

#AutoChessMOBA: The Auto Chess themed MOBA game with ALL HEROES FREE

Chess characters from #AutoChess will become heroes in the MOBA game!

Features: all heroes free, no paid runes, day and night version system, destructible objects pic.twitter.com/dN7utBNgxp

— Auto Chess (@AutoChess2019) January 9, 2021

According to Drodo, all heroes will be free when the game launches, and players won’t have to pay for runes. This is in the interest of fairness; Drodo believes individual players having different hero pools is unfair, and so granting all players all heroes for free makes the game fair. Those heroes will, naturally, be adapted from the chess piece characters in Auto Chess.

Have you played Auto Chess?

YESNO

Auto Chess itself started life as a mod within Valve’s Dota 2, which became so popular that it was spun out into its own game. Valve then created its own version of Auto Chess called Dota Underlords, with League of Legends creators Riot Games following suit with Teamfight Tactics.

Here is a more thorough breakdown of the ‘Auto Battler’ genre, to get you up to speed. Essentially, Drodo’s MOBA spin-off has become so popular that the studio is now creating a MOBA of its own, using the characters popularised in Drodo’s Auto Chess spin-off as playable heroes. What makes this quite funny is that Dota, or Defence of the Ancients, the official touchstone for MOBA’s such as League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2, started life as a popular mod for Blizzard’s Warcraft III, way back in 2003.

For more on MOBAs, Dota 2 recently made our list of the 25 best PC games to play right now.

Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.