![]() Once the battle phase begins, the fighting is automatic - hence Auto Battler. The Auto Battler name comes from what happens next - your heroes duke it out against another team, and the results are determined without any input from you. The Dota 2 custom map is called Auto Chess largely for the board the game takes place on - an eight-by-eight battlefield upon which you place your team of heroes during a preparation phase. What am I playing?Īuto Battlers, or Auto Chesses - as they would be known if we stuck with calling it Auto Chess as a genre - are relatively new in the gaming world, entering the scene this year by way of Drodo's custom map on the Dota 2 Arcade, where it single-handedly reminded non-Dota players that Dota 2 exists.Īs a concept it's quite a bit older, however, hearkening back to Warcraft 3 custom maps like Pokemon Defense, which took Tower Defense and turned it into a hero-based team management game. It may cause you to lose a synergy you’ve built, but those kinds of type advantage-based decisions could go a long way to keep games exciting right up until the end.Maybe that fad will return, but it's not coming this year, because in 2019 we've got Auto Battlers like Dota Underlords, Teamfight Tactics and Auto Chess. Maybe you could roll a tier five water Pokemon in the shop in the final round and give yourself a chance to fight back. Say the player in first place is dominating with a three star Charizard. ![]() But a Pokemon game might be able to give you one last chance. If you’re at a disadvantage, finishing games can feel like a death march as your team slowly, inevitably, gets defeated. ![]() At that point, you typically will just roll your shop and hope it lands on the last few pieces you need. When a game of TFT is down to two or three players, it’s usually way too late to change anything about your team. ![]() A Pokemon auto-battler would need a similar system for creating synergies, but it could also use individual type advantages on the battlefield. If you get four different brawlers onto your battlefield, for example, all four of them will get a health and attack damage bonus. In an auto-battler, every character has an origin and a class that determines which synergies they get. One thing that no other game has experimented with before is type advantages. Related: These Franchises NEED An Auto Chess GameĬlearly, Pokemon would be a great fit for auto-battler games as we know them today, but there’s also a lot of opportunity for Pokemon to help push the genre forward. Related: Were Auto Battlers The First Video Game Fad? It’s incredibly important to learn who each character is, because when you’re quickly rolling through the shop or evaluating the damage charts, you need to know who everyone is without having to constantly reference the character models on your board. When you’re just starting out, it can be hard enough just identifying the different units and matching them to their name and thumbnail. To play competitively, you need to learn all of the characters, all of their abilities, and all of the items they can use. Like their parent genre, the MOBA, auto-battlers have an incredibly steep learning curve. Hearthstone Battlegrounds is a great example of a game that innovated on the genre, so it stands to reason that some future game could push auto-battlers forward even further. It’s probably the newest video game genre, and there’s still a ton of untapped potential in it. The point is, there is still an audience for auto-battlers. The original Auto Chess debuted on PS5 this week, and while Underlords hasn’t gotten an update since November, Team Fight Tactics gets patched with balance changes and updates almost weekly, and is only a couple of weeks away from introducing its fifth set update, Reckoning. That’s not to say Auto Chess is dead though. All three of those games came out within weeks of each other in 2019 and since then there haven’t been any new entries in the series except for Blizzard’s card-based version of the game, Hearthstone Battlegrounds. The original modder created a standalone Auto Chess game, Valve made Dota Underlords to replace it, and even Riot got in on the action with Team Fight Tactics, an auto-battler game that uses League of Legends characters. The original Auto Chess, a mod for Dota 2 that found a lot of popularity on Twitch in early 2019, spawned three different retail versions in quick succession. Related: Auto Chess Coming To PS5 With Next-Gen Enhancements On March 30Īdmittedly, the Auto Chess fad has mostly passed.
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