The history of the MOBA genre is one of mods and iteration. The most popular and still existing games today are the result of multiple innovations and tweaks to get around copyright issues. Now there is one more absurd step in the story: the creators of Car chess make a MOBA. A Car chess MOBA is a game based game, based on a game mod, which in turn is based on a game mod.
Announced on Jan. 8, publisher Dragonest announced it would be developing a new MOBA game based on his game Car chess. At first glance, that is a fairly simple story. Go a step further and ask “what is Car chess, ”And now we’re running down the rabbit hole.
Bring things back to StarCraft and the ardent modding scene that surrounds it as well as the expansion Brood War, and you will find a game type called Aeon or Strife. It was a fairly simple game: choose a character, attack the enemy base, destroy it to win. Units would automatically spawn in designated “lanes,” imitating a sort of larger battle, where heroes fought and destroyed on the field to build up personal resources, eventually becoming powerful enough to destroy the enemy team.
Another Blizzard game, Warcraft 3, had an equally ardent modding scene, and here’s the Aeon or Strife concept would be shaped into a more recognizable comparison to what MOBAs are today: Defense of the ancients, or DotA. DotA gradually dominated the custom game scene, thanks to a range of heroes with items, special abilities and surprising depth. It was difficult to find a game The life of a farmer or Trolls against Elves amid the flood of DotA.
Like all popular genres, followers soon followed. Riot Games founded League of Legends, the enigmatic developer IceFrog went to Valve to kick things up Dota 2, and Blizzard struggled with Valve about the naming of Dota, eventually creating its own all-star MOBA heroes of the storm. There were many, many other MOBAs too, but they were most prominent and relevant to what came next.
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While the Blizzard games had inspired modding so far, Valve’s own custom games came in Dota 2 a new genre born with a mod called “Dota Auto Chess. “Instead of dashing down lanes and fighting for gold, players put units on a grid and watch their armies fight with others, combining them in a way similar to poker. It exploded in popularity and soon others were looking for their own version of what was called ‘autobattlers’.
Riot Games came out well Team fight tactics, Valve developed its own version called Dota Underlords, and Blizzard instilled an autobattler-like mode Hearthstone. The original studio that made Dota Auto Chess, Drodo Studio, now had to create its own stand-alone version, just without the resources of Dota 2– and so has made it Car chess.
Now, Car chess gets a MOBA with a day-night cycle and destructible terrain. Even when I look at the hero lineup images, I see characters that are absolutely rugged offshoots of Tusk, Slardar, and Mirana. But then Slardar is just a rough offshoot of a Warcraft Naga, and even when I’m playing Dota 2 nowadays I sometimes call Mirana ‘POTM’, or priestess of the moon, one Warcraft name.
The endless spiral down of concepts StarCraft, and perhaps even more relevant Warcraft, I find fascinating. Some of them WarcraftArchetypes are quite common in fantasy, such as the frost magician or the giant tree guardian, but now they have trickled down through multiple filters, avoiding copyright issues and intellectual property battles.
MOBAs are not entirely unique in this regard; turn to the FPS genre and you can trace the lineage from Appreciation underneath Counterattack and Half-life, or the idea of a Ryu-esque character over the years from various fighting games. Mods and iteration are how competitive games evolve, and they’ve resulted in some pretty spectacular results. (I have to believe that, or else all those hours of Dota 2 were for nothing.)
Still, I am very curious about the Car chess MOBA. How familiar will it feel? Where will certain characters remind me of them? Dota counterparts, and where will they break out of the mold? If I have one hope, it is that it will have mod support that will somehow generate a new genre craze, dragging the rabbit hole that started decades ago with a simple mod even deeper.