In early 2019, Dota Auto Chess single-handedly invented a new genre that every MOBA developer wanted to copy. Auto Chess took the fun characters from MOBAs and put them into a much more accessible high-level strategy game. It was a light-hearted time waster and it didn’t take hundreds of hours of practice to get good at it. As the Auto Chess designers broke away from the limitations of their Dota 2 custom game, Valve built Dota Underlords, Riot launched Teamfight Tactics, and Tencent took multiple shots on target. But if you strip away the graphical differences between these games, they are usually indistinguishable.
The formula never changed much, which may be why autobattlers faded almost as quickly as they appeared. But they’re not dead yet: Two Dota 2 casters have built a new autobattler custom game that has caught the attention of the Dota community. If it were a standalone game, Ability Arena (opens in new tab) would have consistently been in the top 100 games on Steam for the past week.
Ability Arena started its journey when Shannon “SUNSfan” Scotten, a top caster of Dota 2 and one of the developers behind Ability Arena, found that after playing Atomic War, another popular autobattler-custom game, he became genuinely annoyed by some of the the mechanics, and wanted to do something about it.
“I came to realize that it was just their design choices [I didn’t like]Scotten says. I was so upset that I had to make another version of this game. But of course it had to be unique enough to stand on its own.”
This led Scotten to come up with a basic idea for Ability Arena: in most autobattlers you build synergy between units of the same or complementary classes, but in his design you instead try to build incredibly powerful combinations of Dota 2 spells to build upon. to make. your units. The only other synergies you need to worry about come from the God you play that gives a unique bonus to a unit or your entire team – and of course how you position your heroes. Scotten took the idea to fellow caster Andrew “Jenkins” Jenkins.
(opens in new tab)
“I had this fantasy to make games and have people test them and watch them fall for our pitfalls and enjoy them,” says Jenkins. “Like when you design something in a way that people find out they can combine with this thing, and then you see someone actually do that without you telling them. That’s the kind of thing I wanted to do and I think that [Scotten] shared the same vision or fantasy.”
Neither was a total newcomer to the development world, with Scotten having made a few slightly successful custom games and Jenkins having a keen interest in game design. But the chances of a new autobattler taking off were slim.
The pair recruited a small team to carry out their vision and had a playable version of Ability Arena ready within three months. They opened it up to a private testing group, but around this time they ran into a small problem: their version of the tried-and-true class system that every other autobattler… has had.
“We had a class system early in alpha called Elements where each spell had its own element, and when you got tired of it you’d have some kind of buff,” Scotten says. “We had that internally for a month and people hated it so much. Having elements actually made it too complex.”
Ability Arena was too hard to understand with Elements added at the top. Currently, each spell in Ability Arena has two upgrades, the highest level of which is known as a ‘Gaben’ in tribute to Gabe Newell. With 150 basic spells in play, there are a total of 450 variations, which is hard enough to learn. Mainly if you haven’t played Dota yet. When you added in to figure out Elements, another whole system, Ability Arena became so complex that players took huge planning time between rounds.
It was “unplayable”, according to Jenkins, and in the end they made the decision to remove the Elements feature. They again focused on choosing and upgrading spells, much like the popular Ability Draft game mode in Dota, where instead of choosing a hero, you draft four skills from a shared pool at the start of the game.
“The Elements talk, man, I lost so much sleep over that,” Jenkins says. “We had to choose: do we want to be like a regular autobattler, or do we want to turn to the design side of things? And we felt like there was no point in just being a better Atomic War, because people already like that game. People already love Auto Chess. We need to do something different. We didn’t want to be like the damn Spritz Up from Sprite.”
This shift to focus purely on the Dota spells makes Ability Arena feel very different from any other autobattler. While the ingrained supposed knowledge makes it very difficult for non-Dota players to learn, there’s an upside: with 150 spells to choose from, it feels like there are this much more feasible strategies than in other autobattlers where you often only have 15 classes to combine.
It’s this variety that really makes Ability Arena stand out. I almost always try to mine every mechanic when I play a new game (I played Stardew Valley for three in-game years just growing berries to get as much money as possible before I even spoke to half the village), but it feels impossible to do that effectively here. With so many possibilities and the nature of almost every Dota spell with some sort of counter, there isn’t one strategy to rule them all. And if luck isn’t on your side, you’ll find yourself having to rethink halfway through the game more often than in any other autobattler. Ability Arena also enables the power fantasy that every Dota player has for just one more spell combine with your others to create an unstoppable combo.
The inexperience of the two casters in development has been shown in a few areas, particularly when it comes to the monetization and progression systems. Ability Arena is free, but has a paid battle pass, much like Fortnite has become popular, and an in-game currency (gold) that can be used to unlock gods, but neither has gone down as well as the development team had expected.
(opens in new tab)
“We kind of guessed what the right numbers would be for the amount of XP you get for the battle pass and the amount of gold you get per game, and we screwed up badly, I’m not going to lie,” Scotten says. “The XP has been way too much, so people just fly through the battle pass, which we didn’t want. But they don’t earn much gold either and they don’t unlock many gods as a result.”
Fortunately, it’s just one flaw that has to do with monetization and not playing the game, which, aside from a few bugs and a few questionably balanced spells, is incredibly fun. The pair already have plans to fix most of the issues found since launching a few weeks ago, with a balancing patch now expected anytime and more gold already being handed out, although the XP changes to the Battle Pass will have to wait until the next season. The impending patch will also feature the first new content since launch, with a new god in the form of Bloodseeker and some changes to the spells.
These kinds of updates will be regular: Scotten says they have content updates fully planned for the next six months, seeing this as a long-term project that they hope will maintain its popularity for years to come.
Given its current player count, where it consistently beats both Atomic War and the original Auto Chess, and sometimes has the highest player count of any Dota 2 custom games, there’s every reason to expect Ability Arena to continue to be a success. — and maybe even give the autobattler a second wind.
0 Comments