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A place for me to post my thoughts on games, mostly digital ones.


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Dota Auto Chess; Apex Legends

This post is about two things that have recently become very big in the gaming space.

Dota Auto Chess

screenshot of dota auto chess Official site

This free mod for Dota 2 (also free) exploded in popularity at the beginning of this year. It’s made by a Chinese development studio which might explain some of the strange linguistic choices.

First, the premise: 8 players are matched together, each on their own little island with a chessboard in the centre. The game proceeds in rounds, during which 1) players receive income 2) players can buy ‘chesses’ (game pieces, based on Dota 2’s heroes; I’ll refer to them as heroes from now on because it’s consistent with Dota terminology) and 3) the players’ islands are invaded, and whatever heroes they have on the board automatically fight the invaders, hopping around the board and launching attacks. The first few rounds are against fixed NPC invaders, but soon the invading army will be a copy of one of the other players. Beating the invaders gives you gold; losing costs your avatar health. Lose all your health and you’re out of the game.

If none of this sounds like chess, you’re right – the name is not at all related to what’s happening.

This is one of those games that necessitates a lot of digressions and parentheticals, similar to Dota 2 itself. Every apparently simple aspect has a bunch of complications beneath the surface. For example, buying heroes: each round, 5 randomly-selected heroes are available for each player to buy. However, this random selection is made from a pool that’s shared among the players, introducing an indirect drafting mechanic: if multiple players pursue the same strastegy, they might prevent each other from executing it well by snatching key pieces away from each other. Further, the selection of 5 can be ‘re-rolled’ - but this costs gold, so you could be spending resources to get more choices, only for the new set of 5 heroes to be useless to your strategy. Finally, you can only fit so many heroes on the board, so you want them to have maximum impact, but you can increase the number you can use on the board by spending gold but you might want to spend this gold on increasing the level of the heroes you already have. So, how do you increase a hero’s level? Buy 2 identical copies, drag them onto the board and they merge into a single, stronger (‘two-star’) copy. If you manage to amass three two-star copies of a specific hero, you can then merge them into a single three-star superhero.

This only scratches the surface of everything to concern yourself with. Some more aspects: you earn 10% (rounded down) interest over unspent gold; you get team-wide bonuses for having more heroes with the same race or class; different classes behave differently (e.g assassins leap to the rear of the opponent’s formation as their first move); there are strong area-of-effect stuns; there’s heroes that summon minions; heroes’ abilities cost mana, but mana is mostly only gained by taking damage so you might actually want your spellcasters on the front-line. The list goes on.

In other words, on top of the relatively simple gameplay loop of buy, place, fight are a plethora of systems that appear to have struck the right people at the right time. And this timing is expecially interesting to me because it coincides with the launch and almost total flop of a game that also operates in the turn-based, hard to master space, but with vastly more resources behind it: Artifact, Valve’s digital card game, co-designed with Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: the Gathering. Artifact deserves a post of its own, one I hope to get to soon, but the contrast between the two game’s arcs is stark. It’s hard to say how great the impact of the required initial investment is (Artifact costs $20 out of the gate) but there definitely are a lot of potential lessons here. Seeing some of my favourite game streamers switch from Artifact/Magic/Hearthstone to Dota Auto Chess has been fascinating to watch, especially since the game is so hard to follow without studying up a bit.

I think the most important lesson is that a nonsensical interface and obtuse mechanics are not necessarily a barrier to success, because Dota Auto Chess is incomprehensible to play at first as well as to watch. In this, it is very similar to Dota 2, which might contribute to players’ willingness to bear with it. It seems that in rare cases, if the pay-off in terms of interesting gameplay is sufficient, complexity can be fine. In the boardgame space, Gloomhaven’s success also indicates this to me.

Apex Legends

screenshot of apex legends Official site

Another free-to-play game that’s become massively popular in a very short time is Apex Legends. It’s the latest entry in the Battle Royale genre - games in which a fixed number of players parachutes from an airplane onto a map, with the last one alive crowned the winner. The genre’s first breakthrough was with Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, based on several iterations of mods for the ARMA 3 FPS. This mostly-realistically styled game was then surpassed in popularity by Epic’s Fortnite, which added rather odd construction mechanics (you can build a whole tower in instants as long as you’ve spent some time gathering crafting materials) and a saccharine cartoonish art style to make the game seem safe for children to play. And now, with remarkably little pre-release leadup or hype, Respawn Entertainment released Apex Legends to instant success, clocking in at 15 million players already, with as many as 2 million playing at once.

Respawn Entertainment was formed by Jason West and Vince Zampella (previously famous for leading Infinity Ward, the developer of the perennial Call of Duty series) after being removed from their own company by Activision under extremely acrimonious circumstances after the massive success of CoD: Modern Warfare.

Before Apex Legends, Respawn released Titanfall 1 and 2, FPS games in which the players can also ride giant robot suits into battle. While critically lauded, neither of the games were smash hits. Besides Titanfall 2’s single player campaign, especially the player mobility and gunplay were praised, and those two aspects are also very well done in Apex Legends. The game is set in the Titanfall universe, though that’s not all that noticeable if you’re not familiar with the setting.

One of Apex Legends’ main innovations is that it always attempts to place player sin three-man squads, and then supports nonverbal team communication to an unprecedented amount through automatic character vocalisations and an extremely well-done smart-ping system. When you point your crosshairs at anything in the world and click the ping button, your teammates will get a notification about whatever you clicked, including a message spoken by your character. Usual examples include telling your team where useful items are lying out in the world, suggestions on what route to take, or where you’ve spotted an enemy. To make this system work as well as possible, the developers stated that they forced their team to play-test with randomly-generated names and voice communications turned off for a significant chunk of time until they were satisfied that the system worked.

I cannot overstate how refreshing it is to play an online shooter that doesn’t immediately make me hate my fellow players. I also adore the game’s aesthetics, which remind me of a less over-the-top verison of the Borderlands look: slightly cartoony quasi-realism with watercolour world. Finally the cast of characters from whom players can pick are charming and diverse, with mostly upbeat commentary. All in all this is probably my favourite multiplayer shooter since Team Fortress 2.

Written on February 16, 2019