[Review] Dota: Underlords



Dota: Underlords is a free-to-play game in the genre of Auto Battler, developed and published by Valve in an early beta stage in June 2019 running on Source 2. Underlords saw its official release on February 25, 2020, for Android, iOS, macOS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. Making it the first Valve mobile game and the first mobile game running on Source 2.

This review will focus on the lead up to the game's failure.

How do I even talk about Underlords? I have played since its invite-only beta stage, while the genre was a growing fad at the time, the same way Valve just put this game out of nowhere in less than a year it faded into obscurity, even now (the officially dead) Artifact gets a larger public recognition than Underlords.



/// The Genre

For those who can't even remember what Auto Chess even is (and I don't blame you) it started as a custom game mode for Dota 2, players would get ''pieces'' that are correspondent to a Dota 2 character, each has a passive ability and an active ability that triggers once its mana bar is full (filled by attacking enemies) and these would go on to battle other enemy pieces automatically every round.

A total of eight players would join a game and begin growing their board. Battles would be set up automatically between players and happen simultaneously, if defeated a player would take a certain amount of damage taken from its health, once depleted the player is knocked out of the game. Victories would grant gold that could be used to further buy more characters from the ''shop'' or ''leveling up'' increasing the number of pieces you are allowed to place on the board.

There are duplicates pieces and once a player gets three copies of the same character, it levels up to a 2 stars character, if you have three copies of a 2 stars character they get replaced by stronger 3 stars.

Pieces also have an ''Alliance'', when a player has a certain number of pieces of the same alliance a passive bonus would trigger, these bonuses would vary from one alliance to another, but generally included broad buffs like increased health, attack speed, or damage.

So essentially it's an automatic, gacha like, battle royale board game.



/// The issues

These are the basics, so what Underlords did differently from the Dota mod?

Well, the titular Underlords were added to the game in its official release, these would be tougher and more powerful leader characters that would be selected before the game started, the idea was so that each Underlord Character would encourage and enable different playstyles. That didn't happen if I'm completely honest.

Very quickly a meta combination of pieces would arise, with your chosen underlord not making much of an impact in your lineup. And with all players having access to the same pieces every game, guess what happened? Whoever could get their hands on the most meta pieces first won the game.

Valve would try week after week to balance and shift the meta to avoid getting stale, even coming up with a system that would break these overpowered compositions, removing a key piece from the game temporarily every day essentially disabling a lineup for 24h, that only made players angry, then it changed to a weekly rotation, that also got scrapped quickly.

The team would often directly follow player's feedback making changes suggested by the Reddit and Discord communities.

This would lead the dev team in circles. New changes would backfire, angering the players that would in turn come up with more feedback and ''fixes'' for the team that leads to more issues. And so on and so forth.

Not saying that feedback is bad, it is a vital aspect of game development. The problem is that players are good at finding issues, not solutions, and taking direct suggestions is not a good idea.

No matter what balance patch they pushed out the game would get stale either way really quickly as its systems were flawed from the start and the community involvement and misguided attempts to help would only make it worse.

There's a reason the genre never really took off, yeah Riot's Team Fight Tactics and Heartstone Battlegrounds are still around, but they remain as a side game mode of a larger whole, (at least so far) no one was able to solve the inherent issues and staleness that is present in these games. It just doesn't have the legs to stand on its own as an online live service game.

/// Conclusion

Valve monetized the game with a battle pass and promised new content and ''New season soon'' back in early 2020.

Guess what? The pandemic hit. Rumors claim that interest in the game on the part of the dev team faded, especially after the Artifact 2.0 beta got officially canceled, communications ceased, and the lead dev Adrian Finol left the team.

Its last major update was in April 2020 and the last balance and bug fix patch were in November of 2020. While Underlords still has a tiny chance, it seems that Valve pulled the plug.



''Face your doom.''
-Faceless Void



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