Death of a Game: DOTA Underlords

Great video - I kinda keep forgetting about Underlords - even though at the time of early access I REALLY liked it. I think the strongest mechanic was the dopamine hit of trying to combine heroes and complete alliances...

Which is why I think the direction it went in just flopped, the whole Underlord element just didn't really fit with what people were playing the game for - it seemed Vampire Survivor games have taken on the niche that AutoChess had.

Also IMO it started looking fine, easy to follow to looking quite ugly, and difficult to manage, there were too many 'bits' and everything was high res and tiny. I can't remember if it was the 1.0 release or a major update that did that but it just sucked the fun right out of it.

In short Riot >>>>>>> Valve

The Underlord units took the fun out of the game and that's where most people stopped playing, me included, instead of just fixing it and getting the game back to where it was and improving it, they just abandoned the game. It's pathetic. Huge letdown.

F

As a DOTA player since my early teenage years and unable to keep up, Underlords not updating has been a bit of a blessing. Still playing daily.

This is so sad to me. Underlords was my dear. While tft had cutesy penguins and auto chess had chibis, underlords had so much lore and personality it hooked me for months on end. Sad it had such a history

I didn’t even realize underlords died. I was debating trying it again since I’ve been binging TFT.

2nd change with Underlords ended it for me... :( got too complicated after that

I still enjoy the game casually until now. I cant believe I still play this game tbh. Valve gave up too soon.

Based on what metric do you call Dota 2 the biggest MOBA internationally? Because any given region of LOL individually has by far more players than Dota 2 in its entirety. By now these 2 games are so far apart that Dota isn't even considered a competitor anymore.

Wasn't TFT before Underlords? Underlords went into Early Access the same month TFT released.

riot had just the so much better game it was never close xD TFT was a landslide

TFT just blows out every other autochess, no contest

sad because I first played dota chess in the dota 2 client because im a dota player, I reached Big Boss in underlords but eventually had to admit the game was dead even though I bought the battle pass

Dota Underlords still a good game, just needs new updates

I STILL PLAY IT UNTIL NOW.

the auto battle genre even got to Clash - they made Clash Mini!

I learned never to trust Google and Valve on new products/ip. They gonna abandon it sooner or later

Man, wish I could have talked to you on this video some. I ran UPL Esports which ran a bunch of high tier tournaments for underlords. Great video.

One things you nailed on the head. My perception of valve changed significantly for the worse when the just abandoned this. Imo their auto battler was much better than the competition imo.

We know why Dota didnt get any update cause almost all the devs of valve are working on CS2

fun but complicated

whoever came up with releasing the Underlord Heroes made a huge mistake, hahaha that caused the death of the game, its no more the Auto chess that everyone initially loved

Why does Riot keep beating Valve in its own game? The answer is really simple. It's all about Riot's massive playerbase. You can easily hop on any of their games and you will have a minimum 1 minute of waiting time. Also they have a lot of newbies playing the game which means you won't get intimidated to try playing the game even if you just started playing. I played TFT a few days ago and I had opponents match up to me on my level. Of course if you play during night time you increasing have more hardcore players to compete with.

Riot has developed a lot of mini games, spin off games and other league based games and they are passionate about it. This keeps the player base and reach out to new players who are completely new into the League Universe or people who dont want to play league but love the lore/characters. Meanwhile Valve has completely abandon games that dont make them money instead of making the game more interesting. They cant hold on to the players.
If you make this comparison Dota2 players just keep saying 'dota2 prizepool' lmao your prizepool keeps your pro players but not you.

all these auto chess just can't compete to TFT
fcking TFT has sets and mid sets where they change the heroes and meta

Auto Chess was the beste game ever. My friends and I meet every weekend drinking beer and playing one after one autochess and everyone was watching the other and was hyped

Needed more innovation in a small genre, especially since they kept the same unit roster everyone was already bored with.
The Underlords were OK (and controversial), but launching with only 2 felt really thin.
Compare to TFT who had a totally new & fresh roster & synergies at launch or Hearthstone BGs which had a radical spin on the genre.
Stale content vs. TFT constantly periodically rotating content
Underlords' "Jail" system which randomly banned units each day showed they knew this was a problem, but then they removed that feature. And content subtraction without content addition feels bad.
Didn't leverage their DotA client, instead making an isolated standalone client
TFT being hosted in the League client & riot launcher is tons of "free" advertising.
Worse IP & Art/Visual Direction vs. LoL
Dota2's bootleg warcraft III art still sucks and the VFX design is worse than LoL

atypically, this is not the case of Valve doing something very wrong - it's just that TFT was so much better in every aspect

It's weird that they had a steady player base of between 3-5k players, and they just got bored and didn't want to upkeep it. That's typical Valve style, and why live service type games is not really their thing.

I preferred M&M Chess Royale anyway...

The game was great, the first season was actually also great, some of the best monetization for players I've seen in awhile. You could get more for free then you couldn't. The game was fine, the only reason it died is it didn't meet the insane imagined player numbers of Valve, that's it.

I really love Valve's artstyle

Of course I didn't know about Auto Chess, the devs decided to make it a god damn epic exclusive lol

I love dota underlord. If it was still updated at the rate it was in 2019 I would be playing it all the time.

Almost 1k hours into this game, mostly because I'm a hopeless valve fanboy.

Valve hasn't had passion since half life 2

TFT better

it was fun while it lasted. the duo mode was really good, me and my buddy played a LOT till we finally reached top 10. sadly you cant find a game anymore in duos in a decent time. you have to search for half an hour at minimum now :(

I didn't even know Blizzard did it too, lmao

In hindsight, Valve should have partnered with Jodo Studio instead of competing with them.

It's still the best game in the genre, despite having no update for 2 years.

I even still play this game on mobile its fun and the offline content is good

I remember getting this game shortly after early access launch, and having fun with it...for a week or two...and then I got bored and moved on pretty soon after.

Don't forget Tencent also put TFT into the league of legends client, with a constantly flashing yellow dot to get people to click on it just to make it go away for a couple days before it inevitably comes back.

I think the most telling thing for why TFT had more energy and innovation behind it is how it came to be according to the devs. It was riot devs that simply loved auto-chess who said "Can't we do this in League?" and then they did. It feels like Valve missed that spark and without it the success needed was dying down too quickly leading to corporate decision to shelf it.

All the voice acting in the world just couldn't against DUDUDUNGA

VALVE is overrated as hell as games go. Steam Deck is a good product though