It's been a huge week for Heroes of the Storm. Blizzard's entry into the MOBA genre officially launched earlier this week, adding Johanna the Crusader from Diablo to the growing roster of characters. That's not all, though, as fans found out yesterday that the next big Heroes of the Storm update would venture further into the world of Diablo with the Eternal Conflict update.
Last week, Shacknews had the opportunity to catch up with Heroes of the Storm technical director Alan Dabiri. Prior to the game's launch, we had a discussion about the contents of the Eternal Conflict update, as well as some other heroes and Blizzard's overall approach to design.
Shacknews: One of the upcoming major additions to Heroes of the Storm is the new Diablo battleground, Battlefield of Eternity. What can you tell us about this map and in what ways does it differ from the other battlegrounds currently in the game?
Alan Dabiri, technical director: The first thing I would go into would be the look of it, the aesthetics of it. It's just this amazing, beautiful battleground that really gives you that sense of being in a Diablo world. Our other battlegrounds, while they've definitely had their flavor and theme to them, they've been in various places around the Nexus, this interdimensional place that we've created and they're not really the IP of our games that we've grown to love so much, so being able to be on this half-heaven, half-hell kind of map, just that in itself, you take a pause for a second and go, "Okay, this is badass."
But in terms of the actual mechanics themselves, the interesting things on this map are the immortals, really. At certain times during the map, you're going to have these immortals spawn in and they're going to fight each other. And it leads to this interesting mechanic where, at the end of the day, you need your immortal to win. So you have a couple of options. You can either go and attack the enemy's immortal and work to try and take him down as quickly as possible. Or you can try to stop your opponents, who are basically doing the same, exact thing to your immortal. It's very tight in the center there, so there's not a lot of room to maneuver. You're basically just getting into battles there all the time, so you make the decision of, "Do I go against the enemy's immortal or do I go and help our immortal?" Then we have some interesting points, where they'll actually swap places. During that swap, there's a cool animation that happens and there's this mini-team fight in the middle that mixes it up, as well. Once you actually do defeat the immortal, you have this incredible ally on your side that pushes one of the lanes. Since you only have two lanes, getting the immortal to fight for you is huge.
Some of the other things that are interesting are that the mercenary camps are a little different than what we've done before. Again, they're Diablo-themed, which is very cool. But one of them, this Fallen camp that's basically the bruiser camp, they basically resurrect parts of their push. So it's almost kind of like Heroes like Sylvanas or other specialists, where if you leave them alone, they can push a lane and wreck a lane, these mercs kind of act in that capacity. Where normally, a merc might just hit up against a gate or some towers and eventually wears down, because this guy keeps resurrecting parts of his merc camp, they can keep on going, unless you deal with them.
The siege mercs are kind of interesting, as well, in that they have three guys this time, instead of two. Also, their look is different and so is their range. Overall, it's like you're immersed in Diablo. You feel like you're part of Diablo, some different mechanics that have different elements than what we've on some of the other maps. It's just a cool experience.
Shacknews: What kind of team strategies would you expect to see used on this battleground? And are there any individual Heroes that you feel work better than others for this particular map?
Dabiri: That's the cool thing about all of these maps. Honestly, when we make them, we think of some cool strategies, like, "Okay, everyone's going to want to team fight against the immortals." Then, when we put them out, the players teach us so many cool strategies that we didn't even think about.
On this map, I think you can see all kinds of things, because you have multiple decision points. Do we actually go to the immortal fight? Because the immortal is a key part of it. It's just like any other map objective. You've got to decide, "Do I want to enage in that or do I want to push a lane?" Because you could elect to, in the case of some specialists, leave a specialist in the lane, while everybody's mixing it up in the middle, you keep on pushing a lane and you can cause some incredible damage while the immortal fight is going on. In the meantime, you're down a guy, your immortal may end up dropping, as a result. Sometimes, you can decide to just let the immortal go. That's another option, but just like in the other maps, usually if you leave a map objective and give one to the other team, a lot of times that can be very punishing.
I think there's going to be crazy team fighting. There is more time outside of the lanes, so that's another thing. Some of your main lane-pushy Heroes maybe won't excel as much in this map, because you might actually want to go to that team fight, since the immortals are so important. At the same time, the players might decide that pushing the lanes is the key thing, if they can hold off the team fight long enough. Another option is, you're not actually going to that team fight to win. You're going in to delay or minimize the damage, giving your lane pusher a chance to actually push that lane significantly, making up for whatever damage the immortal ends up doing.
Shacknews: In terms of map design, how important is it to differentiate new battlegrounds from ones that came before them?
Dabiri: It's definitely a consideration. If we keep making the same map over and over again, it's not that interesting. But at the same time, it's balance. We also need to make sure we don't change it so much that people get confused. We actually have a good variety of battlegrounds. The different battlegrounds have different mechanics that are very unique on their own and interesting. So as we're going into launch, we're still trying to keep them a little bit within the same frame of what needs to be done.
One thing we've said over and over again to the development of this game is, "You've seen nothing yet." This is truly just the beginning. We're trying to set this foundation that people can understand and then we can start to go even nuttier and go crazy, putting in all kinds of wacky stuff. Even just our first maps, when we started going away from the standard types of maps that was in the genre previously and we started adding these things, people started going, "Isn't this going to be confusing?" And now, at this point, I think we've proven through people playing the game that this is part of what makes the game interesting and fun, that each map has this different experience. It's not just the same experience over and over again.
So we would like to keep pushing that and keep going crazier each time, to see how far we can push it. We've talked before, "Hey, maybe we don't have lanes in the future. Maybe we have more lanes. We've gone two lanes, three lanes, maybe go more lanes." Mix it up, different victory conditions, whatever excites us and makes the game fun.
Shacknews: How did you approach Johanna and the Butcher from a design standpoint?
Dabiri: Every Hero that we approach... number one, we've got to be true to the lore and the character of the Hero themselves. What feels right for that Hero? There are some other aspects, though, which is, what's missing from that particular game world? If we're missing a support or melee assassin, we'll look towards that. What new mechanics do we want to introduce? Just like with the battlegrounds, we want the Heroes to be different, as well, and be interesting between different Heroes. If we use the same mechanics, it starts to get stale.
With Johanna, keeping true to this kind of crusader theme there is her trait. Her trait is just awesome, with this Iron Skin where she barrels into battle, unstoppable. It's cool, because she can do it both ways. You can either pop that, stride into battle between all of the enemies, hit Condemn, which basically pulls in all of the enemies, and set up your team to rain down AoE on that battle. And then, at the same time, she has various escapes, as well. If things are getting hot and heavy, she can use her Shield Glare to blind the opponents, so auto attacks aren't doing that much damage. Really, her theme is just about getting in and getting out, that tankiness, making it so that the opponents aren't able to do a lot of damage. She's just a fun Hero overall.
Butcher? The idea there is that, again, the cool thing about this game is just bringing out these themes and ideas that we've all grown up with and played with. Butcher, the first time you experienced him in Diablo, was just this fear moment. When he says "Fresh meat!" and he comes running out! It's kind of the approach here where we went with a melee assassin. He might ve a little bigger, you might think he'd be a little tankier. But really, it's just this thing where he's just a blood demon, he's hungry, and he's coming for you. And a lot of his abilities go towards that. His trait, with his ability to collect this meat or blood to empower him and his attack power goes up.
I really love the Butcher's Brand ability, where he basically marks an enemy and there's this dilemma with the enemy, where they go, "Hey, do I fight this guy?" When the Butcher pops this thing on, it's probably when he's lower in health. So your enemy might think he can take him and DPS him down, but meanwhile the Butcher just marked him with his Butcher's Brand, so he's going to go crazy and every one of his attacks will heal him. He's basically consuming you to restore his health. So you've got this dilemma, "Do I run? Do I DPS him down?" And the same thing with the Butcher, you can put it on someone to get them away or you can put it on someone and sit on them with your teammates and get a ton of health.
Shacknews: Let's talk about another character. How has the community received Kael'thas and do you foresee any changes for him anytime soon?
Dabiri: He's been very well-received. He's launched up to the top of the picks in Hero League, a lot of people are drafting him, he's a really exciting Hero. I think the thing that's really cool about him is that he can put out a lot of damage, but he's also super squishy, so you have to play it really careful. In terms of balance, he's in a good place, but there was one thing we fixed in a recent hotfix. Some of his talents combined with Living Bomb, kind of made a situation where you could just blow up an enemy team by himself, 5v1. If they got in a right situation with minions around and they're all bunched up, he could competely wipe out an enemy team and we thought that was a little bit too powerful.
Other than that, we think he's in a reasonable place. He is powerful, but we think he has weakness that counter that power. So we don't want to go too crazy with nerfing him or anything. For now, we just started with that one change and we'll just keep monitoring him and see how things go.
Shacknews: I'd like to jump into the eSports side of Heroes of the Storm. We just had the Heroes of the Dorm event a couple of weeks ago. It was a tremendous event on ESPN with a lot of people watching. Did you expect the audience to be so big? And what's the main takeaway that you'll apply to future events?
Alan Dabiri, technical director: It was an interesting experience for us. It was a new experience in a lot of ways. We've done eSports for many, many years. We've had major events all over the world and at BlizzCon. So we know that eSports is a huge part of our company, of all of our games, of the community. Yeah, we knew there'd be interest in it for sure, but there were some new aspects to it.
One was the collegiate aspect, which was a new thing. The community's done it, definitely, before. But for us, running it as a collegiate tournament was an interesting element. Would people be interesting in watching, basically, different rival schools play against each other in this game? And the other one was ESPN. ESPN was huge. This kind of changes the entire frame of the conversation, really. Once you're on live television with your tournament going on live, it kind of changes a lot of things. Ultimately, like you said, it was a phenomenal event. It was more successful than we could have imagined. The live audience, just being there in the room, was incredible. The games were awesome.
The secondary effect of being on ESPN, the community reaction, and all that stuff. There was this whole other thing about being on social media. The conversations that were surrounding it, it created a lot of discussions that were really interesting about our game and about eSports, in general, that I think were really cool. And that kind of helped move the whole industry forward. It was an amazing event and it definitely helped us for our future BlizzCon events, but also for events like that. Whether it's another collegiate event like Heroes of the Dorm or something else that's on live television. We've learned a ton of stuff. There was a bunch of restrictions and limitations that we had to play with, because of being on television, that we're not used to. But we're really going to explore all avenues of eSports. We're still going to do stuff that's embracing streaming on the internet. That's obviously a huge part of what we are and what eSports is and we want to keep to that, as well. But looking at these other areas, I think, can expand us to a new audience and new ways of watching the game.
Shacknews: With that said, what is your response to mainstream critics that say eSports has no place on an ESPN network?
Dabiri: **chuckles** I think that that is a debate that people will have for quite some time. Everybody has their own opinion. I think that being on television is something that, absolutely, eSports has a right to be, if you want to put it that way. I think it exposes our games and eSports to a new audience. We're in a different world. Things constantly change and the mainstream audience is embracing gaming, eSports, all of it. So absolutely, I think it's a really cool thing.
In terms of the individual critics of whether it should be on ESPN, whether it's a real sport, I think that's something people will debate forever. And I'm not truly concerned with it. It's more about what we can do for the games, the industry, and all that stuff.
Shacknews: That brings us to the launch build. What do you expect players to notice in that launch build that they haven't seen before?
Dabiri: The biggest thing, actually, is Johanna. She's a launch Hero and we've already talked about how great she is.
We've actually got a lot of stuff lined up after the launch, as well. The biggest thing being this Eternal Conflict that will shortly follow launch. It showcases the fact that launch, while it's an event and a critical milestone for us, it doesn't mean that things are over. It doesn't mean that this is everything we've got and we're done. We're going to keep on going. So while we do have content in the launch build and people will keep on... also, that's another thing, is new players who will get to experience all the stuff we've done up to now. We have so much more planned. There's so much more with Eternal Conflict, features we're working on with Heroes beyond it.
Heroes of the Storm is now available on PC as a free-to-play game.
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