“It's sort of a culmination of everything that has happened in the game since launch. We have reached the point where we feel like the game is different enough that calling it 2.0 makes sense.” That’s Heroes of the Storm Lead Game Designer Travis McGeathy talking about the recent 2.0 announcement, which represents a plethora of changes coming to the game later this month. Most significantly, the popular (don’t call it a) MOBA will have its progression system overhauled, but it will now boast Loot Chests, an Overwatch-themed battleground and introduce numerous cosmetic items designed to cement the fact that you’re playing a game that celebrates all things Blizzard.
The 2.0 moniker is also a branding opportunity, of course – a convenient shorthand to drive new interest in the game and reclaim lapsed players. After all, Heroes of the Storm has seen many changes from the initial beta period until now. “There has actually been a couple of points over the past year where the community has called what we’ve done Heroes 2.0,” Travis tells me. “It's a live game and we're constantly improving it over time. We launched with a ranked version, which many refer to as the second version of the game, but we weren't happy with it so we redid it. The progression update we're talking about here is very similar. The progression system that went out the door was fine for the time, but we've kind of grown beyond that.” Timing, of course, is key and with the changes coming to the game, plus the introduction of new heroes from Diablo (Cassia, the Javazon from Diablo II) and Overwatch (ninja extraordinaire Genji), and new locations to battle in -- adding ‘2.0’ feels right.
Released in June 2015, the Heroes of the Storm story is one of evolution, change, and a game finding its voice. Going back even further than that, the earliest version of what we see today was first shown to the world as Blizzard DOTA, a showcase for the creation tools that would ship alongside StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. Naturally, it was to be a MOBA, as this is a genre that has always shared genetic and ancestral traits with high-profile RTS games, namely those coming from Blizzard. In fact, Heroes of the Storm is still being developed utilising the same StarCraft II engine from its 2011 incarnation, and with a team comprised of many talented people who worked on classic strategy titles like Warcraft III.
But that was 2011, and in the subsequent years what began as a playable game-within-a-game grew to become something so much more. Taking place in the Nexus, a fictional dimensional plane where characters from throughout the Blizzard universe can get together and battle it out, there’s a sense now more than ever that if you love Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, or Overwatch, then there is something in Heroes of the Storm for you. Or someone. “For all the different properties we have at Blizzard, Heroes is the place for everyone to come and play with their favourite heroes,” Travis explains. “And we literally have lists that are hundreds long of favourites we want to bring. So there's always a chance for somebody's favourite, no matter how strange it is, to be in there.”
That core idea, of a diverse and growing cast of heroes from the Blizzard multi-verse (where new additions happen monthly) has been there since the beginning. It’s just that Blizzard’s interpretation of the standard MOBA formula took some time, and multiple revisions, to nail down. Perhaps the moment that solidified Heroes of the Storm as a very different experience from, say, another MOBA was the introduction of themed and objective-driven battlegrounds. The team took the core mechanics of how a standard MOBA match played out and layered additional objectives on top. On a StarCraft battleground, for instance, teams scrambled to collect nukes and then fight each other to avert the iconic phrase “nuclear launch detected.” It proved to be a huge draw.
“We always want the battleground objectives to feel unique,” Travis tells me. “Even if it's a standard map where you're pushing a core, you want to make sure those objectives are doing something different each time.” With Heroes of the Storm 2.0 comes the game’s first Overwatch battleground, set in the scenic and colourful Hanamura. Perhaps the most ambitious battleground so far, it incorporates key elements from the popular shooter expertly translated, or transported, to the Nexus.
“A lot of it just starts off with just the core concept of what we’d like to do,” Travis explains. “A lot of our team plays Overwatch regularly and loves the game. So even though we're talking about Hanamura, which is not a payload map, when you think about Overwatch payloads are kind of iconic.” In the context of a MOBA a themed map may sound simple enough, but for Heroes of the Storm this drive to make each battleground feel unique lends itself to the idea that each one can feel like its own game mode. For the Hereos of the Storm version of Hanamura, with no standard path to travel in order to attack a core, both teams instead must escort and defend their own payloads in a bright, open, vibrant area. And when a payload is delivered it fires off an attack on the opposing team’s core.
Taking the payload mechanic from something like Overwatch and making it work within the context of Heroes of the Storm raised many questions for the team. Pushing to create bespoke missions and make them work is one of the reasons why the creation of a new battleground can take up to a year to develop, as a large portion of that time is devoted to testing and iterating to get closer and closer to that initial core concept. “It’s like, how do we get this mechanic in here? And more importantly, how do we make it work with Heroes?” Travis recalls. “One of the things that's very important for us are the team fights. So we had to make sure the payloads were not just going from point to point, but that you were attacking and defending them. And so we needed to make sure they crossed paths.” That process, creating the paths, ensuring they cross, and finally, setting each team’s core health to seven came from countless hours of internal testing.
The confidence to create a drastically different, at face value, experience with the new Hanamura was born from the success the team found with the original no-clear-path-to-the-core battleground, Towers of Doom. “When that battleground came out it was not a favourite, and a lot of people didn't like it. But it's evolved over time, and today it’s become a fan favourite. So, we had to embrace that approach with the payloads as well,” Travis tells me. This is a process where not giving up and “just figuring out how to make that work” drove design and development for months, and where the term ‘new map’ begins to take on a whole new meaning.
In the StarCraft-themed battleground Warhead Junction, collecting nukes to deploy on an opposing team becomes the key objective. In Hanamura you might think it would be to simply stick with or attack a payload, but even something as staple as the Mercenary Camp mechanic has been given a complete and very interesting overhaul. Now called Support, Recon, and Fortification camps, destroying the powerful robots there can reward you with stuff like limited healing abilities and best of all, a turret to place on your payload. For the Hanamura battleground in Heroes of the Storm, the core hero mechanics, team combat, and intense action is instantly familiar, but everything else points to a new and welcome addition to the Nexus.
For Heroes of the Storm 2.0 the new progression system and rewards are certainly worth celebrating, as anyone familiar with the game will know that levelling your profile, heroes, and obtaining new skins can be a long and somewhat grindy process. Or, was. As a headline ‘New Progression System!’ may not be as immediately impressive as Hanamura or the introduction of one half of the Shimada-clan, Genji, but take a peek under the surface (or inside the Loot Chest) and it’s clear that this is something that Heroes of the Storm needs, while also bolstering the things that make the game fun to play in the first place.
“We’re playing the game as well, sitting at the level cap of 40, with some of us having level 20 heroes,” Travis explains. “And there was a sense that this was a problem we needed to solve. So, you start looking at what you can do to give players frequent rewards, and well, a loot chest is kind of an obvious thing. It's the randomised mechanic that allows for pretty much infinite reward cycles.” A progression system built around rewarding the time players put in is a no-brainer, and in the case of Heroes of the Storm 2.0 this means the introduction of so many new character banners, sprays, skin variations, voice lines, and even announcers it’s an embarrassment of riches. And best of all, everyone now has the chance to get their very own Azmodunk.
For those of you familiar with the line-up of Blizzard games you might notice a few familiarities in the setup, and if you were of a certain mind you might think that a few of ideas have been copied almost verbatim from other games. But then you realise that Blizzard is one company, made up of teams that work on multiple titles that talk to each other, collaborate, and yes, even take ideas that worked in one title to see if they’ll work in another too. “Overwatch is a great example, and Hearthstone. They both do things slightly differently, so we looked at what they were doing and took a few things here and there and then added our spice to it,” Travis confesses. “But with the addition of things like the rare epic chests and hero specific chests and stuff like that it feels different. And then some of the protection on the system, so like re-rolling for gold and the protection against bad luck, for that we looked to what the Diablo team was doing.”
It’s clear that Heroes of the Storm 2.0 represents a new chapter for the game. And outside of the steady stream of new heroes and battlegrounds that the game has received over the past few years, this new approach to progression and rewarding players for their time simply amplifies the idea that Heroes represents all of Blizzard. Being able to customise a character loadout to not only shape their look but also ensure that the announcer is from the Diablo or Warcraft universe adds immeasurably to the experience. Even if it sounds minor. Travis agrees, “I think it'll be very good for the game. It's been funny, there came a point recently where internally Heroes felt so much better than when we were playing on the live servers it was like ‘Man! I wish I had all this cool stuff!’, and that's always a good place to be.”
With 2.0 still in open beta testing, the wait won’t be long. And soon enough you’ll be able to plant your banner on Hanamura with The Butcher from Diablo calling the action. Or if you’re feeling silly, the murloc announcer from the Warcraft universe - Murky.
Kosta Andreadis is an Australian musician and freelancer who tends to write about and review adventure games. He also has plenty of time for Diablo. Check out his tunes and follow him on Twitter.
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