There are video game developers, and then there’s Blizzard Entertainment. Since its founding in February 1991 (under the name Silicon & Synapse) the California-based giant has delivered hit after hit, and far more than good sales figures – Starcraft, boosted by its expansion Brood War, is the foundational title for eSports, while World of Warcraft is the quintessential massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Last week saw the release of arena-battler Heroes of the Storm (HotS), an entry in a popular genre that – unusually for Blizzard – is also a little bit of unfinished business.

HotS is a multiplayer online battle arena (Moba), currently the biggest genre of competitive gaming in the eSports scene. The idea is simple: two teams of players, each controlling an on-screen warrior (or “hero”), face each other in a small arena and must fight using melee weapons and spells, until the opponent’s base building is destroyed.

The battlefield is split into lanes, with the armies – of exactly equal strength – marching from each side and fighting to a standstill in the middle. Dotted along the lanes are fortifications for each side – turrets, castles, walls – and in between them is terrain which the armies never enter. It is fast-paced, but highly tactical, with players able to fight directly or control AI characters named “minions” to carry out objectives. The Moba is effectively a game about momentum.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The armies meet on the three-laned battlefield, each hero offering a range of special abilities

Although HotS is Blizzard’s first official entry into the market, the developer kind of invented it. Kind of. The genre began with a player-made modification (a mod) for the company’s 2002 real-time strategy sim, Warcraft 3. Created by three fans, Defense of the Ancients (Dota) was so popular it resulted in several attempts to recreate the magic in a standalone release, the most successful of which are Riot’s League of Legends (LoL) and Valve’s Dota 2. Tens of millions play Mobas, and many millions more tune into video streaming sites like Twitch to watch them played professionally.



The genre has its own stars, its own massive global tournaments, and, of course, it’s own jargon. The minions you direct around the battlefield are “creeps”, killing them to gain experience is “laning”, and when multiple players ambush a luckless opponent that’s “ganking”.

The simple foundations can also lead to head-spinningly complex depths thanks to the range of possible heroes players can choose, all of whom have distinct abilities, and the dynamics of team play. This is not a genre for solo artists. Over the years since Dota, its successors have codified and expanded upon this foundation, to the extent that LoL and Dota 2 have extraordinarily steep learning curves and demand a significant time investment.

If this doesn’t sound too attractive, welcome to the club. “The world does not need Dota 3 from Blizzard,” laughs HotS director Dustin Browder. “They’ve got a great game that’s like that. So if we’re gonna do something it has to be fresh.” HotS began as a mod itself, designed by Browder’s Starcraft 2 team to show the potential of that game’s community tools, before morphing into a full project – but the starting point was getting as far away from today’s big beasts as possible.

“It was all about what we had played back in the Warcraft 3 days,” says Browder. “There were a tonne of Warcraft 3 mods of that ilk, not just Dota, even though that eventually became the king of that particular pack. Where did you think it was going, where did you imagine it was going? Not where it has gone. When you think from an earlier stage you get a much wider spectrum of possibilities. The limitations of Warcraft 3 meant Dota has things like recipes [item combinations] – you couldn’t add more items, there were only six item slots, so you had to do recipes. That came out of a need and a limitation. So, when we’re doing this exercise of imagining what could’ve been different, we got some much more interesting answers, and where we thought it was going was not ‘better recipes’.”

The mechanics that these limitations led to are much-beloved by the Moba crowd, and not without reason, but their absence from HotS makes it an experience that first of all feels new, as well as enjoyable and exciting from the first minute for any player. Yet despite jettisoning such baggage, HotS zeroes in on what made the original Dota work. “We loved the team fights,” says Browder. “We loved the customisation of your hero over time and the ability to grow them and make choices over a match about your strengths and weaknesses in the context of a bigger battle. We liked the way the game creates co-op play that separates you and brings you together, then separates you and brings you together again – so you know what it’s like to fight alone, and as part of a team.”

Riders on the Storm

A major part of this dynamic in HotS is that teams level up and increase in power as a team, whereas in other Mobas players level up their characters individually. The latter mechanic, again much-beloved by some, seems counter-intuitive for a team game in that it forces every player to look after themselves first. HotS initially didn’t have team experience, but what the developers saw from players convinced them that this was an essential change.

“At first on a map like Blackheart’s Bay when the treasure chests spawned you’d have people six feet away saying ‘I’m not going, you go!’ because they’re afraid to leave the lanes,” says Browder. “So team levelling just opened up the game for us, it gives a lot of opportunity for cross-lane ganking. You wanna be Zeratul and roam and see what disruption you can cause? Great. It also opened up opportunities for support-only heroes like Lili who can’t fight worth a damn, but she’s a great support when working for the team and that’s all that really matters.”

Blackheart’s Bay is one of the seven ‘battlegrounds’ that HotS currently offers, a huge departure for a genre where the most popular games have a single competitive map. “When we looked at our game we never imagined one battleground,” says Browder. “That seemed a limitation, again, of the Warcraft 3 engine – because technically modders weren’t making games, they were making maps so it had to be one map. So if you’re starting fresh, of course you do more!”

The impact in-game is obvious. Each match of HotS is given a unique spin by the individual map objectives which rewards the successful team with minor advantages that, as the match wears on, can become major. This in turn feeds into the single most important aspect of HotS: the matches are short. In other Mobas you might sit down for a game and still be there an hour later. In HotS the average match is around 20 minutes long.

“Twenty-minute matches is something we learned from Brood War, carried into Warcraft 3, and now into Starcraft II and Heroes,” says Browder. “We don’t have any proof that this is the magic number, it just feels good to us when we’re playing – five minute games you don’t really care whether you win or lose, whereas if it’s an hour maybe you care too much. Twenty minutes feels like a sweet spot, where you really want to win but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t.”

Last year’s League of Legends world championship final attracted 27m viewers, a disappointment next to 2013’s 32 million

All of the changes that HotS brings to the genre may seem minor. But consider that last year’s LoL world championship final attracted 27 million viewers, which was considered a disappointment next to 2013’s 32 million. It’s hard to make straight comparisons to the traditional sports world, because Twitch gives LoL easy access to a global audience whereas very few sporting events outside of the World Cup have comparable reach. For argument’s sake, however, in the UK, Andy Murray’s 2013 Wimbledon victory was watched by 12 million, 2014’s snooker final at the Crucible was watched by 6 million, and this year’s Six Nations showdown between England and France attracted a record 9.6 million. The point is not that Mobas attract larger audiences than traditional sporting events (Wimbledon will still be around in 50 years, whereas one imagines the same can’t be said of LoL), but that they attract such enormous audiences that any minor change to the rules is a serious matter for a lot of people.

So the minutiae leads to the bigger question of whether HotS, excellent though it is, will succeed as a spectator sport – which is undoubtedly Blizzard’s intention. Browder was, after all, project director on Starcraft II, the grandaddy of the eSports phenomenon. Is designing a potential eSport simply a matter of designing a good competitive game, or is there another layer there? “It’s a lot of the same things we did with Starcraft,” says Browder. “But this is true of all games I’d say. You want them to be clear, you want them to be simple, you want them to be deep.”

There are areas such as visual clarity, nevertheless, that are especially crucial for a game that wants to be watched on any number of screen sizes. “But when is that not the case?” Browder counters. “No developer wants their screen to look like a muddy mess. A lot of the things that work well for eSports are just good PvP [player v player] design principles to begin with. Brood War didn’t set out to be an eSport, there was no knowledge of eSports or what they would be or why it mattered. But the team set out to make something easy to learn, difficult to master, and clean and clear on screen. They made a great game. And look what happened when the community got a hold of it. Same with Hearthstone. It’s clear what’s going on – great design values.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unlike many titles in the Moba genre, Heroes of the Storm features a range of maps, requiring different strategic approaches.

HotS launched last week, and with that the development cycle didn’t end – but moves into another gear. “We’re growing the team and we’re aiming to move towards a three-week release schedule for new heroes,” says Browder. “That’s not a promise, that’s just the direction we want to go. We want to keep adding polish, new ideas, and a lot more heroes – we have 20 years of history to pull from.”

Browder’s team may have created a great game but its future depends on far more than that: Mobas are huge investments and the field is cut-throat. Only last week it was announced that Infinite Crisis, the Turbine-developed Moba starring the DC Comics roster, is being shut down a mere five months after launch. Success depends on attracting a large audience, above all else, but also on whether Blizzard transitions effectively from building the game to supporting it in an interesting way (given the company’s past form, this is very likely). It also depends on whether professional players can make a living from streaming and playing competitively.

And it depends on that most ineffable of design qualities – whether something that is fun to play for weeks and even months can somehow stay interesting over years. So far HotS has attracted both glowing praise and the odd bit of grumbling, with the latter almost entirely from fans of established Mobas. They represent an enormous, and in some sense captive, audience. “HotS offers a legitimate choice to players,” says Browder. “You don’t want to be the same as another game but the art’s different you know?”

Nevertheless you wonder if the preconceptions will hurt, whether HotS will be able to attract the playerbase it deserves, and – perhaps most important of all – whether it can pull fans from the competition. Browder simply smiles for a moment. His team’s game has been released, and as far as he’s concerned, the question’s already been answered. “We’re getting them.”

Heroes of the Storm is out now on PC and Mac