Game Details Developer: Blizzard

Platform: PC (reviewed), Mac

Release Date: June 2, 2015

Price: Free-to-play, microtransactions

Links: Official website Blizzard: PC (reviewed), MacJune 2, 2015: Free-to-play, microtransactions

The "MOBA" genre is a tough arena to break into—old and new game makers alike want in on the budding five-on-five online-battle genre, but they have to contend with deeply entrenched juggernauts Dota 2 and League of Legends. So when Blizzard Entertainment—the developers responsible for their fair share of juggernauts, including World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, and Hearthstone—decided to make a MOBA move with this summer’s Heroes of the Storm, the result seemed like a real immovable object and unstoppable force situation.

Blizzard’s greatest strength, for the last 20 years, has been its ability to move into a genre and dominate it using two consistent strategies. Its games have consistently high production values, and its games are accessible in every way possible. The former is certainly present in Heroes of the Storm—which looks and plays great— but the latter is more important. For Blizzard, “accessible” means easier interfaces, lower required technical specifications, and a design philosophy aimed at ensuring the player constantly has something fun to do.

I’ve long been interested in the MOBA genre, thanks to its combination of strategy game-style controls and sports-like positions and improvisation, but my previous attempts to get into the genre had been cut short by unfriendly players and game mechanics. It’s hard to enjoy a competitive game where people are screaming at you for not immediately having the skill to keep up, or where the game itself offers very little encouragement and teaching. But Blizzard’s history of making their games accessible instantly piqued my interest—and now I’m fully invested in Heroes of the Storm.

Here’s how Blizzard made this game more accessible—and why it has a chance against the two-headed monster that is Dota 2 and LoL.

Dubloons, matey!

























































Like other MOBA games, Heroes of the Storm puts you in control of a single hero, then matches you with four other heroes with differing skills. The object of any five-on-five match is to destroy an enemy team's base while protecting your own, and players have three lanes they can take to advance upon their enemies. Like other MOBA games, you have a variety of hero classes to choose from, each with their own strengths, maneuvers, and weaknesses, along with a whole bunch of enemy minions that continually appear for players to hide behind (if they're allies) or easily defeat (if they're not).

The most immediate thing you’ll notice about Heroes of the Storm, compared to other MOBA games, is the stress it places on specialized maps. As of this article's publication, the game has a rotation of seven battlegrounds, each with its own mechanics that can swing a match. In general, every two or three minutes, something happens on the map that forces players to respond. In Cursed Hollow, you chase down a tribute in order to take down the enemy team’s defenses, while in Blackheart’s Bay, you collect coins—er, dubloons—that can be cashed in for an artillery assault on enemy structures.

For beginners, this is great; instead of being confined to a lane, Heroes consistently provides you with a clear, simple alternative strategy—trying to fulfill the map mechanics is rarely a bad idea, so go for it! Still, the constant strategic issue of a Heroes of the Storm match is how much to split up, and how much to stay with your team. Gather experience on your own? See if you can sneak a map mechanic? Join up with one teammate and recruit nearby mercenaries? Or join the whole team, wipe out the other team, and take the map mechanic in one big push? The relative simplicity in terms of focus, combined with the map mechanics, leads to the core strategic tension of Heroes—stick with the team or split up and try to accomplish more at once?

This focus on strategic and tactical decisions is supported by a second set of major changes from most MOBAs: the removal of frustrating, inaccessible interface quirks. The two big ones are that there’s no “creep score” or need to last-hit enemy minions, and that character customization is streamlined into picking a talent every couple of levels, instead of a confusing item shop. Both of these mechanics were parts of Dota and Dota 2 that I totally bounced off of—they seemed unnecessarily complicated effects of Dota’s history as a Warcraft 3 mod, instead of game mechanics I’d actually enjoy.

There’s a trade-off here between customization and accessibility, but Heroes still offers a significant amount of character development. For example, I build my Kerrigan—a melee assassin who leaps at and pulls enemy characters to her—in a way that accents her mass damage. I improve the range and radius of her attacks, and make it so she hits multiple enemies at once. This way, she can wipe out mercenaries and minions much faster than most other characters, and do more general damage in a team fight. Many of the skills synergize with one another—or with other characters, as with Valla (Diablo 3’s Demon Hunter), who can take a skill that does more damage to disabled enemies. If her teammates can stock up on stuns, that’s great for her.

Meanwhile, laning—the traditional basis for play in other MOBAs—isn’t rendered useless by these changes. You still get experience points from beating up minions, and especially in the early game, it’s sometimes more effective than aiming for hero kills. But this becomes another interesting strategic choice—as it becomes less useful, when should you switch to fighting heroes or chasing mercenaries?

Welcome back, Lost Vikings!

Heroes of the Storm also works to limit one of the toughest issues facing MOBAs and competitive multiplayer: potentially poisonous social environments. It does a few minor things, like limiting chat to only your team and not your opponents. The biggest change in terms of game mechanics, however, is that you only have team-based experience and not individual leveling. Everything everyone does goes into the same pool, so it usually takes an especially bad game from a player (or an especially nasty person) to totally ruin a match.

Its status as a sort of “Blizzard All-Stars” also helps with Heroes of the Storm’s immediate appeal. Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft are three immediately recognizable game series, and that’s in large part to their colorful batch of characters. Returning to Warcraft 3 characters like Jaina and Arthas over a decade later feels good—and non-RTS characters like the Diablo-ites fit in surprisingly well, especially Johanna, the Crusader from Reaper of Souls.

There are also a few surprisingly strange and varied characters that alter the focus of any match. Murky, a Warcraft Murloc, is fragile, but immediately respawns after death if you kill his egg. The Lost Vikings (the only hero from outside the main Blizzard triumvirate, sorry, Superman) play like real-time strategy characters, with three weaker individuals who can be split up and targeted separately. The Starcraft Zerg character Abathur hides in the back and rarely fights directly but can piggy-back on other heroes and minions to give big combat buffs—it can be hard to read a match that includes Abathur, as he can pop up and swing a duel without any notice.







Unfortunately, it can be difficult to acquire or see some of the characters in action, thanks to Blizzard’s pricing and unlocking methods. (It’s worth noting here that Blizzard’s accessibility goals have rarely led to super cheap games—like Nintendo, they tend to view themselves and their games as premium products.) Heroes of the Storm feels expensive, with most characters and skins costing up to $15. All of the characters can be unlocked using the game’s free gold system, but it’s unsurprisingly rather stingy. Blizzard cycles seven characters for free each week, but this tends to mean that you see the same heroes over and over in normal quick matches. As the game and its community matures, this should become less of an issue—but it’s still annoying to see everyone trying and failing at Zeratul or Illidan in the same week.

I’ve been playing Heroes of the Storm for a few months now, and I’m finding myself still quite happy with it. I’m still regularly encountering new depth or breaking through with a new character, and I can play for hours in a row or just log in to make sure I’m not missing a daily quest. For this one-time beginner, Heroes of the Storm was exactly the accessible gateway it promised to be.