Heroes Of The Storm
Heroes of the Storm is not just another MOBA. It's a comment on the MOBA by the company whose games inspired the genre. With it, Blizzard step into territory that is both deeply familiar and deeply alien to them: a world of chunky characters and competitive strategy that they embrace alongside a world of fathomless homebrew complexity that they don't. This is a studio that has always valorised accessibility and has lately had that belief galvanised by the striking success of Hearthstone. Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA for people who don't play MOBAs, therefore—perhaps even a MOBA for people who don't like MOBAs.
It'll be divisive for that reason, I suspect. In designing Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard have stripped away many of the ideas that previously defined the genre. Individual leveling is gone, replaced with a team-wide experience bar. Gold is gone, and with it items that boost your character's powers. Strategic drafting is gone, at least until you complete the long climb to competitive ranked play: for the majority of players, Heroes of the Storm is a game where you pick who you want to play, click 'Play', and play.
Heroes of the Storm features seven unique maps with various secondary objectives that can assist a team in their siege of the enemy base. Each of these secondary objectives serves to create interesting movement and points of conflict, thus preventing the game from devolving into poke wars or stalemates where teams are too afraid to engage with each other.
As Jim Raynor, I loved summoning a starship to slaughter enemies trapped by my teammates. Nova and Zeratul roam invisibly across each map, dealing high damage to pick off stragglers escaping the terrifying Kael’thas, who can burst down entire groups’ life bars in short order. It doesn’t matter who I play in a given match; I love these heroes in equal measure and for different reasons. I enjoyed healing allies as Tyrande because their success in battle was a result of me keeping them alive. Choke-slamming a wizard over Diablo’s head is both hilarious and a useful means of literally handing said sorcerer to your kill-hungry allies. Everyone has value, plays a core role to combat, and has a spectacular set of skills.
Fights happen early and often, with crucial map-based objectives forcing players into brutal bottlenecks consistently each round. These bloodbath engagements are exciting to watch and a ton of fun to participate in, but their eventual outcome is also the source of Heroes of the Storm’s unsettling imbalance in player power.
Doing so places you in a team of five fantasy heroes drawn from Blizzard's wide roster. Victory means pushing AI-controlled creeps from one side of the map to another along linear lanes. This means passing through the gateways, towers and fortresses that amount to your opponent's outer defenses, and when one team's core falls the game is over. Here the comparisons to other MOBAs end.
Heroes of the Storm has seven maps at present, and each of these offers a different layout and a different set of objectives. In Sky Temple, capturing shrines and defeating guardians grants your team the assistance of a building-felling laser weapon. In Blackheart's Bay, collecting coins for a ghostly pirate allows you to turn his cannons on your enemy. In Haunted Mines, the whole bottom level of the map—the titular mines—amount to a side-dungeon where you gather undead skulls to power up your team's hulking golem.
Diverse as individual objectives are, they amount to the same thing: a reason to leave your lane and fight elsewhere. Sit in one place clicking minions and you'll find yourself quickly overwhelmed as your opponent takes control of the map, and with it the neutral monsters and bosses that can be defeated and recruited to join one side or the other.
The rewards for taking the secondary map objectives are so disproportionate that they discourage laning and distract from the primary goal of sieging the enemy base. Whoever takes the objective gains an enormous advantage that dramatically accelerates them toward victory. This is true across all maps. Ignoring objectives is not an option, it’s suicide. If you disregard the Haunted Mines’ tedious skull-collecting mini-game, which happens in a separate area off the main playing field, the enemy will carve through your defensive structures like butter with a powerful golem built from the skulls you left behind. That single success grants the opposing team a nearly insurmountable increase in power and map control. In most MOBAs, this is known as “snowballing.” In Heroes of the Storm, it’s an avalanche.
Defeat in Heroes of the Storm is a special sort of painful because losing frequently feels out of your control for one reason or another. Its novel approach to leveling up is another key contributor here. Teammates level up in unison, sharing the wealth of XP earned from killing minions in a lane, destroying enemy defensive structures, or picking off an out-of-position hero. This is a razor-sharp double-edged sword.
All heroes begin with three abilities alongside a passive power (although these sometimes have an active component) and earn an ultimate when their team reaches level ten. Heroes of the Storm often feels like entering a Dota 2 match in the middle, and within a fifteen minutes you can be playing out battle scenarios that would amount to the endgame of a fifty-minute epic elsewhere.
These scenarios are likely thanks to a generous number of comeback systems. Games rarely feel lost within the first few minutes—although this doesn't stop a certain section of the game's community from angrily abandoning matches after an early setback. Teams that are behind receive bonus experience, and the plurality of optional objectives means that there is almost always something you can do to turn your fortunes around—you just need to figure out what it is.
These decisions make Heroes of the Storm the most accessible MOBA I have ever played. They amount to a striking simplification of the genre's vocabulary, boiling the most opaque sector of competitive gaming to a handful of verbs: attack, defend, capture, collect. With this, it opens up the basic strategic pleasure of five-on-five fantasy battle to an audience that might never have otherwise tried it.
The Haunted Mines, the secondary objective sends players underground, off the main area of the map to collect skulls that empower their team's massive grave golem. The power of each team's golem depends on the number of the 100 available skulls they are able to acquire. Teams must react and take position according to how well they managed to acquire skulls underground while the mines were open. A stronger enemy golem requires staunch defenses, while golems relatively even in power enable more versatile splits of defenders and attackers. Each team's golem pushes opposite lanes, and upon collection of another 100 skulls, revives wherever it died previously, adding a sense of dread when an enemy's golem dies close to your core. The battles with the grave golem are the main course, certainly, but the skirmishes in the mines and the tight interplay of fending off the enemy team while your team slays the mine's boss is quite the appetizing hors d'oeuvre.
On one hand, it discourages superiority within your team, granting everyone equal gain regardless of their skill, and giving you a clear understanding of what you and your four allies are capable of in combat. The unfortunate side effect is that there’s rarely an opportunity for a playmaker to carry their under-leveled team to an outstanding, unexpected victory. Trampling another squad feels fantastic, as winning often does, but falling behind a few levels after losing an objective and watching enemies skyrocket in power feels like a burial instead of a challenging struggle for an epic comeback. Recovery is possible, but rare in the 115 games I’ve played so far.
Success can seem impossible as early as the screen informing you which of the seven maps you had the misfortune of loading into. When you select your hero and queue into a game in Quick Match, the basic multiplayer mode accessible to everyone from the start, you’re going in not knowing which map you’ll play or what roles random teammates already picked. Even with a party of five friends meticulously composing a lineup of healers, tanks, damage dealers, and lane-pushers, you’re still going into each Quick Match blind, hoping you’ll get one of the good maps, or at least one your team fits.
One of the ironies of Heroes of the Storm's accessibility is that, in removing the obvious impediments, it drops new players right in the strategic deep end. Given the amount going on in any given map and the apparent 'looseness' of the laning system, it's easy to lose matches quickly and not really know why. Play Heroes purely as a 'hero brawler'—Blizzard's preferred term—and you'll find yourself outmaneuvered by players who understand that there's a time to fight, a time to hide, a time to sweep the map for objectives.
These considerations are just as compelling as 'what item do I build next'. Heroes of the Storm loses out in terms of systemic complexity and the creative potential that comes with it, but does an impressive job of introducing new players to the map-wide strategic element that makes these games so compelling to watch and play. Where the game stumbles, it doesn't stumble because it's accessible.
Although the feel of the game has improved since I first played it at Blizzcon 2013, Heroes of the Storm doesn't match the high standard that Blizzard have set elsewhere. This is particularly apparent in the case of the Diablo heroes—in their original incarnations, these are defined by the damage they dish out, by the sense of force imparted with every click. In Heroes of the Storm, that edge has been stripped away. What would be a bone-crushing slam in Diablo 3 becomes a weedy thump here.
One of Heroes of the Storm's primary draws is its cast of characters from Blizzard's various franchises. Warcraft's Uther, Malfurion, Illidan, Jaina, Thrall, and others face off against StarCraft's Raynor, Kerrigan, Tychus, Tassadar, and Zeratul as well as Diablo's Diablo, Azmodan, Tyrael, and a few representatives of the Diablo III playable characters. Despite being essentially recycled pre-existing characters, Heroes of the Storm's character design still greatly impresses. Diablo offers his signature red lightning breath as an area-of-effect team fight ultimate, while Raynor may call in help from the Hyperion Battlecruiser to rain down fire from above. Arthas summons Sindragosa to freeze all in her path. These characters bring their own signature moves from their franchises into the arena with them, while still sliding neatly into the mold of a different genre.
While most characters fit into the standard classes of Warrior (tanks with crowd control), Assassin (sustained damage and nuking mages), and Supports (mostly healers), Heroes of the Storm features a fourth classification: Specialists. Specialists all have mechanics unique to their characters and don't really compare to the other characters in the game. Abathur may attach a symbiote to an allied unit in order to launch his attacks from the safety of his own base. Azmodan empowers nearby minions while summoning a relative army all his own. Murky, the Baby Murloc, may lay an egg anywhere on the map in order to respawn there within a few seconds of death, rather than the long respawn timer to revive in base. The Specialist characters offer an entirely different perspective on Heroes of the Storm's gameplay.
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With seven Battlegrounds at launch, each with a separate layout, lane structure, and important objective, there’s a lot to think about. Certain heroes seem outright stronger for certain maps than others. Tanks, particularly with the assistance of teammates wielding area-of-effect spells, are great for holding the Sky Temple control points -- which blast devastating beams into enemy buildings, wrecking their defenses. On Blackheart Bay, where collecting and turning in coins earns your team the assistance of destructive cannonballs, you may want single-target killers to take down an enemy holding a bunch of coins. But If you can’t prepare for the map when composing your team, how can you cook up victory tactics? Don’t get me wrong, I love improvisational tactics, but the inability to prepare is absurd.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the overall map quality were more consistent. Some objectives, like the one in Dragon Shire, lead to intense situations, closer matches, and nail-biter team fights. Lose control of its control-point shrines, and the enemy summons the fierce Dragon Knight, who you then have to focus on defending against. Cursed Hollow is another story. My entire team would sigh in disappointment every time it appeared in our matchmaking rotation. We loathed the consequence of its objective -- a series of randomly spawning Tributes that, when claimed three times, reduces enemy minions to one hit point and disables their defensive buildings for a time. Worse, Tributes can spawn so far away from your team that you literally can’t get to them in time to stop your opponents -- who happened to be nearby at the time -- from taking them.
Balance isn’t the only problem either. For a free game, Heroes of the Storm is expensive, whether we’re talking in terms of money or time. Newcomers don’t even have access to all of a given week’s free characters from the get-go; they’ll have to grind for the additional free character slots. Locking free heroes in a free game is just unlocks for the sake of unlocks.It’s an awful, greedy limitation solvable only by grinding or spending.
Heroes of the Storm's avatars occupy far more screen-space than their equivalents in League or Dota, and combined with much smaller maps this gives the sense of being a bigger kid in a smaller sandpit. On the other hand, abilities feel rather muted: stuns are short, damage is low, particle effects simple and brief. These two factors contribute to the sense that your individual power is limited.
I don't believe that Heroes of the Storm lives up to the best of Blizzard's visual work, either. These games have always looked like a teenager's sketchbook given life, but now it feels like that sketchbook has been through the corporate photocopier one too many times. Blizzard's latter-day love affair with PopCap is evident in the little details—like the way that turrets and gates screw themselves into place, Game of Thrones intro-style, at the start of every match—but this doesn't make up for the general lack of atmosphere. The StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo universes, when seen through the same technicolour filter, lose their distinctiveness.
It is also, at present, a little too eager for both your time and your money. Although the worst excesses of account-wide levelling were excised during the beta, you still need to grind away to unlock every talent and skill for every character, and if you want to play outside of the rotation of free heroes then you're looking a week of running daily quests every day in order to save up enough gold for one or two characters of your own. Unlocking ranked play takes about 40 hours—double that if you're not using a premium booster—and this feels like a misstep in a game that otherwise doesn't provide you with many ways to gauge your growth as a player.
I feel comfortable recommending Heroes of the Storm despite these issues. In some ways, I feel more comfortable recommending it than I do Dota 2, a game I have committed a substantial amount of my time to. This is because Blizzard has created a MOBA that doesn't require you to commit your life, or even an entire week, to get something out of it. The benefit for newcomers is obvious. The benefit for existing MOBA players is more subtle: we finally have a fit ambassador for our genre. Heroes of the Storm may be divisive, but I hope it isn't. I hope that this is the game that shows people who don't like MOBAs what they're missing.
Heroes of the Storm is a free-to-play game; thus, playable characters are limited to a free week rotation and characters are unlocked through Gold (earned by playing) or real money. With the existence of daily quests such as "Win three games" or "Play two games as a Diablo character," gold comes easily, and it never feels like it will take days of playing to unlock whatever character you're looking for. Bonus gold is also given out at various account level milestones and for reaching mastery level five of a character. Overall, the free-to-play structure doesn't feel greedy or insurmountable, even when you only casually engage. Admittedly, it may take a long time to unlock every character in the game, but unlocking a decent variety of characters should come rather easily. I'm admittedly not the best person to trust with regards to games labeled “free-to-play” though; I've spent over a thousand dollars in League of Legends over the years.
The environments, animations, and sounds of combat all evoke a mental investment in the action. Animations are simultaneously flashy and elegant, and ability animations feature enough clarity that it's rare to be confused about what killed you. Tassadar's Psionic Storm crackles and flashes for each enemy it hits. As E.T.C. The Rock God leaps into the fray from across the map, a rocking guitar riff signals his landing. The comical trio of Lost Vikings mounts up into its longboat when activating a heroic ability, and the three sing a merry tune as they rain cannon fire down on nearby foes and towers. And the sound of a dead hero (with which you will become very familiar) features a bass "shoomp" to draw just the right amount of satisfaction for each and every kill your team secures.
Heroes of the Storm is a must-play for both MOBA players and Blizzard enthusiasts. It avoids stepping into the exact footprints of the games that paved the way for the genre, and delivers a beautifully graceful, unique experience with familiar characters. And should you not fall into either category, it is still a fantastic casual-competitive game that offers untold hours of enjoyment.
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