BOSTON — Blizzard doesn’t want to refer to Heroes of the Storm as a MOBA, or a multiplayer online battle arena. I get that. The MOBA landscape is getting crowded with Defense of the Ancients 2, Heroes of Newerth, and Infinite Crisis standing as just three of the highest-profile games in the crowded genre.
League of Legends still bills itself as a MOBA, though some call it an “action real-time strategy game,” or an ARTS. Blizzard wants to differentiate Heroes of the Storm, so they’ve been referring to it as a “hero brawler,” ostensibly because they want to reinforce their simpler, more accessible design for players new to such games.
It was all beginning to sound quite silly to me. We’re talking about a bunch of games that all spawned from the creative DNA of the original Defense of the Ancients, a mod of seminal strategy game Warcraft 3. They’re all variations on the same theme. They’re all MOBAs no matter what they call themselves, right?
So at PAX East when I met with Dustin Browder and Phill Gonzales, the game director and primary character artist, respectively, for Heroes of the Storm, I wanted to know how their game was different enough from Dota 2, Valve’s MOBA on digital distribution service Steam; or League of Legends, an ARTS game, to justify an entirely new appellation.
Understanding the DNA of a MOBA
Defense of the Ancients, the first multiplayer online battle arena, was a mod for Warcraft III, which was a real-time strategy game like Command & Conquer, Dune 2000, and, of course, Blizzard’s other standout series, StarCraft. In a RTS, you build a base to collect resources to build structures which build troops which you use to kill the other guy’s base.
DOTA simplified the logistics. You still had a base to defend, but you didn’t have to build it. You still had infantry units, but they were generated automatically and ran straight for the other team’s base. Instead of controlling entire armies, you controlled one powerful Hero character, and that’s where the game’s complexity lay.
Heroes accrued experience and became more powerful during the match. They earned gold for killing enemies and destroying structures. They used the gold to buy items to use during combat. Players operated in teams of Heroes, and the goal was still the same as in a real-time strategy game: Kill the other guy’s base.
That describes the basic rules behind Valve’s Dota 2 and Riot Games’s League of Legends. The difference between the two games is mostly one of complexity. Dota 2 has one map, unlocks all of its characters from the start, and only offers cosmetic items to purchase with real dollars. League of Legends has multiple maps, offers 10 free Champions every week for to choose between, and players use an in-game earned currency called Influence points to permanently unlock Champions — or they can pay real dollars to do so.
Heroes of the Storm is no different as far as core rules go, but the designation “hero brawler” could be appropriate in that players are more likely to have relationships with their Hero from the start, and it has fewer distractions from actually wading into and staying in combat with that Hero.
Above: I know who Diablo and Kerrigan are, and I don’t want either of them anywhere near me.
If you know Blizzard, you already know your Heroes
“It’s very easy to look at our game, [as] I think a lot of people do, and say, ‘This is just the simplest version of the game you can make,’” said Browder. “We used to hear the same thing about World of Warcraft.”
“In [EverQuest] if you died, you lost experience, and if you went below a level cap, you blew away a level. At the time, that was required. The guys who made WoW were ‘ruining it’ because they got rid of that. And it was a simplification, sure. But then that complexity comes in other areas. So you’re doing tradeoffs as a designer,” said Browder.
Where Dota 2 and League of Legends offer more than a hundred characters for players to choose between, Heroes of the Storm currently offers 24. That might change over time, but the characters in Blizzard’s game map onto archetypical characters from Blizzard games like StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and Diablo, so there ought to be a more finite number.
“You can see, on a very basic level, that immersion is very tied to these characters. The iconic characters kind of speak for themselves out of the gate,” said Gonzales. “People just understand based on the lore.”
“You kind of know what you made them to do, what to deal with,” said Browder. To a point, then, the accessible nature of Heroes of the Storm has much to do with knowing Blizzard’s IP. One might argue this doesn’t make Heroes of the Storm more accessible across the board, although access to Heroes of the Storm will be through Blizzard’s online portal, Battle.net. Chances are you’re already familiar with at least one Blizzard IP if you have a Battle.net account.
Above: When you get into battle, Blizzard wants you to stay in battle
Immediacy is the key to immersion
As characters gain experience in Dota 2 or League of Legends, they gain access to new abilities. A new player might not know which options to choose when the opportunity pops up. In Heroes of the Storm characters have access to all of their abilities from the beginning of the match. The choice isn’t between which abilities to take, period, but which abilities to level up.
“I think there’s a lot of pressure [in other games] when you have to select, ‘Which skill should I pick first?’ and you’re like ‘Well, should I read a guide? Should I cross-reference with a friend?’ [With our system] you have them all. Try them all; you have time to read the tool tips and experience them,” said Gonzales.
“Just use them a couple of times before you level them up,” said Browder. “We’ve only got a certain amount of choices per level, we feel we can get away with showing you that option in the field and making you choose it live.”
In Dota 2 and League of Legends, players use the gold they earn from killing enemies to buy items from shops during a match. In Dota 2 the shops are located in the middle and the sides of the map. In League of Legends, each team’s single shop is located in the corner of the map at their spawn point. In either case, selecting items to buy takes players out of combat for as long as it takes them to make the purchases.
This is not an issue in Heroes of the Storm.
“It’s easier to support your allies because you don’t have other incentives pulling you away from the game,” said Browder. “It means you really focus on the map, the objectives, the other team, all of the time; you’re just trying to stay engaged and keep on them. It means the pace of the game is kind of relentless. It’s got more of an action kind of feel to it.”
In Dota 2 and League of Legends, the player who lands the killing blow generally earns the gold for killing that unit. “Last hits” are a staple of game strategy in League of Legends. If a team wants to make one of its players stronger at a more rapid pace than everyone else, for example, that team needs to make sure the player in question gets all of the last hits in order to earn the gold to run back to base and buy items more quickly.
New players don’t have to learn how to navigate the cognitive dissonance of wanting to kill a bad guy but having to hold back to give someone else the kill, because Heroes of the Storm eliminates the gold and vendor aspects of the game. “We’re trying to make sure that if it’s the obvious thing to do, the game rewards you for that,” said Browder.
The big picture difference of keeping the focus on the action is that where an average game of Dota 2 or League of Legends may take 40 minutes between two teams of equal skill, a game of Heroes of the Storm averages out at around 20 minutes.