Heroes of the Storm designer: ‘I’d change every single hero in the game’

Kent-Erik Hagman: We still completely afford ourselves the opportunity to do any wacky hero that comes to mind that the team gets super-pumped about. We’ll totally let that creativity just drive it, and if the team gets behind it, we’ll just sneak that hero in when we can.

GamesBeat: Baby murlocs are in Heroes of the Storm already, so I’m not really sure where you’re going to go on that.

Hagman: Yeah, I know. You’d think we’d blown our crazy! But you’ll be surprised. That’s all I can say, before Che’von kills me.

GamesBeat: How do you start incorporating a new hero?

Hagman: From a high-level standpoint, when you finish your first game of Heroes with that hero, we want you to be like, man, I felt like I was Thrall, I felt like I was Jaina, I felt like I was Sylvanas — I was dark and creepy and underhanded.

The first thing we do is identify what is the fantasy of this hero? What defines, what makes this hero — this hero? And then we try to find mechanics that fit that or reinforce it.

We also look at the art. We look at their silhouette. We look at what they’re wearing and what the artists want to do with that character. Some of our characters have been many things over many days, over the ages. So like [World of Warcraft Horde leader] Thrall, for instance.

GamesBeat: Thrall is not doing the pacifist shaman thing here, for some reason.

Hagman: Yeah, he doesn’t have the dress that he has in WoW.

GamesBeat: And the gigantic beads. What happened to the gigantic beads?

Hagman: He’s also not riding a wolf like he did in Warcraft 3. So it’s, like, hey artists, which Thrall are you doing? They’re like, we’re doing the one right at the beginning of vanilla WoW that nobody ever actually played! And it’s like, oh, OK — thanks, guys! [Laughs.] We’ll work with that, I guess.

So all right, what has he got: He’s got his big gold armor with spikes all over it; he’s got this massive hammer, his Doomhammer. So we felt like we kind of had to make him beefy, we needed him to be melee and hit people with the hammer, because … that’s what you do with a hammer. We had this expectation to fill.

But we still want you to feel like you are Thrall, so we need chain lightning in there. We need a wolf to have some kind of an aspect in there. We were also really cautious because we had already done Rehgar, so we didn’t want the wolf to be out there all the time.

[Rehgar is a shaman that transforms into a ghost wolf in HotS. –Ed.]

We were also dealing with a summons problem in the game, where we were trying to cut down the number summoned units we’re adding. They just gum up the board. They really hurt clarity.

So it’s like, OK, we need a wolf, but they can’t actually be summoned so … figure that out. Basically, we’re given a puzzle that says, hey, you need to hit this fantasy. Here are the notes you can use, here are the notes you can’t use, and good luck.

GamesBeat: How does the practical process work?

Hagman: We’ll scrap together a paper design, we’ll shoot it around the office, we’ll get a lot of good feedback, we’ll tweak it, and we’ll tweak it.

A week or two later, we’ll put it in the game. We’ll play it. Then whoever the designer is will usually go, wow, that was horrible, I’m sorry, guys. And then rework it some more, rework it some more. It takes a long time and every hero’s different.

GamesBeat: Can you give examples of the changes?

Hagman: [WoW Alliance mage] Jaina was one and done. I think we had her kit implemented after paper, and we didn’t change anything except for her water elemental.

But Thrall has had six different kits. I think windfury was the most stable part of his kit, but chain lightning and feral spirit went through a lot of iteration. His trait used to [randomly cause] chain lightnings, and that was really cool, but you didn’t feel like you were Thrall. You were just randomly zapping people, and it was like, ehhhh, I want to directly zap. OK, let’s just make it direct and figure out another way to give him what we need him to have, mechanically speaking.

It’s a big puzzle piece. It’s an interesting math problem and psychology problem. We need the numbers to work. We need the mechanics to work. But it also needs to feel good for the player, so it’s this real touchy-feely like, did I feel like Thrall? I don’t know. …

We’re also using really temp art this entire time, because we don’t want the art team to feel like they have to make us a bunch of art that we’re just going to throw away. So I think it feels like Thrall, but I’ll know better when we have real art. You never really know for sure, so it’s always a little bit of a risk.

GamesBeat: How do you design abilities for Heroes of the Storm characters that fans have watched but never been able to play?

Hagman: The worst characters for us to do are heroes and villains that were not player controlled, so Diablo, Tyrael. It’s like, what do those guys do? I, uh, have no freaking idea. [Laughs.]

Diablo went through about four different kit iterations, so a little less than Thrall. He went through a lot before we landed on this disrupter guy who could flip people over his head. That one was tough for us.

Whereas someone like [WoW’s cute baby amphibian … thing] Murky and [StarCraft Zerg evolution master] Abathur … well, Abathur was actually completely tied around his kit. We wanted to do a hero that sat in the base and could put a hat on people. We thought that was a really cool hook. That was an instance of the mechanic driving it.

Whereas Murky, we were like, oh, look, a cute little murloc. That’s adorable, and we want to get more cute characters in the game because when we look at all of Blizzard, we’re like, wow, we’re really into big power fantasy.

With him, we had all the space in the world and could do a lot, which is sometimes the worst thing you could ask for as an artist or a designer. “Here’s a blank slate.” No, no, no — don’t give me a blank slate. Give me some poles in the ground so I can wrap around them. But with Murky, we at least had somewhat of an idea.