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

GamesBeat: What do you consider when designing abilities for Heroes of the Storm?

Kent-Erik Hagman: We look at the cinematics for sure. We’re all hardcore fans on this team, and so we kind of have some expectation of what we want to see heroes doing.

We look at their silhouette. It usually dictates what kind of archetype they are — are they going to be a warrior, melee assassin, ranged assassin, support, or if we want them to be a siege hero. That’s going to drive how the abilities will function and what we want out of them.

We end up leaving a lot in the hands of the art team, in terms of the delivery mechanism. We might have a character shoot a laser, and the art team is like, uh, we don’t like laser — could it be something coming from the ground? It doesn’t change the gameplay, so it’s totally within their realm. They champion and hold the idea of what the look of the character is and how their abilities will look as a whole.

We make a lot of demands on the art team, because we want to dictate 100 percent of the game play. With such a high demand, we want also to give them as much room as possible with the art. We’ll give you guys the timings that we need from the gameplay side, but you guys can do whatever you want.

That’s usually worked out really well for us, because our artists are phenomenal. They always kill it.

GamesBeat: Were the artists trying to bring particular themes through all of the characters? Obviously, they looked very different in their original games.

Hagman: That was a huge deal, because you’re bringing in three different art styles. I think StarCraft is a lot darker and gritty, Warcraft is bright and shiny, and Diablo is just completely different.

It’s part of why our original map lineup wasn’t really focused on doing battlegrounds that were centered on Blizzard IPs, because of the difficulty in trying to figure that out. Now we have some solves going forward with that — we have the things we teased at BlizzCon — but it’s definitely been a challenge for the art staff.

[We followed up with senior art director Samwise Didier — does everyone at Blizzard have unusual names? — on this question — Ed.]

Samwise Didier: We had to come up with a style that would blend all of our worlds together. We had to make the more realistic Diablo characters stand up visually against the super heroic proportions of Warcraft.

The easy answer was to push them both into the middle where StarCraft lives. StarCraft has a bit more of the realistic texturing and proportions found in the Diablo universe, but also combines bold silhouettes and colors similar to Warcraft.

In Heroes of the Storm, we pushed our Diablo characters to make them a little more super heroic and dialed back our World of Warcraft characters just a bit to be more in line with the StarCraft style. By doing this, we were able to blend all three of our worlds together to make what is now the art style for Heroes of the Storm.

[We now return you to designer Kent-Erik Hagman. –Ed.]

GamesBeat: Are characters voice performed by the same people who do them in the original games?

Hagman: Not always. Our writer, Justin Dye, is mostly in charge of who does the [voiceover]. Some of the characters we definitely get the person who has always been that one. The problem is, some of our characters have had multiple voice actors and actresses over the years. I think [StarCraft villain Sarah] Kerrigan has had three, four different actresses.

[The voiceover team] doesn’t want one person to be the voice for half of our heroes, which I think we were getting close to with one of our actors. He’s so good, and he did all these Warcraft 3 heroes.

And, guess what, we love Warcraft 3 heroes, because this is the team that made Warcraft 3! So yeah, we kind of wrote ourselves into a corner there.

GamesBeat: How do you choose an actor?

Hagman: It is always tricky. I think they want to find who did that character best. The Jaina you see now in Hearthstone and you see in WoW is post-traumatic Jaina. The white hair, she’s crazy; she wants to kill all the Horde.

Whereas the Jaina we did, we definitely wanted to give her a completely different personality. We have enough “I’m intense and I’m going to kill you” heroes in Heroes of the Storm. We wanted somebody who says, “I hate resorting to violence.” We wanted that Warcraft 3 Jaina.

So our game had a different need and so I don’t know if we went with the same voice actress.

[This question we also took to Andrea Toyias, casting and voice director. — Ed.]

Andrea Toyias: Whenever possible, we used the same actor or actress who originally voiced the character in each of our franchises. Much of the experience our fans get from each character comes from the character’s unique sound, delivery, and personality … so we very much wanted to honor our legacy voices in order for our players to have the same experience, but now with their favorite character in a different setting.

What was particularly enjoyable about finding our characters in this new setting was that we got to play and experiment with them outside of the storyline they were tied to in their original game. This gave us a chance to really expand their personalities, their opinions, their sarcasm, their humor … really, a full range of emotions and responses that weren’t generally possible in their original IP.

So bringing each character to life in new and exciting ways was really fun. Each recording session tended to be 50 percent recording and 50 percent wiping tears of laughter from our eyes.

[And again back to Kent-Erik Hagman. — Ed.]

GamesBeat: When are voices added?

Hagman: Voice acting comes in at the last minute before we ship the hero. It’s the last thing we do, on the design side. We never even get that feel of the character until the end, and it’s always, oh, look at that! They have a voice now, oh, that’s cool!