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

Heroes of the Storm will succeed or fail on the backs of its heroes.

I spoke with game designer Kent-Erik Hagman, who works specifically on hero design, about the process of choosing which characters from the Blizzard Entertainment franchise would be included in Heroes, and how those transformations happened. The company’s new multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) exits open beta and launches tomorrow.

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The talk covered a lot of ground, from which heroes he’d make changes to if he could (spoiler: all of them), to how the next heroes are being chosen, to what the team considers in their designs.

In order to truly appreciate how this interview went, you have to know how the (naturally?) super-caffeinated Hagman talks in real life. Here’s an unedited sample:

“This is the stupidest job in the world. I can’t believe I get paid to do this. This is what I do in my free time. It’s dumb. It’s pretty ridiculous. I have so much fun doing it. I’ve grown up playing Blizzard games my entire life. Now to have the chance to bring these characters I played … I get to take the toys I played with as a kid and bring them into a video game space. Like, how cool is that? I love my job.”

That short and sincere speech, delivered (as far as I could tell) without taking a single breath, was part of an aside during a question about gameplay mechanics. We’ll try not to edit him too heavily.

GamesBeat: So, how did you choose the initial hero lineup?

Kent-Erik Hagman: We had a magic crystal ball about two years ago, and we’d shake it, and it would say, you should do this hero next. [Laughs.] I wish that was true. My second joke answer will be that we have a council of Illuminati; they have their hooded robes, and they say, “Blizzard has spoken, you will do this hero next.”

GamesBeat: I was hoping you’d say your data analysts tallied up all the tweets. …

Hagman: “The people have spoken.”

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Actually, early on, these [hero selections] were mostly driven by our art team. They were typically ahead of us as the design staff. So the art team would make the models they thought were really cool, and they would bring new shapes and silhouettes and fresh characters, and also characters we were really excited about.

That’s why we had a lot of our big heavy hitters in our opening slew, like Arthas, Diablo, Kerrigan, Nova, and Tyrael. Those kinds of characters, they’re on boxes; they’re in cinematics; these are characters we’ve got to get in the game, right? That’s kind of where it started with originally.

GamesBeat: Were all of the early choices big brand names?

Hagman: Some of them were grandfathered in, like Sgt. Hammer. First she was [StarCraft character Horace] Warfield, and before that, he was actually General Duke from the Brood Wars days, because Duke was the siege tank hero unit in StarCraft 1.

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But that was back in the days when our game had a name I don’t think I’m legally allowed to say — am I? [He consults with Blizzard representative Che’von Slaughter in the room.] I can reference Blizzard DOTA? I won’t get lawsued? OK — back when it was Blizzard DOTA, it was like Sgt. Hammer; this is cool, a hero that can siege up.

Plus it’s a siege tank, who wants to be a siege tank, everyone wants to be a siege tank! We were a bunch of dudes saying, “This is cool!” “That’s cool!” And we just kinda did that. Now we’re a little smarter.

GamesBeat: You’re crushing the dreams of millions of fans who hoped this was carefully thought-out.

Hagman: Yes, Blizzard is smart, and they looked forward, and they did all these things really smartly … no. [Laughs.]

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We’re trying to do that now. I say now, but we’re talking months and months away in the future. We’re trying to figure out what the right way is to pick which heroes come up next. It definitely is a combination of, there’s certain goals we should try to hit, like we want to get more franchise parity. We were definitely hitting a lot of Warcraft heroes early on.

GamesBeat: Why choose so many Warcraft heroes?

Hagman: When we were starting on this game, we started even before [Diablo 3] launched. The idea of doing D3 hero classes was not even a thing.

We did the Witch Doctor because he was a cool, unique character from D3, and he could bring some interesting stuff to the game. The others kind of felt like, OK, the demon hunter is very similar to a Sylvanas or an Alleria Windrunner, so that’s not super unique. We’ve got these tropes through our other franchises.

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GamesBeat: But the D3 player classes ended up in HotS.

Hagman: They all ended up making it in. Midway through development, D3 launches, [the expansion] Reaper of Souls launches, Hearthstone launches, and [StarCraft II:] Heart of the Swarm launches, and all of a sudden, these characters become much more popular, these non-Warcraft characters.

We’re basically a few months behind, always lagging, because of the time it takes to develop heroes. Those guys become popular and then we realize, oh, shoot, we should have added a lot more than that.

Now we say, OK, we should make sure we spread things out; let’s try to be smart about it. And so now we are trying to be the guys in the robes looking down the future with our crystal balls. “We’ll have this many assassins, this many warriors. What should we fill out? What does the game need at this point in time?”

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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.

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!

GamesBeat: Is there placeholder voice, for testing it out?

Kent-Erik Hagman: There’s nothing.

GamesBeat: They’re mute? That’s kind of sad.

Hagman: When we do the feel of the hero, we’re trying to nail it down from game design, from gameplay.

For Jaina, regardless of how her spell effects looked, regardless of how they sounded, regardless of her VO, we wanted [to know], hey, does the combo of landing this delayed circle, landing this short-ranged cone and then having this final skill shot? Does this feel like you’re hitting a frost mage fantasy? For us, we want just those mechanics to speak to the fantasy.

I’m not going to say that we’re doing that successfully in all of our heroes. I think some of our heroes are failing spectacularly at that. But we’re getting much better at it.

GamesBeat: Can you talk about some of the heroes that you think need additional polish between — I’m looking at my watch — now and tomorrow?

[Laughs.] That ship has kind of sailed.

With a lot of our older heroes, I honestly think we could do more polish. It’s a very delicate balancing act, though, because these characters are now in players’ hands. They’ve either bought them with gold, or bought them with money, or they’ve earned them in some other way.

They form an attachment to this character. Let’s take [Diablo 3 demon hunter] Valla. If we changed Valla, that would upset 50 percent of our player base.

It’s really a cost-benefit analysis. If she gets into a problem state, then the community will come to us and ask us [to] change it. Sure, we can do some stuff. But right now, she’s in a great spot, so we should be really careful if we change her. We need to have a really good reason to.

GamesBeat: So who would you change?

Hagman: If I had a magic wand, I’d wave it, and I’d change every single hero in the game probably. There’s a reason why they don’t give me that much control.

We are perfectionists by nature, and so I can nit-pick any single hero in the game. But I’m actually very proud of pretty much 95-99 percent of them. [Laughs.] I’m actually really proud of all of our heroes. I think they’re wonderful.

But I will always go home and play and feel like, oh, we should tune this or tweak this, but I’m sure the rest of the team disagrees, so … we’ll keep ’em as they are.

GamesBeat: This is the game that feels like it’s been in alpha and beta forever. You’ve got a pretty good selection of player data to work from. Are you seeing trends in characters people choose for their teams?

Hagman: It surprises us. Every time we think we have it figured out, it changes a little bit on us. There’s certain characters that are pretty stable, like Valla, who I think is always very popular.

Nova was always popular at every single BlizzCon, and she still is relatively popular. She’s fallen off a little bit, I think, because we nerfed her. It’s actually surprising how much the changes made by our balance team affects play count of heroes.

The fact is, we have an audience that’s growing every day, because we’ve been inviting more and more people.  So the data pool we’re drawing from is constantly changing as well.

While we definitely put some stock into what our players are doing, at the core, we’re Blizzard: We want to make the game we want to play. We want to make the heroes we want to play. We’ll continue to do that going forward.

GamesBeat: Are the characters you’re designing now based entirely on gameplay? Or is it more, “Your choice was No. 37 on the list of everybody’s favorite heroes, so we’re finally going to get back to you now?”

Hagman: There’s a little bit of Column A, a little bit of Column B … and C … and D … going on right now. We definitely see certain holes, like the StarCraft warrior, the Diablo support, which I think our community asks about every day. We definitely want to hit those holes.

Then we’re also looking across the spectrum to see what archetypes are getting picked by most team comps and which ones are the most frequent, and do they have a proportional amount of representation. We’re definitely looking at that some.

We’re also trying to be smart about other plans that we have going on that I can’t talk about at all, and trying to make sure we line those up as well.

GamesBeat: So what you’re telling me is that a whole slew of Overwatch heroes are just waiting for launch.

Hagman: [Laughs.] I cannot say a word.

We have some plans lined up for the next handful of heroes. If these plans end up failing, you can better believe we will change course and find a better way to slot what heroes are coming up when. It’s not a set in stone process.

We think we’re smarter now; we’ll find out if we are. And maybe we’ll get an even smarter idea four months from now that’ll completely change how we’re doing heroes going forward from there.

One thing we’re not worried about is running out of characters to do. We’ve looked at the list. It’s huge. It’s massive. I’ve got plenty of job security.