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

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.