There are video game
developers, and then there’s Blizzard Entertainment. Since its founding in
February 1991 (under the name Silicon & Synapse) the California-based giant
has delivered hit after hit, and far more than good sales figures – Starcraft,
boosted by its expansion Brood War, is the foundational title for eSports,
while World of Warcraft is the quintessential massively multiplayer online game
(MMOG). Last week saw the release of arena-battler Heroes of the Storm (HotS),
an entry in a popular genre that – unusually for Blizzard – is also a little
bit of unfinished business.
HotS is a multiplayer
online battle arena (Moba), currently the biggest genre of competitive gaming
in the eSports scene. The idea is simple: two teams of players, each
controlling an on-screen warrior (or “hero”), face each other in a small arena
and must fight using melee weapons and spells, until the opponent’s base
building is destroyed.
The battlefield is
split into lanes, with the armies – of exactly equal strength – marching from
each side and fighting to a standstill in the middle. Dotted along the lanes
are fortifications for each side – turrets, castles, walls – and in between
them is terrain which the armies never enter. It is fast-paced, but highly
tactical, with players able to fight directly or control AI characters named
“minions” to carry out objectives. The Moba is effectively a game about
momentum.
Although HotS is
Blizzard’s first official entry into the market, the developer kind of invented
it. Kind of. The genre began with a player-made modification (a mod) for the
company’s 2002 real-time strategy sim, Warcraft 3. Created by three fans,
Defense of the Ancients (Dota) was so popular it resulted in several attempts
to recreate the magic in a standalone release, the most successful of which are
Riot’s League of Legends (LoL) and Valve’s Dota 2. Tens of millions play Mobas,
and many millions more tune into video streaming sites like Twitch to watch
them played professionally.
The genre has its own
stars, its own massive global tournaments, and, of course, it’s own jargon. The
minions you direct around the battlefield are “creeps”, killing them to gain
experience is “laning”, and when multiple players ambush a luckless opponent
that’s “ganking”.
The simple foundations
can also lead to head-spinningly complex depths thanks to the range of possible
heroes players can choose, all of whom have distinct abilities, and the
dynamics of team play. This is not a genre for solo artists. Over the years
since Dota, its successors have codified and expanded upon this foundation, to
the extent that LoL and Dota 2 have extraordinarily steep learning curves and
demand a significant time investment.
If this doesn’t sound
too attractive, welcome to the club. “The world does not need Dota 3 from
Blizzard,” laughs HotS director Dustin Browder. “They’ve got a great game
that’s like that. So if we’re gonna do something it has to be fresh.” HotS
began as a mod itself, designed by Browder’s Starcraft 2 team to show the
potential of that game’s community tools, before morphing into a full project –
but the starting point was getting as far away from today’s big beasts as
possible.
“It was all about what
we had played back in the Warcraft 3 days,” says Browder. “There were a tonne
of Warcraft 3 mods of that ilk, not just Dota, even though that eventually
became the king of that particular pack. Where did you think it was going,
where did you imagine it was going? Not where it has gone. When you think from
an earlier stage you get a much wider spectrum of possibilities. The
limitations of Warcraft 3 meant Dota has things like recipes [item
combinations] – you couldn’t add more items, there were only six item slots, so
you had to do recipes. That came out of a need and a limitation. So, when we’re
doing this exercise of imagining what could’ve been different, we got some much
more interesting answers, and where we thought it was going was not ‘better
recipes’.
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