esports
With fun as their highest priority, Heroes looks to find a balance between casual and pro play.
A late entrant to the MOBA genre, Heroes of the Storm had a tall task in distinguishing itself from the competition. Yet the game has captured a player base numbering in the millions along with a highly competitive pro scene. Blizzard has found success with Heroes by making a fun game that they always want to play, said Production Director Kaeo Milker and Technical Director Alan Dabiri.
“I work all day, I have a little bit of time with my family then from like 10-2 a.m., I’m playing Heroes,” Milker told me at this year’s Heroes of the Dorm. The two game directors have loved Heroes from the beginning, not only as developers, but as players themselves. This passion drives the majority of their decisions and has kept the game fresh and engaging since it was in alpha.
Built for the Common Man
In his time developing StarCraft II, Milker knew from day one they were working on a game destined to be an eSport. However, this was not the case with Heroes. “We knew eSports was a potential for it, but all our decisions for Heroes were made about gameplay,” he said. “We wanted to make a game we wanted to play.” Dabiri echoed the sentiment and added that the team’s background working on StarCraft meant that developing a game with highly competitive players in mind came naturally.
While the majority of players remain in quick match, it doesn’t affect this focus. “We are usually aligning toward the high-end play – because that’s that foundation that everything it’s built on,” Milker explained that the competitive scene lends legitimacy to the game as a whole. With this in mind, the team always returns to the same principle – making a game people want to play. From the game’s shorter matches to letting players pick the hero they want in every quick match, fun is always top of mind in developing Heroes.
A part of this boils down to choice. "There may be some heroes that don’t translate to competitive and we’re okay with that,” Dabiri said. Even if these heroes don’t fit in the current meta-game, he believes that if players have a deep pool of content to choose from, they will continue to enjoy and return to the game. So Blizzard focuses on giving players numerous viable options, from the heroes the play to the way the play them.
Another key ingredient in Heroes’ secret sauce is the team’s endless commitment to challenging the MOBA genre. Breaking free from tradition, Heroes frequently introduces innovative new heroes and maps like a single hero that two people control or a map that transforms players into a gigantic dragon armed with a sword. Adding more characters to a competitive game adds complexity over time and in the case of Heroes the developers have to consider how they will perform on multiple maps. Yet the devs refuse to stop pushing the envelope, because they believe that’s what makes the Heroes of the Storm what it is.
A Balancing Act
“We’re making a lot of choices that make the game fun and they pay a lot of dividends everywhere else,” Milker said. One such example is the relatively new hero Blizzard announced at BlizzCon, Cho’gall. Cho’gall is a two-headed ogre that is controlled by two separate players. He was given to all BlizzCon attendees for free while other players had to play with someone who already owns him in order to unlock him. The unique way he was designed and released drew praise and attention to the game, even amid the craziness of BlizzCon. It also made something traditionally bland—acquiring a new character—fun.
But all this fun needs balance. Again, Heroes has a unique methodology to keeping all of its various elements in check. Coming from their laissez faire approach to balance in StarCraft, in which the team stood back and let the players work things out without major balance adjustments, they have taken a similar approach with Heroes. “In general we’ve always been of the philosophy that we shouldn’t knee-jerk react," Dabiri said. “Then there’s those times that it’s pretty clear that something is broken.”
They are able to see the need for these adjustments well in advance, partially because they play the game so much. Beyond playing for hours on end at home, designers spend up to 40 percent of their time playtesting. Dabiri joked they sometimes forget which heroes or maps are live in the game because they are playing so many builds ahead in the office.
When the game does need a tweak, the developers rely on a host of metrics to make their decision. In-game data like pick and win rates, community input, and the pro scene are all variables the team considers before making any balance changes. And sometimes by the time they have made all these considerations, the meta-game has already shifted and the need is gone. Both Dabiri and Milker indicated that there is a bit of magic and lot of finesse that goes into balancing a game as complicated as Heroes. But with a focus on fun and breaking rules, the team feels confident they won’t go wrong.
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