How Heroes of the Storm is evolving with new modes and 'crazy characters'

20 Nov 2015

Heroes of the Storm is a love letter to fans of Blizzard's games -- a mash-up of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo, with characters from classics such as The Lost Vikings and upcoming titles like Overwatch joining the mix, all battling it out in a competitive MOBA.

Having officially launched in June this year, the game is about to expand with new modes and new heroes joining its 50-strong roster of playable charactrers. Arguably the strangest of these is Cho'gall, a two-headed ogre from the Warcraft universe that will be controlled by two players simultaneously -- one for each head. The character's distribution will be quirky too, spreading from player to player like a virus.

At Blizzcon 2015, WIRED spoke with senior game designer Matthew Cooper on how Blizzard grew Heroes of the Storm from a genre created by fans, why you shouldn't expect too many bizarre characters like Cho'gall, and why despite the strong esports following it enjoys, fun is ultimately the most important part of the game.

MOBAs began life as fan mods of WarCraft 3. Going back to Heroes' origins, when did Blizzard decide to do something "official"?
Obviously, DoTA came from Warcraft 3 as a mod, and even before that there was Aeon of Strife -- there's been quite a few of these different game modes, and we have a lot of fun playing. It's a little twist on the RTS genre -- normally you're controlling a whole army and you're constructing your base and so on; the MOBA, the Heroes of the Storm experience is focused on a single hero and playing together as a team.

We'd been playing a lot of it and originally, back probably four or five years ago, it was [codenamed] Blizzard DOTA and it was going to be a mod for Starcraft II. We were working on a number of mods, all these different modes we were going to have. I think it was one of our level designers and one of our technical designers, two people worked on it. They brought it to BlizzCon and got a crazy amount of feedback going "oh my god, this is amazing, you have to make this game". It went from there.

The rules of the genre are also originate with fans. Was doing a stand-alone product a chance to solidify how MOBAs function?
I think one of the big advantages we get being a standalone product is we have a huge development team working on it -- I think we have over a hundred people on the game. The game is originally based on the Starcraft engine but it diverged and now it's a dedicated Heroes of the Storm engine that lets us do what we want to do. Just being able to have our own matchmaking, our own ladder system, and our own different game modes and stuff like that is something I don't think we could do as a mod. You kind of need to have a standalone product to do all that. I think we'd be excited about, in the future, maybe allowing users to create content but that's not something we're working on now.

Cho'gall is a very odd idea for a MOBA character -- a two-headed hero controlled by two players. He already existed in World of Warcraft lore, but how did you adapt him for Heroes?
We have a big list of characters we'd like to add to the Nexus -- I think it's up to about 200 -- and Cho'gall was one of those characters. I think we actually had a playable version of him in the game about two or three years ago, before we had the Talent system [but] he was a different character. He wasn't controlled by two players back then, he was a tank. When we started developing the Talent system, we started really focusing on our characters and making them stand out -- looking at Cho'gall and asking what rules in the genre we could break. One of those rules was "one player, one hero". What about someone who breaks that rule?

We like to say you haven't seen anything yet and you can break any rule; our latest battleground, the Towers of Doom, you don't actually directly attack the core [like most MOBAs]. You win through very different means. Plus we have characters who play differently. If they're fun to play as and fun to play against, then they're a good thing.

When you're introducing alternative characters and rules though, does that upset balancing?
It definitely can. I'm lead balance designer and we have a lot of balance guys who do things like this. One of the things we talk about when we're making a character like Greymane or Lunara, ranged assassins, we have templates and make them different. With characters like Cho'gall, we don't have a template! We know how tanky some characters are and how much damage they can put out but a lot of it is just playing and seeing how it goes. I think we're going to learn a lot when Cho'gall goes live -- we've played hundreds of games with him but we'll see millions of games played when he goes live.

Given Cho'gall is, by design, an unusual hero, can new players get to grips with him?
Absolutely. If you've played a lot of Heroes of the Storm and you have a friend who hasn't, if you're playing Cho you control the movement so you need to have good map awareness; Gall mostly just focused on landing his abilities. There's synergy between their abilities so there will be teamwork but Gall doesn't have to worry about the minimap or being at the right spot at the right time. I think that's definitely a good point for a new player. Playing as Cho'gall together can be a great way to learn the character and the game.

Where did the idea of spreading Cho'gall like a virus come from?
I'm not sure what the initial reason was but it encourages people to try him. He's so unique that earning him in a similarly unique way was interesting. If I own him and we play a couple of games together, then you get him. It is a little like a virus, where the way to spread him is to play. And once you help people unlock him, you get some gold for it.

Will we see more unorthodox characters added to the game?
There's a lot of excitement around when we do something like Cho'gall [but] you definitely want these characters in moderation. We don't want to release three crazy characters in a row -- then it stops being quirky. You want some stability to the game: maybe you need more mages or basic attackers, that kind of thing. We definitely want to work on more of these weird characters but in moderation.

One of the big things we've been talking about is while it's important to us to do a really crazy character like Cho'gall, it's more important that the character is fun as and fun to play against. We wouldn't make a character just for the sake of it being different. If we make that character internally and they're not fun to play as then we'll try something else.

The figure "200" gets bandied about a lot for the number of characters that will eventually be in the game. Do you think there's a risk of bloat?
I think right now, if we were at 200 today, it'd be a different story. We're at around 45 characters right now. Every time we add a character it feels like we're adding new strategies and changing existing strategies, so it's a huge win. I think we will get to a number a couple of years from now where it's closer to a hundred characters and feel "oh my god, maybe it is starting to get bloated". It might be a concern down the road.

Would you retire characters like League of Legends has?
It's not been talked about. I think it might be a challenge for us in a few years' time. I don't imagine ever retiring a character, but at the same time there will probably be some challenges down the line if we continue to add a lot of characters to the game and have to figure out the best option to go for.

Conversely, Blizzard is centred on a handful of core franchises. Does that limit how many characters you can conceivably draw from?
I don't know if we could ever be in a spot where we have every single character! Our list includes bosses from Diablo, player classes, even unit types like the Siege Tank. There's so many characters to draw from and now we have Overwatch coming in, so we're adding Tracer to the game. We haven't even totally explored our games -- we have The Lost Vikings but there are other characters we'd love to do from other games. I think we have plenty of characters for a long time. The great thing is this is a company that's making more content for World of Warcraft or more content for Starcraft, so we'll continue to have more content to pull into Heroes of the Storm.

How do you avoid repetition, such as characters having similar moves?
It's a consideration when making new characters or balancing older characters, making sure we balance them in a direction that feels unique. Someone like Lunara, a lot of her balance is in her move speed and some of it is in her basic attacks doing damage over time. That's got to be really important about her and it helps her be unique from Raynor, who's more about long range and heavy hitting and he's easier to play. So whenever we're going back to older characters we're definitely thinking about if we need to, say, buff up Tychus -- what's a way we can do that while making him unique from other characters?

Heroes only fully launched in June. How do you feel the game has grown since coming out of beta?
We've received a ton of great feedback and I feel the game is a lot better in a lot of ways. Recently my team has been really focused on balance. We were seeing everyone playing the same characters [so] we made a lot of changes to different warriors. Now we're seeing more characters being played; that's a huge improvement for us. One of our primary goals is a wide hero diversity so you can see a lot of different strategies.

The other big addition coming to Heroes is Arena Mode. How does the game and its players benefit from it?
Arena is a different way to play. It's a quicker experience -- most of our matches take ten minutes [but Arena] is a great way to try out new play styles, new characters -- it's a lot less stressful. You only have two heroic abilities; you don't level up; you start at level 10 and stay at level 10; the death timer is shorter. It's all focused on team fighting and the action. I don't know if Heroes "needs" this mode but we've been playing it a lot around the office and it's definitely a very fun mode. A totally different experience.

Heroes has become a pretty serious title soon after launch, with a strong competitive side. Is it important to bring in some levity, make it more accessible with characters and modes like these?
Absolutely. I've had a lot of people ask me "so you've done Cho'gall; would you ever do a four or five player hero?" The answer is, if it's fun to play and fun to play against, then absolutely. As great as it is to add new experiences and different experiences you haven't seen before, the most important thing is -- is it fun? Do players want to play it? If we're only doing something to be different or unique, that's not a prospect.