Obviously the MOBA genre is growing exponentially, with League of Legends and DotA 2 gaining major success, and Heroes of the Storm has been growing very successfully, with events like The Eternal Conflict. How did you guys feel about The Eternal Conflict in terms of new players? Was it something you expected to bring in a bunch of people? Did it succeed in that regard?
At least for me, we weren’t thinking of it from the perspective of bringing in new players, we just wanted it to be a really cool event for our existing players. We wanted to bring in our first Diablo battlegrounds, the first ones from other Blizzard IPs. I think that was a really cool moment, bringing in a lot of cool Diablo characters and some Diablo battlegrounds.
Absolutely! Talking about that, battlegrounds from Blizzard IPs, are you guys thinking about bringing in maps from other Blizzard IPs like Warcraft, Starcraft, and even Overwatch?
It’s something we would love to do! It really enriches the game, and that’s what Heroes of the Storm really is, the characters and locations from all over Blizzard. We would absolutely love to do battlegrounds from other Blizzard games - we don’t know when that would be but we’d really like to do it.
That’s definitely one of the biggest reasons people play Heroes - having a bunch of your childhood memories, even adult memories, come together in a wonderful, fun game. In terms of battlegrounds, we currently have 9 battlegrounds, going on 10 with Towers of Doom coming up. Are you looking on expanding the number of battlegrounds continuously? Is there any kind of number you guys are looking to reach, or is it something you are going to play by ear?
I think we’re still exploring. Obviously when we went from 4 battlegrounds to 5, that was a huge deal. Like, wow, that’s amazing! And we’re going from 9 to 10 - towers of doom is awesome, it’s a completely different battleground, it’s a whole new way to play - but I think we’re hitting a pretty good point where we have a good number of battlegrounds. Obviously, we want to keep adding new battlegrounds, but we’re hitting the point where we have to start talking about stuff like, “do we want to add a battleground rotation? Do we need to do something with battlegrounds for seasons?” I don’t think we want to be in a spot where we have 20 battlegrounds in Quick Match at a time, that’s probably too many.
How do you guys feel about the battleground diversity in the eSports scene right now? Most battlegrounds are played, some are played less. Are you looking to make it so that all the battlegrounds are played in an eSports setting?
eSports is very important to us, for battlegrounds, for heroes, in general. On the heroes side, we want to make it so that there is as many characters as possible viable on an eSports level. At the same time, on the battlegrounds side, if we can identify areas to make the battleground more interesting or accessible on a pro level, then that’s something we’ll likely do. We have a battleground team, so any time that they spend working on, say, Haunted Mines or Gardens of Terror, is less time they’re spending on new battlegrounds. So it’s a bit of a trade off. We want to make the battlegrounds the best they can be, but we want to add new battlegrounds as well.
Sounds awesome. Back to this balancing for competitive - something that Dustin Browder said in the State of the Game panel was talking about Nova, about how she’s scooting the razor’s edge, being very powerful in quick match but not quite as popular in the competitive scene. This is something you guys have to keep in mind all the time. How do you guys balance between those two and find the “fine line” for each hero?
It’s definitely a challenge. There’s a lot of things we’re looking at, we want characters to have good win rates in ladder, making sure characters are viable in eSports, making sure that they have good talent diversity and they’re picked a lot. For a character like Nova, the challenge for us is that if she does too much burst damage, she can instantly kill someone like Kael’thas. If you’re playing as Kael’thas in Quick Match by yourself, what do you do, right? But at the same time, on the pro level, where teams are drafting in groups of five, and they’re playing really well together, Nova may be perfectly balanced, even if she’s able to one-shot Kael’thas. So it definitely is a challenge for us. For Nova specifically, we want to increase the total damage she brings to a team fight, but not through burst. We could do that in a couple ways - maybe her snipe cooldown goes down a bit so she can use it a little bit more often, things like that.
That’s really interesting - those little tweaks can change a hero very significantly, very cool to hear. In terms of new heroes, you guys have been steadily releasing heroes about every three weeks. Is this something you guys see going forward as sustainable? I know MOBAs in the past have done something like that and slowed down over time - is this something you guys are looking to continue with for the near future?
For the near future, absolutely. I think right now we’re hitting about three and a half weeks - sometimes three, sometimes four. We’d love to get to a spot where we’re hitting, say, three weeks, for the short term future we want to continue adding a lot of characters to the game. I think there’s huge value added every time a character comes in, whether it’s new strategies or augmenting existing strategies. We’re really excited to continue to keep bring heroes into the Nexus.
So let’s talk about specialists a little bit. Really cool design - heroes that break the boundaries of assassin, different and very unique playstyles for every hero. This is not something we see often in MOBAs. What is the inspiration for the different specialists? Does it come mostly from the inspiration of the character themselves, or is it just random ideas shot throughout the office? Like, “what if we had a character supplemented another hero for the majority of a match instead of helping out directly” in the case of Abathur?
It’s definitely a combination of both things. We have a list of things that are defined in the genre, like “heroes will fight in combat!”. Okay, so, Abathur doesn’t, right? Or, “a hero is played by one person.” Okay, well, Cho’gall. We have these list of rules for the genre and we try to figure out, “can we break these? If we break these rules, is that fun? Is that something that players want to do?” And then often times when we find out, “okay, it’d be really cool to do a character that is controlled by two players,” then we’re kind of looking at our list and saying, “are there any cool heroes that can do that? Ooh, Cho’gall, yeah, the two headed ogre!” Other times it’s different. We really wanted to do Abathur, he’s a really iconic zerg character from Heart of the Swarm. He was one of the characters that our Starcraft players and fans really wanted to see, and we really wanted to add him to Heroes. But at the same time, we knew that Abathur is not really going to be in a lane brawling with Diablo, right? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. So we started thinking about - what COULD Abathur do? What could be really unique about him? That’s kind of where that came from.
In terms of the different universes in the game - Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo - there’s a little bit of an imbalance, there’s a lot of Warcraft heroes, and Starcraft/Diablo heroes kinda bring up the rear. Is this due to Warcraft’s immense popularity? Or is this just a side effect of releasing new heroes every couple weeks? Obviously you don’t want to release, say, seven Diablo heroes in a row.
We definitely want to be releasing a wide variety of characters and kinda bouncing around. One of the things of the Eternal Conflict was that we did feel like it went a little long. Four months of kind of all Diablo, which is really cool, but for some players, they’re like, “eh, can we get some Starcraft or Warcraft?” [chuckles] There is a huge list of characters we want to do, and Warcraft has a really iconic history of a lot of really awesome characters, whether it be Thrall or Arthas, right? And obviously there’s a lot of really cool characters from Starcraft and Diablo as well. We definitely want to have a good mix, but at the same time, we want to make iconic and awesome characters. And if that means Warcraft might have a couple more characters, that’s cool.
Piggybacking on that - Diablo characters. There’s obviously a lot of awesome Diablo characters in the game. Most of them are from Diablo 3. Do you guys have any ideas on doing a Diablo 1 or 2 nephalem, or maybe a Diablo 1 or 2 villain? Is that something you guys want to do in the near future?
I I don't know about the near future, but our list of 200 characters definitely includes some bosses you’d expect from the Diablo franchise, some character classes, and so on. We’d definitely like to explore that going forward. When you look at the characters we’ve done from Diablo 3, and maybe the characters you’d expect, there’s still a lot we haven’t done yet. Malthael, Imperius, and some of the character classes come to mind. There’s also a lot of really cool characters from Diablo 2, like Baal or Mephisto. Mephisto is probably the most popular we get. There’s a lot of room there for cool Diablo characters.
Absolutely - that was my thought when I was going over what I wanted to see coming up - Mephisto or Baal would be so cool! You can tell I love Diablo 2. [chuckles] In terms of hero diversity in tournaments, do you guys want to see all heroes played at a competitive level? Or is it unrealistic to say, we want all 50ish heroes to be played competitively, often? How do you guys deal with meta heroes and finding a good balance?
I want to go to the moon, y’know? [chuckles] Obviously it’s challenging to bring in all the characters. An ideal situation would be that there’s a huge roster of characters that are played a lot of the time, and then there’s characters like Azmodan where you see, “oh he was played two times that tournament!” But those were two really cool moments. If we can get every character as a “main” character, or played in some way, that would be ideal. Gazlowe is someone we talked about on the panel. He’s a really cool character, and wouldn’t it be cooler if you saw him once in awhile on Sky Temple?
Totally - have those heroes that fill those specific niches. They maybe aren’t the greatest in all scenarios, but in the places they shine, they really shine.
And you definitely bring up a good point, it’s extremely challenging. It’s not just as simple as making sure every hero has a 50% win rate, right? You have to do more than that.
I got the impression from both the panels I’ve gone to so far - the Deep Dive and State of the Game - that you guys really DO go to the moon and dream huge. This is shown through the gameplay, heroes & battlegrounds. The heroes team is constantly pushing the envelope as to what you can do in a MOBA. Is this something you guys strive for every day in the office? Or are there days where you guys just say, “let’s make some normal heroes, do some normal stuff?”
We definitely want to do some “normal” heroes, because that is a huge value add for a lot of players. If we were to add another mage to the game, or in the case of Lunara and Greymane, we felt like they were more core basic attackers. We only had Raynor and Valla, MAYBE Tychus a little bit. [chuckles] We wanted to add more characters into that role in the game. While Cho’gall is one of the coolest heroes in the world, we want to add more characters that are accessible and fun for everyone, like Greymane or Lunara.
Thank you very much Matthew for taking the time out to answer some questions.
Absolutely. My pleasure.
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