This year has been incredible for Heroes of the Storm: you’ve launched the game and had great eSports success with Heroes of the Dorm on ESPN2. What kinds of things have you guys been doing, and are you looking to do, to effectively get new players?
Hugh: You can see some of the things that we’re doing here at the show. We’re trying out a new type of hero with Cho’gall. If you’re already playing Heroes of the Storm, and you wanted to get your friend in that hasn’t thought about playing before, now they have an opportunity to come in and play in a way that is a little less imposing than it was before. So that’s one step. We also showed off the new map, which is a new way of playing objectives. The big thing we’re focused on that we didn’t show off too much here is improving matchmaking, so that the games are going to be better experiences for everybody involved, especially at the high end of the playerbase. We’re also working on Grandmaster for ranked, in addition to looking at all of our ranked modes of play.
The Eternal Conflict was a huge success, and we’ve had smaller events in game as well, like the Hallow’s End event and the Cho’gall event coming up. What kinds of events do you guys want to tackle going forward?
Phill: We learned a lot from the Eternal Conflict. It was great to roll that out and have a suite of heroes and maps that were all themed. The lessons we’ve learned are definitely going to be applied to future events. Things like the quests and getting people immersed in the experience of bringing another world into the Nexus. We’re really excited to show off that kind of stuff when we do the next one.
Ranged warriors are kind of a taboo in MOBAs. People think of tanks as these beefy frontliners. You guys tried to break the boundaries on that with Rexxar, which is the closest thing we have to a ranged warrior. Even then, the real warrior part of Rexxar is Misha, who is melee. Is a ranged warrior something you guys are looking into more going forward? Do you want to continue exploring that space, or is it really difficult?
Hugh: There’s definitely challenges when it comes to designing a ranged warrior. As a warrior, you want to be up front, protecting your team. We have a couple ideas in the works to get that type of character into the game. We’re trying to continue to add different characters that fit niches that haven’t been fit already in the Nexus, and that is one of those niches that we could do more than what we’ve done so far.
A lot of players have commented on the lack of Heroes eSports advertisement from within the game client, and there’s only a small news box on the actual battle.net client. Is adding something like an eSports ticker inside the game something you guys are interested in?
Hugh: Adding more eSports content into the Heroes client is definitely something that we’ve talked about. Right now, with our priorities being on matchmaking and ranked play, a lot of the resources on our team used to work on those would also be used to work on that in-game eSports content. While it’s really important to us, our highest priorities are blocking us from doing that at this time. We’ll keep reevaluating going forward what is at the top of our list.
Today, Kim Pham mentioned that you guys are trying to do a World Championship for most seasons, having a couple a year with a significant prize pool for each. Do you think that this will help propel Heroes even more into the limelight of eSports?
Phill: It will definitely help to increase the exposure that is has. It’s gonna create more opportunities for everybody involved in the Heroes eSports scene, from the players to the organizations to the sponsors. I see it as a really positive step in the right direction.
Going back to new players, do you guys see any hurdles that are holding new players back from really enjoying Heroes? Have you guys tackled anything along those lines recently?
Phill: We do have some discussions coming up. When we playtest - we saw this with Starcraft - there are definitely simple factors that we can change to help people integrate into the game. Research might show that “oh, they skipped a video,” or “they’re not reading the tooltips,” so for new user testing, we’re definitely looking forward to improving that. We’re also looking into making better points of access for experienced players coming from other games. Part of that is just being able to communicate via overall mechanics. There’s always going to be that learning curve of, “okay, I’m getting dropped in here, what does soak mean? What are these terms, what are these gameplay mechanics that I’m not getting?” We can always make improvements to that to try to make the game as accessible as possible.
Hugh: With our main focus being on hero development, the biggest thing that we can do is adding heroes like Cho’gall - a hero that can be picked up by people that maybe were worried about playing this type of game. Since we are getting him out for free, that means that the new player is able to play him right out of the gate. That’s a big thing on the hero development side.
Thanks a bunch to both Hugh and Phill for taking time to answer some of our questions.
