Slaying sacred cows of action-RTS design in Heroes of the Storm

Even for Blizzard, stepping up to bat in the genre that Dota built must be a daunting task.

built must be a daunting task. In a field so thoroughly dominated by a pair of games-- League of Legends and Dota 2-- any attempt to even gain a little market share isn’t remotely easy. Not least because the success of both of those games remains something of a nebulous unknown.

Yes, they’re about teamwork and strategy, but the specifics of which mechanics are "core" to the genre, and which are each individual games’ foibles and unique personality, isn’t nearly as well established as in other genres.

And taking the established and exemplifying it is what Blizzard does. It did it with base-building strategy games in Warcraft and Starcraft , it did it with MMOs in World of Warcraft , action RPGs with Diablo, and CCGs with Hearthstone . Blizzard's games are well-seeded genres pushed to their respective peaks. But Heroes of the Storm , which releases today, feels like a different beast.

Striking down sacred cows

“We went back to the original Dota , the mod for Warcraft 3 , and designed from there,” says Dustin Browder the creative director of Heroes of the Storm , and a Starcraft and Starcraft 2 designer. “Not literally, as we didn’t have the code, but to ask ourselves: ‘Where do we think this was going in 2002?’ A lot of things that have changed since then are very cool, but none of them are a given.”

So, to Blizzard, the core of these games was there, in embryonic stage, over a decade ago in the first iteration of the mod. It’s an interesting perspective, and one that allows the developer to sidestep a 1:1 comparison with those behemoths of the genre, but also gives them a lot of freedom when it comes to striking down sacred cows and challenging what are seen as base mechanics.

For instance, Heroes of the Storm has no individual player levels. Instead, the team gains experience as a whole, pushing you more into the mentality that you’re one cog in a five-cog machine than a separate actor. Similarly, progression isn’t attained with the gold you earn from slaying AI drones and other players, but garnered by pushing down objectives and getting closer to victory.

“We were going right back to the beginning and asking where it would go from there, and that was very powerful for us. It led us to a place where we were questioning a lot of assumptions,” Browder continues. “We were very fearless about messing with the formula. From very early on people were saying ‘You can’t! You shouldn’t!’ It was very clear and loud: 'You can’t not have last-hitting!’ But it turns out you can, and it’s totally ok.”

Opening up the experience

Part of this aggressive move away from these systems could be seen as an attempt to separate Heroes of the Storm from its established contemporaries, but it’s also a move designed to remove a lot of the immediate obfuscation of the genre and make it a more accessible game to newcomers. “We did everything we could to make the tutorials as comprehensive as possible and ramp you into the experience nicely. We really want to open it up to everyone who’s interested in this kind of experience.”

And if that’s the case, unintuitive concepts like last-hitting and gold advantage, and more frustrating ones like longer disables and game-changing abilities, are dropped in favor of something that is significantly more forgiving, while still allowing for the depth of strategy these games lend themselves to.

More significantly, Heroes of the Storm departs from the accepted practices in its landscape, hurling multiple "battlegrounds" at its players, each with their own objectives and mechanics. Each battleground is its own map, each with its own unique way for players to interact with the environment to secure tactical advantages.

During an introductory presentation, Browder brings up a slide that has nothing but "20 minutes" on it, another challenge to the assumptions of the genre. League and Dota 2 games tend to typically run almost twice that time, but Heroes is aggressively pushing for a neat 20-minute average for its games. I ask Browder how he aims to get that average.

“It’s not going to hit that number all the time, and that’s ok. But we control the numbers and systems and how they interact, so we can set things so that it hits that number most of the time. You’ll see the occasional 40 minute game of Heroes , and the occasional 10 minute game, and that we’re good with. That’s exciting. We want that kind of variability, so it’s not a hard rule that every game has to be 20 minutes. It’s more-or-less, kind-of, most-of-the-time, games should be about 20 minutes. And by tweaking things like experience game, map objectives, tower health and power, we can hit that number most of the time.”

This is emblematic of the design philosophy that emerges while talking to Browder. Blizzard has a very clear idea of what Heroes is supposed to be, which niches specific heroes slot into, how maps are supposed to play out, and, ultimately, what a Dota -like should, well, look like. And when no one really knows exactly what that is, that’s something that a developer can do, to the betterment of the genre as a whole. It’s what drives a variety of experiences, and until the tenets of the genre are well established, Blizzard is going to be doing something that it's not typically known for: creating the rules themselves.