Heroes of the Storm (HotS) is Blizzard’s foray into the MOBA genre currently dominated by League of Legends (LoL) and Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA 2). For the first time in my life, I find myself disappointed by a game made by Blizzard. In this article, I will be going over why I am so underwhelmed by the game. Normally with my analysis articles I try to stay away being too negative and focus on the game’s strengths, but unfortunately this article is mostly critique.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of League of Legends, and many would point to that being the reason I dislike Heroes of the Storm so much, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I’m a huge Blizzard fanboy, and have been all my life. When HotS was announced, I was really excited. My favorite company, making a game in my favorite genre, where I could play the characters I had spent the last 20 years with? Sign me up! If HotS had been a better game, I would have swapped away from League and never looked back, but that didn’t happen. Why not?
I think HotS‘s design tunnel-visioned on one goal, to be an easily approachable MOBA, and forgot important PvP design fundamentals along the way. The end result is a game that is unsatisfying to play, for a multitude of reasons.
Before I get into this, I want to state that this is all, of course, my opinion. I tend to word statements as absolutes because I think that filling an article with constant “I think” and “in my opinion” makes for weak reading, but nevertheless judgement on game design is always subjective. I don’t like Heroes of the Storm, and I’m going to say why, but obviously many people do like it. If you like Heroes, then I can’t take that away from you.
Let’s Start With Something Positive
There’s actually some systems in Heroes of the Storm that I really do like, the foremost being the talent tree system, an innovation that takes the place of the item system in traditional MOBAs.
The first reason I like this innovation, and the most important, is that the talent tree system is much easier for new players to understand. When players first play League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients 2, games that both use the traditional item model, new players are overwhelmed. There’s hundreds of items to choose from, its choice overload, and it’s scary for a new player because so many of those choices are straight up wrong for the character they are playing. Modern games combat this by having a “recommended” items feature, but the talent tree system in HotS circumvents the problem entirely.
The game only presents four choices at any one time, and all of those four choices are legitimate. While experienced players may collectively agree that certain talent choices are sub-optimal, none of them are ever going to be 100% incorrect, which can easily be the case in the traditional model.
Even for experienced players though, I think this system offers advantages. The second reason I really like the talent system is because of how much easier it is to balance the game around it. With the talent system, all the tuning knobs for a character are independent from other characters. The designers of traditional MOBAs constantly have to worry if a new item is going to get built on characters it was never intended for, and be overpowered in those hands. Blizzard never has that worry.
This leads to my third reason for liking the talent system, it allows for much more evocative and interesting choices. The designers can present the player with awesome choices they otherwise couldn’t, because giving those same choices to every character would be unviable. Those talent choices can also be very evocative to that character. Whereas the item system can inhibit interesting character designs in other MOBAs, the talent system can enable them. Unfortunately, I think that HotS mostly squanders this opportunity, and I’ll get more into that later.
The talent system as a whole is really smart. Heroes of the Storm has the goal of being an approachable MOBA, and in many cases overly-focusing on this goal is the reason the game falls flat for me. The talent system is an example of accomplishing HotS’s goal in a way that enhances the game, rather than detracting from it. There are some advantages to the traditional item system, of course; it allows for more customization and exploration by the players, among other things. However, if I were to make a MOBA of my own, I would use the talent system.
Underwhelming Heroes
My first major criticism of Heroes of the Storm is that I find the hero characters themselves very underwhelming.
The majority of the heroes I play in HotS feel to me like their development was rushed, and below the standards of quality set by the leaders of the genre. This is very disappointing, Blizzard is usually the company setting a new bar of quality with their games, not squeaking under it. Heroes of the Storm has a very fast schedule for releasing heroes, once a month, and perhaps that rate is too quick to release characters of the level of quality I expect of Blizzard.
When I play a character in Heroes, my first impression of the abilities is usually very disappointing. I rarely feel like the abilities of an individual character come together into one cohesive kit, they often feel instead like just 5 random abilities that fit a theme.
As an example, Jaina’s kit is a collection of abilities that slow enemies and damage them, but there’s nothing more to it: no combinations that can be used, no decisions to make with her ability order. Compare her to Brand from League of Legends, who is a very similar concept (elemental mages with a skillshot based kit), but the player is given various decisions how to use his abilities, as a different order of abilities will give different results. Brand also gives a satisfying reward for hitting all of his abilities, which is more good game design icing on top. If Jaina was in League of Legends, I’m sure that there would be many more interactions between the abilities, like casting Cone of Cold on an enemy that was chilled would freeze them in place for a moment, and hitting a frozen enemy with Frostbolt would deal triple damage (and the ability would be called Ice Lance).
The designers at Blizzard aren’t dumb or lazy, so why did they choose to go in this direction? Like many of the decisions made in HotS, Blizzard didn’t want to overly complicate the game and turn off new players. I think that’s a noble goal, and I’m certainly always harping about new player experience, but HotS goes too far. While it’s important to make the characters easily understandable, it’s also important that they are fun and have depth to their kits so players can master them. New players don’t stay new forever. In my Warwick article I discussed how surprisingly complicated some of Warwick’s abilities are, despite the character being designed with new players in mind, but complimented how intuitive they were to understand regardless. I think in HotS we see the results of the other direction of thinking, where we don’t trust players not to get scared off.
The ideal is to create abilities that allow for interesting decisions while also being simple to understand, with little text needed to explain them. It’s fully possible, although difficult, but I know Blizzard can do it. I think HotS’s characters need more development time in order to come closer to this ideal.
More Exciting Talents Please
If Blizzard wants characters to be un-intimidating to pick up, they have the option of using the talent system to introduce these added interactions. If so though, the player needs to be given those choices very early on in the game, so they aren’t stuck playing a boring character for long. As a matter of fact Jaina’s Cone of Cold does indeed freeze enemies for 1 second if you take a talent, but not until level 16, which is too little, too late. It’s a pretty lame reward for hitting level 16, and that’s systematic of most of the talent choices, they feel like underwhelming minor upgrades.
Leveling up should be exciting and carry with it exciting improvements, I don’t want to increase my Blizzard’s size by 30% and for me to think “oh, yeah I guess that’s bigger.” I want my Blizzard’s size to increase by 100% and for me to get excited about it. When high level players fight in the endgame, it should feel like a volatile clash of superpowers. Instead, it’s basically the same experience that the game was at level 1, and I never feel like I get to reach any sort of endgame aspiration.
Trapped!
I also think that the premise of Heroes of the Storm -that it contains characters from all of Blizzard’s intellectual properties- often hurts character design, and “traps” the designers. This became particularly obvious when the game started to introduce Overwatch characters.
The characters from Overwatch always feel very uninspired to me, their abilities are directly lifted from the original game, and don’t feel particularly suited to Heroes of the Storm. The abilities these characters have work just fine in a first person shooter, and are fun and interesting to use in that setting, but when translated over to a MOBA they feel out of place. There is also an important difference in the creation of these characters in their original game: the characters and their abilities in Overwatch were developed from the designers deciding what new unique gameplay styles and strategic options they would like to introduce into Overwatch. Those same characters, when brought over to Heroes, aren’t fulfilling the same design goals.
At the same time however, I understand that the designers are trapped: if they create entirely new abilities for these characters, players won’t feel like it represents the character. I suspect the designers are even more frustrated than I am, and I don’t really see a way out for them.
Satisfying Gameplay
Rarely in HotS do I find abilities and attacks satisfying. I’m constantly wondering if my ability actually connected with the opponent. Part of this is the audio and visual feedback from the characters’ abilities, I often feel that not enough time was put into making them feel rewarding to connect, which again comes back to the short development cycles of these characters.
Another major reason is related to how health bars are displayed in HotS. In most other MOBAs, whenever a unit takes a hit, that unit’s health bar leaves behind a highlighted area showing where the unit’s health was a moment ago, which communicates how much damage the latest hit did. In HotS, the health bars just appear at whatever the new health value is at, leaving room to wonder if any damage happened at all.
I also think the lack of last-hitting in the game also contributes to basic attacks feeling less satisfying than I’m used to in a MOBA. In traditional MOBAs, many basic attacks are rewarded with a small amount of gold, and there’s a satisfaction to pulling off such a precise timing. We don’t get that in Heroes of the Storm.
The Lack of an Clear Point of Improvement
In my PvP Lessons article, I talked about the benefits of having “clear points of improvement”. The summary is that a PvP game greatly benefits from having a skill that can always be improved upon. In the traditional MOBA, that “clear point of improvement” is last-hitting minions.
Heroes of the Storm does not have the mechanic of last-hitting minions. In other MOBAs I know I can always improve my skill at the game by improving my skill at last-hitting minions, and no matter how stuck at my skill level I find myself, I know I always have that guiding light in my quest for improvement. I find myself adrift in that quest when playing Heroes of the Storm. If I’m consistently hitting all my skill-shots on priority targets, always showing up to teamfights, and always ensuring I’m in lane getting the maximum rate of experience, what should I be improving on? Obviously, there is still a lot I could be improving on, and any experienced HotS player would find a lot of problems with my play, but I don’t feel that way when playing the game. Instead, I feel skill-capped.
Unfortunately, I have this problem with a lot of Blizzard’s games. I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft, and in my heyday I played at some of the highest levels of PvP competition, playing both with and against rank 1 players. Even so, it was common for us to not know why we lost a game, and what to improve upon for next time, even though we would actively search for the reasons. We wouldn’t know what skill to improve upon in order to become better at the game, and that is a serious problem in a PvP game. I give WoW some leeway in this regard, it was never fundamentally designed to be a PvP game, and the genre doesn’t have a widely accepted solution to this problem. Heroes of the Storm’s genre, however, does have a pre-made solution to this problem: the last-hitting mechanic, and for this reason and more, I think not including it is a mistake.
On Weight and Legends
One of the most fundamental things that strikes me when I play Heroes of the Storm is that I feel none of my decisions have any weight behind them. No matter what I do, I never really feel like I’m influencing the outcome of the game, positively or negatively. Instead I just feel like I’m running around doing my thing every game, and then my team either wins or loses.
When I play the game, I just don’t care, and it’s been very difficult to pin down why. Part of it is because I’m not invested in the game, I know that, but I’ve observed this same lack of weight when I’ve introduced the game to others. I have a lot of friends and family that I want to play MOBAs with, and when they play Heroes of the Storm they also express this lack of weight to their actions. Later, when we play LoL or Dota, they feel a great deal of weight on them (arguably too much, which is what HotS tries so hard to avoid).
While it’s not the whole story, there’s a few design choices that I think contribute here.
Maps are very small, and the ability to mount up allows players to move around the map so quickly that map positioning isn’t really relevant. You’re never too concerned with where you are on the map, because you know you just mount up and be anywhere else in just a few seconds.
Map positioning is part of a larger problem in Heroes: I don’t think the game pulls players in enough directions. In the traditional MOBA model at any one point players need to kill minions and combat the enemy players. The need to balance the two adds context to the decisions the players are constantly making, and the players that are better able to balance both rise above the rest. In Heroes of the Storm, the minions are mostly irrelevant, all you need to worry about are the enemy players.
Some would argue that this is a good thing, the focus is always on fighting your opponents, but I disagree. One of the fundamentals of creating a good experience is to have variations of tone: moments of rest, periods of building up tension, dramatic surprises, and climaxes of action. League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients have all these moments over the course of a single game, but Heroes of the Storm is a constant climax of fighting, and rather than being exciting it actually ends up being a very flat experience.
I Want To Be The Guy
Also contributing to the flat experience is HotS’s system of the whole team sharing experience. Blizzard created this system because they wanted to avoid the moments where players felt so weak they couldn’t fight back, as it was a huge turn off for players, especially new ones. While I understand this fear and think it’s completely legitimate, I think the systems in Heroes go too far. While Heroes removes the low moments of feeling very weak, it also removes the high moments where you feel very strong, and that undermines a major aesthetic of a PvP game in the first place.
One of the biggest reasons we play PvP games is because we want to be that guy. The hero in the action movie that takes on 10 men at once and doesn’t even bat an eye. The master swordsman that takes on a horde of lesser skilled men and walks away unscathed. The legend you are in awe of and aspire to be. It’s a primal desire in humans, particularly men, to achieve that level of mastery and dominance, but we live in a civilized society that doesn’t allow us to just go around challenging people to duels, and becoming lethal master swordsmen or whatnot. In the absence of that, we turn to video games.
In Heroes of the Storm, you never get to be that guy. Just as importantly, you’ll never meet that guy and be in awe of him. It’s always a flat experience, with no low lows and no high highs.
An emerging theme in my articles is that a variable, turbulent experience is preferable to a flat experience. Horizon vs Persona encapsulated this theme in the context of a story-based game, and Heroes of the Storm reinforces it again in a PvP context.
More Maps != More Fun
There are a lot of different maps in HotS, and while more content would seem like an improvement over other games in the genre, I think the way the game designs these maps hurts more than helps.
Whenever I see a new map in Heroes my reaction is always, “ugh, what gimmick do I need to deal with now?” I’ll admit that part of this reaction is because I’m not an invested player of the game and constantly looking forward to new content, but I’m not an invested Overwatch player either, and I always appreciate new map releases in that game.
The difference lies in Overwatch’s design model for maps. Overwatch has figured out what gameplay plays the best for its game, and new maps use those same tried-and-tested gameplay mechanics, just in a new setting that brings new positioning considerations. The game is confident in its gameplay and that players will still enjoy the same gameplay in a new setting. Heroes feels insecure in its gameplay, constantly worried that if it’s not throwing something brand new and exciting at the players all the time they’ll get bored.
Another reason I don’t like the eclectic maps in Heroes of the Storm is because it undermines the game’s fundamental goal, to be approachable. I constantly find myself in over my head in HotS because I never understand what I’m supposed to be doing on a map, even though the game is ostensibly supposed to be very easy to understand.
There is one map in HotS that I like far more than all the others: the Tomb of the Spider Queen. In this map, players have to pick up gems that are dropped by minions, and deliver them to the center of the map. This mechanic actually addresses a lot of the major issues I have with HotS:
- It encourages lane presence. In most maps I feel that lane presence doesn’t matter, and bullying your opponent out of lane feels pointless. In Tomb of the Spider Queen, bullying your opponent off of gems is a legitimate victory.
- It’s a player driven mechanic. In most maps it feels like Blizzard is telling players when its time to fight, but fights in this map are player-driven.
Rather than this eclectic collection of maps with their own rules, I would have liked to have seen the game have one centralized map mechanic that was really well polished, and then given us multiple settings with those mechanics. I think Tomb of the Spider Queen is a good template to work from, we could have had players collecting gems in new settings, and I think that would have been a better direction for the game. This is particularly relevant because although Tomb of the Spider Queen is my favorite map from a design perspective, its one of the least visually appealing. Nobody likes spiders.
I find it interesting looking at League of Legends’ history in comparison. That game also started off boasting about having more maps than its competitors. Over the years, League has decided to focus itself on just one main map, even to the point of removing maps that previously existed, and choosing not to release a new map they had created. Many LoL players expressed a lot of disagreement this direction, and players will always say that more content is better, but I think Riot made the right choice. While having lots of maps makes for a good selling point in marketing, it doesn’t necessarily translate into a better game.
The “Casual Game” Defense
The heart of my criticisms for Heroes of the Storm are that I think its design choices undermine what should be a core goal of the game, the players’ pursuit of mastery. A lot of people defend these choices by saying that Heroes isn’t trying to be a competitive game, it’s trying to be a “casual” game. Certainly Blizzard themselves have said multiple times that they aimed to make a MOBA that was approachable for new players to the genre, or who were turned off by other games in the genre. The defense is that it’s okay for HotS not to hold up to scrutinizing it from a competitive angle, it was never intended for that audience.
I don’t accept that argument. Blizzard has always aimed to make all their games approachable, yet also aimed for their games to be competitively deep. A common design motto of theirs is “simplicity with depth”, and all their games have been entries into existing genres with the goal of making their entry more polished and more accessible than what was already in that genre.
A large part of Blizzard’s incredible success as a company comes from achieving this goal so well, so often. Overwatch is their latest game that I think really accomplished this goal of approachable simplicity with depth, and it’s been incredibly successful. I would argue that Overwatch is an even simpler, more approachable game than Heroes, but Overwatch also holds up just fine as a competitive game.
Clearly Blizzard does want Heroes of the Storm to be taken seriously from a competitive angle, they have a ranked ladder, and a professional e-sports league. I feel that this argument is more the fans defending the game, rather than a position Blizzard themselves would take.
The Tale of Omni
Heroes of the Storm reminds me a lot of the first game that I ever made professionally, which was a MOBA called Omni. Omni, being my first major project, naturally had a lot of design issues, and was an important learning experience.
When I was asked to make a MOBA, I wasn’t really a fan of the genre (or rather, I wasn’t a fan of DotA, which was the entire genre back then). So when I was designing Omni, I decided to make a game that addressed the reasons I didn’t like the genre. While this isn’t a bad direction in and of itself, the problem was that I also didn’t appreciate what was good about the genre.
A lot of the decisions made in HotS’s design feel like they were made by a team that didn’t like the genre, like I did back then. Non-MOBA players look at how the game is always played on the same map, and assume that’s boring. Players from other genres look at MOBAs and compare how punishing it is to die in a MOBA compared to say, a first-person shooter. They look at laning and think it’s boring because they don’t appreciate all the subtleties, the precise movements and mind games that happen in laning. Thus we get a MOBA with a plethora of maps, little punishment for mistakes, and trivialized laning.
I don’t know if HotS was designed by people who didn’t like MOBAs, that seems harsh, but it was certainly designed for people who didn’t.
HotS 2.0
I have a lot of criticisms for Heroes of the Storm, but at this point in the game’s life-cycle I think the criticisms are justified, and that it’s not just me preferring a certain style of game. Although we don’t have access to sales figures from Blizzard, I think it’s safe to say that HotS is one of Blizzard’s least successful products. While I anecdotally see a general lack of interest in the gaming community, and can see some indicators like Twitch viewer counts to back this claim, there’s something more concrete that points to HotS under-performance: the 2.0 update.
I was excited when I saw the 2.0 update announcement. “2.0” signifies a major update, and I was hoping it would mean addressing some of the issues I had with the game. It was not to be however, instead the update focused exclusively on changing aspects of the game I had no problems with: the new player retention, rewards, and monetization systems. I was really baffled, because I thought that those were all areas Heroes of the Storm had done really well.
For those who don’t know, in the 2.0 update, players now buy loot boxes from the store, instead of skins directly. In the loot boxes you can get random skins, as well as new added sprays, emotes, and other minor things. Additionally, the player leveling system was changed drastically.
Perhaps the developers at Blizzard honestly felt like these systems needed improvement, but it seems to me the 2.0 update was a reaction to the game not bringing in much money compared to Hearthstone and Overwatch, games which have randomized reward structures which HotS now emulates. I don’t know if the new monetization system has improved Blizzard’s revenue or not, but I don’t think the old system was at fault for any under-performance in revenue: it was exactly the same system League of Legends uses, and that game has been very financially successful. Blizzard wanted HotS to be pulling in as much money as Hearthstone and Overwatch, but the truth is those games make better revenue because they are better games.
Things I Do Really Like
This article is mainly a criticism of Heroes of the Storm, but there are a lot of things I do really like about the game.
I love Cho’Gall’s design, he’s so much fun to play with a friend, and I love that the more casual attitude of the game allowed the developers to explore a character like that. I would love to see more characters like this, in any MOBA. Even in games that take themselves as “seriously” as LoL and Dota 2 would benefit from a fun character like this every now and then. I view it much like some of the cards in Magic: the Gathering: you might not want it to be competitively viable, but there will be an audience that absolutely loves it.
I absolutely love the skins in this game. The production values on them are sky high, and it’s a great example of how Blizzard so often sets new bars for quality. I love seeing my favorite characters re-imagined in different universes, and I love seeing Warcraft characters wearing different gear sets from World of Warcraft. I’ve probably spent as much time in the store looking at skins as actually playing the game, and before the store was changed, I would buy random skins as impulse purchases just because they were so cool.
Finally, I really appreciate the queuing system where you choose which character you want to play and then you get matched into a team. As somebody that was used to rarely getting the role and character I really wanted when playing League of Legends, especially before that game changed to its new role queue system, I greatly appreciated HotS’s system. While I expect players will have issues with this system, and complain about getting put into teams with awful team compositions, let’s be honest, that happens all the time in other MOBAs too.
I think the queuing system in Heroes of the Storm makes a lot of sense for its design goals too. New genre players aren’t going to accept that they really wanted to play one character but then be told by their teammates that they can’t. Like my praise for the talent system, this is another system that I think accomplishes the goal of having an approachable MOBA in the right way.
Imagining a Different Game
So, what would I change about Heroes of the Storm, if I could?
Well, keeping away from giant, sweeping changes that turns the game into something else entirely and move it away from its fundamental goals, here’s what I would do:
1: Experience Changes
Change experience to be local, rather than team wide, so players on the same team can be different levels. Getting the last hit on a minion grants a small bonus experience to everybody nearby, divided equally. Killing an enemy player gives experience to all players involved in the kill, divided equally. All players gain a baseline experience over time.
So the first thing I would do is change how experience is handled and reintroduce last-hitting to the game. I want to remove the concept of the entire team being the same level, and move it towards players having individual levels and experience, so that the gameplay isn’t so “flat”. I want to reward players for precision and timing with last hits, and create that “obvious point of improvement”. I agree with HotS’s attitude of avoiding kill-stealing scenarios, so the whole team benefits equally from kills, as long as they were involved.
Also, I want a baseline experience gain over time so that nobody gets too left out. This could be likened to traditional MOBAs getting baseline gold over time, but I’m looking for much higher numbers here. I would be aiming for about 40% of the experience players get to be from the baseline, and the other half being from minions and kills.
The goal with all these changes to keep HotS’s direction that nobody gets left completely behind and stomped, while reintroducing more areas to develop skill and be rewarded for individual skill.
2. Homogenize Map Objectives
All maps have a similar baseline for their mechanics, based on Tomb of the Spider Queen’s gem mechanic, creating a common language for how the maps’ mechanics work.
As I’ve said, I really like Tomb of the Spider Queen’s map mechanics, and I think they are flexible enough to base the game on. Every map would have minions that drop “gems” of some sort, and those gems would need to be delivered to some place on the map. In Tomb of the Spider Queen, the gems would be called be “spider gems”, and delivering the gems to the center of the map spawns a powerful spider boss.
Other maps could keep their unique flavor, while still using the gems and delivery template. For instance, on the Sky Temple map players could collect “sand gems”, and the delivery points would only become active at certain times. In the Hanamura map, delivering gems to the payload would move the payload further, etc.
Keeping the “fighting over gems” mechanic allows for players to establish lane dominance and makes it an important part of the game. It gives context for decisions of when to attack and when to back off, but also pulls them into being active participants and not rewarding passivity like the game currently does.
3. Talents
Rework talents so they give more obvious payoffs. Players can now only spend their talent points while at their base.
I would rework the talents for characters so they had much more obvious effects, making them more exciting to choose. The goal is for gameplay to feel like a clash of superpowers in the late game, and feel completely different from the much weaker early game fights. Until everybody starts getting a few talent points, they should actually even feel a bit weak.
I also want to give players a reason to return back to base, as well as giving windows of opportunity to opponents to capitalize on a player that hasn’t returned back to base for a while. Additionally, I don’t like how a giant menu appears mid-combat, as this can be very distracting.
4. No Mounts
Remove mounts entirely. Gone.
I’d just get rid of mounts entirely, reintroducing map positioning as an important element that players need to balance against other factors. Heroes that have mechanics that take the place of mounts could keep those mechanics, giving them added mobility and adding strategic diversity to their kits, as long as it makes sense thematically for the character to have it.
5. Fix Up Feedback Issues
Add the “previous health highlight” feature. Add a small blood splatter effect on hits. Do a pass on all characters and ensure all their abilities have audio and visual feedback on abilities.
Cleaning up some of these feedback issues is very important to making the game feel more satisfying to play. The health highlighting feature is an obvious inclusion and would help a lot. I would also like to see little blood splatter effects when hitting enemies, spraying in the direction the animation of the attack was coming from (think Yasuo’s effect in League of Legends). Not because I’m a gore lover, but just for the added feedback that your attacks are dealing damage. I don’t think it would push the game into being considered more violent or earn it a higher ESRB rating.
Lastly, a pass is needed on all the characters’ abilities once these feedback changes are in place, and propping up the feedback when necessary. For instance, currently Garrosh’s Decimate makes a sound when it connects with an enemy, but there’s no visual confirmation. Does it need one, once the health bar and blood effects have been added? Ideally, each character would get a feedback pass like this.
Conclusion
Of course, suggesting changes like this is just me indulging myself. Not only would I never be able to change Heroes of the Storm so drastically, but the game has so much content now that such changes would be so massive an undertaking, it’d never happen. To my disappointment, Heroes of the Storm is going to remain as it is.
My dislike of Heroes of the Storm is a personal opinion, and the direction the development team took with it was always something I wasn’t going to agree with, I’ve always been a “hardcore” gamer. However, I’d like to think that with this article, I’ve shown that some of the issues with Heroes of the Storm aren’t purely subjective, there are some fundamental game design issues at play. This is disappointing for a Blizzard game, they are normally such masters of the fundamentals of game design.
Despite all my criticisms I’ve heaped on the game, I don’t Heroes of the Storm isn’t a “bad” game. I don’t like many of the design decisions made for it, and I don’t like it as much as other games in the same genre, which is why I play those other games instead.
I hope that this in-depth critique of Heroes of the Storm has helped give you some insight into the design of PvP games. Thank you for reading!