Heroes of the Storm dev on the quest to keep the MOBA strong with new heroes and changes

Heroes of the Storm had a big 2017 thanks to a significant 2.0 update that gave players a more rewarding loot system. But a MOBA like Heroes must embrace continual evolution if it wants to stay relevant in a market with heavyweights such as Riot’s League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2.

At this month’s BlizzCon, Blizzard announced two new heroes: Overwatch’s bow sniper Hanzo, and the Aspect of Life, the dragon Alexstrasza from World of Warcraft. More characters can keep current players engaged and attract others to your game, but Blizzard is also planning other additions. The studio is rethinking towers, a MOBA staple that players must contend with, and reworking the in-game camera so it can show more.

I interviewed Heroes of the Storm’s game direct, Alan Dabiri, during BlizzCon. We talked about the new characters, the reception to Heroes 2.0, and the importance of the upcoming gameplay changes.

GamesBeat: I play Hanzo a lot in Overwatch.

Alan Dabiri: You should feel right at home.

GamesBeat: Overwatch characters seem to translate easily to Heroes of the Storm. Do you think they’ve been the simplest ones for you to bring over?

Dabiri: It’s interesting. We get asked this question a lot. It’s both easy and difficult. It’s easy because Overwatch has a lot of similar mechanics to what Heroes has. It’s a team-based game. You have different abilities, different roles, Ultimates. A lot of that translates nicely. The difficult is that it’s also a different style of game. It’s a first-person shooter, while we’re this top-down MOBA-style game. Certain things like verticality — obviously Hanzo has wall climb in Overwatch, where he can go up on top of buildings.

In Heroes, we’ve tried to get that theme with his natural agility trait and jumping over terrain, but those are some aspects that — we have to figure out the Heroes version of that. The other things that can make it difficult — Heroes is a different game in the sense that, we typically have mana as a mechanic that a lot of heroes have. In Overwatch not so much. Maybe it’s more like ammunition that you’re reloading. Some heroes, we’ve tried to use that mechanic, in the case of Tracer. Other heroes, we’ve tried other mechanics. I would say it’s both easy and it’s hard.

The other thing is, there’s also a lot of player expectation when you bring a hero from Overwatch. They’re used to a specific kind of experience, since the games are so similar. When you bring over Alexstrasza, they’ve never played Alexstrasza before. They’re not sure what to expect. You have a little more room to play with that.

GamesBeat: Most Overwatch characters bring all of their original abilities to Heroes, but you still need to give them some new moves, usually another Ultimate since your game gives players the choice of two. How do you design these new abilities?

Dabiri: The Ultimates are always the place where we can shine quite a bit with Overwatch heroes, because since in Overwatch they only have one, we can always add an extra one. Usually people want the iconic one as well. Then we’ll add the extra one that’s unique to Heroes. It’s the same way we do it for all our other heroes. It’s not specific to Overwatch. We look at what would be cool for this hero, what’s a cool new mechanic that’s exciting? What do we think we might need in the game?

You mentioned the differences between his basic attack in Overwatch, for Hanzo, and in our game it’s his Q ability. We typically wouldn’t put, on a basic attack, something like that, where you hold down the attack button like on Overwatch. For us it made sense to translate that over to an ability, and then make his basic attack longer range, slower firing, but heavier hitting. It’s something the hero designers — I think they have a lot of experience now. By the end of this year we’ll have 75 heroes in this game. It’s a challenge, for sure, but I think they’ve been doing a great job.

GamesBeat: There’s always a lot of excitement when you add an Overwatch character. How do you decide which one is going to be next? You have a lot to choose from.

Dabiri: I think probably the way we choose heroes is similar for all our heroes, in the sense that — we have so many different factors. One is, clearly we want to hit the iconic heroes that are fan favorites. That’s one part of it. We also want to look at what roles are needed in our game. If we’re heavy on one thing and we need some more supports, let’s bring Alexstrasza in. She’s the Lifebinder. We can make her a support. We also look at silhouettes. We don’t want all our heroes to necessarily look identical, visually, because then it makes it difficult from a gameplay perspective. We look at what their abilities are. Can we offer something new?

In the case of Hanzo, his Scatter Arrow is something we really didn’t have in our game. In fact, we developed quite a bit of new tech just to support it with the pre-targeting UI. Literally, we’re taking into consideration all of the terrain and collision on the map. Junkrat touched on this a little bit, but Hanzo is the one where we’ve doubled down on it. It was a cool new mechanic for the game as well that we were excited to bring. A lot of factors go into it.

GamesBeat: Is it a coincidence that Hanzo and Alexstrasza both came out with this dragon theme, or is that something you thought about?

Dabiri: All those factors I just said, and then you have this other, hey, it would be cool to have two dragon characters together. We can call it Dragons of the Nexus. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t in our minds as well. But I don’t think we would make that the only part of the decision. All these other factors go into it.

GamesBeat: Has Alexstrasza ever appeared in a cinematic before?

Dabiri: She’s been in in-game cinematics in World of Warcraft. You know, I’m not sure if she’s been in a pre-rendered [one].

GamesBeat: The cinematics are always great, but a lot of times you guys are using models that Blizzard used in other movies. But the Alexstrasza model is new.

Dabiri: Yeah, she was built purely for that cinematic. She’s even the Heroes version of Alexstrasza. Some of her look is different.

GamesBeat: In the cinematic, you show her turning into her dragon form. I was expecting this to be her Ultimate ability, so I was happy and surprised when it was unlocked at the start of the match. Why did you decide to not maker her dragon form an Ultimate move?

Dabiri: For exactly that reason. Being a dragon is cool. We want to give you that ability right away. It’s also kind of core to her fundamental identity. She’s a dragon. Being able to transform into that dragon often, even before you get your heroic, is cool. The other thing is, we kind of hit up both options. We’ve also added some cool dragon-specific heroics on her Ultimates. Cleansing Flame, where she’ll fly up into the air as a dragon and rain down fireballs on the battle.

GamesBeat: Having these transforming characters is always cool, but is that a design challenge, to balance the two forms of one character?

Dabiri: It’s definitely a challenge. We’ve experienced that with a lot of characters now. But I think we’ve also learned a lot and gotten really good at doing things. One example is, we basically replace your entire ability set with another set when you’ve transformed. But something we learned very quickly was, we want to try to keep those abilities in the new form in the same vein as the other ones. If your muscle memory is that Q does healing, when I transform, we still want that to do healing. We just want to amplify that, or do something different with the healing. In the case of, let’s say, her flame buffet ability, when she transforms, it’s basically this wing buffet ability. In flame buffet you can still do crowd control in the sense that you can slow people. In her dragon form she pushes people away. You still have this mentality of, this is how I do crowd control. It’s just a different version of it. It’s a more amplified version.

GamesBeat: Being the Heroes of the Storm guy, when you watch these other cinematics or see other new Blizzard characters, like Moira, do you look at is as a MOBA designer? Do you immediately begin wondering what her HotS abilities would be?

Dabiri: It definitely goes through the mind of the Heroes designers, for sure. We’re always excited. With us celebrating all these other Blizzard universes, we will never run out of awesome heroes. Blizzard as a whole just creates some amazing characters, both thematically and also in what they do from a gameplay perspective. So yeah, when we see new heroes like that, we definitely start salivating.

GamesBeat: When HotS launched, seeing all the different franchises together was a novelty. Now we have Blizzard World in Overwatch. It’s not that jarring anymore. All these things feel like they belong together.

Dabiri: The worlds themselves, I think, are distinct. As far as canon lore are concerned, we don’t have Warcraft characters in the StarCraft universe. But I think the Blizzard ecosystem is something really special. Players who play our games typically play many of our games. They’re used to these different experiences. Getting these few opportunities to bring them all together, I think, is really cool, and players really enjoy it.

GamesBeat: You said you were going to be making some changes to the in-game camera. What’s the thought process behind that?

Dabiri: We’ve gotten this feedback even back to when we launched the game, that our camera — intentionally we made it a bit closer. We wanted to make it more of an intimate experience. Really focus on that close team fight. As we’ve gone on, we’ve kind of seen that engagement ranges have increased a bit. We’ve also started to, ourselves, rethink that original philosophy. Getting a little more map awareness, more situational awareness, is also healthy for the game.

We’ve pulled the camera out slightly. It’s not a massive increase, but we’ve pulled it out to where, if you’re in a lane, you might see a bit into the jungle area. You might see back toward the gate. Heroes that are longer range, longer engagement ranges, like Genji or Chromie, both playing as that hero and playing against that hero, this will be an improvement. But even beyond those heroes, just team fighting in general — now you might see one of your friends being chased down by someone else, where previously you might have been focused on something you were fighting yourself. We just thought it was a good change overall for the game, in that it provides a little more map awareness.

GamesBeat: You’re also making changes to some of the attack towers in the game, right?

Dabiri: We’re actually doing a whole bunch of changes. This whole set of changes we’re calling the 2018 gameplay update. It’s a lot of changes to core gameplay. Some of those changes you’re talking about fall in line with this area of, we want to make the early game a little bit more compelling. And so — we’ve always had this idea of different phases within the game, but our early game would end very quickly, because our map objectives would come up very quickly, and as a result everyone would get together and have the team fight. Which — I will say we really like that about our game. We like team fights. We love action going on. But there’s also a moment to be able to shine as an individual player. And to really show off your skill, being able to defeat your opponent in a 1v1 or 2v2 scenario. We wanted to extend that initial early game a little bit longer, but more important, make it more compelling, make it so that when I actually defeat my opponent, I get meaningful value out of it.

And so that’s where some of these other changes come into play. We’re taking away tower ammunition. Basically they can fire infinitely, so now you as a player — it’s in your interest to help push that lane. We’re buffing the minions a bit stronger so you want to push with them, because you get more value out of them when they start attacking the buildings. We did remove that stand-alone tower as well. That was almost for a different reason. That was actually for the reason of — we found that it wasn’t really providing a ton of advantage to the defender. Typically all those defenses are there for the defender’s advantage. By the time that tower even fired at anyone, most of the town had been destroyed. But we found that it was creating a bit of a choke there, where as a defender, the attackers basically had this clear tunnel of, I should line up AoE (area-of-effect) and skill shots right along that point, and I can wreck the defenders. Ultimately we thought it just cleans things up a little bit, provides a little more maneuverability for the defenders. We did roll the power of that tower into the other buildings, so we increased the health and the damage of those other buildings.

GamesBeat: Even if you understand the logic of a decision like that, is it scary to do it anyway? Towers are such a MOBA staple . Is there a fear of players rejecting any change?

Dabiri: I’ll admit, all of these changes are scary. We’re making a lot of changes at the same time. But we really think that all of these changes are good for the game, and we think a lot of them are synergistic with each other. That’s why we’re doing them at the same time. If you talk to anyone who has a live game and is making such drastic changes as this, fear will be one of the first emotions that you’ll get from them. But that’s why we’re trying to do this in the right way. We’ve been working on these changes for a long time, doing a lot of playtesting internally.

Back in October we had a summit where we invited pros and other people from the community to come and try changes out and give us feedback. And then we’re going to have this extended PTR, where the entire community will be able to play these changes as well. Everything we just announced here at BlizzCon, we may alter it. If we see, through more of this testing with the community, that some of these changes aren’t perfect, we may tweak them left or right.

GamesBeat: Unlike other MOBAs, Heroes has a lot of different maps. Do you need to adjust these changes for different levels?

Dabiri: Absolutely. That’s true in general. Some maps have different mechanics. When we talk about moving the map timers around, some maps — the mechanic is almost designed for that — for the mechanic to happen earlier. You want it to happen earlier. In other maps you want it to happen later. That’s why we took that into consideration. We’ve now standardized our timers to two different timers. We have a minute 30 and then three minutes. For the ones where the map objective really enhances the laning, we’re okay with those coming out earlier. And then with the ones where it pulls you out of the laning, that’s where we might want it to be at that three-minute mark. We absolutely consider the different maps. There may be some stuff we’ll learn. One of these changes, it makes this map too powerful or broken or whatever, and we might have to make adjustments to battlegrounds as well.

GamesBeat: Early on it seemed like the maps weren’t specifically themed to Blizzard games. Newer levels are clearly places from the likes of Overwatch and Diablo. Do players enjoy it more if the maps are also something they recognize?

Dabiri: Yeah, I think it goes both ways. Our earlier battlegrounds were set within realms of the Nexus, our own universe. Obviously making a game that celebrates all the other Blizzard universes, the players would immediately say, where’s Diablo’s thing, where’s StarCraft? We also explored that. We thought that was awesome. I love the battlegrounds we’ve come out with in those places. But I think we also have the opportunity to try some of our own places as well. And so it’s a balance. We’d like to explore existing places, but we’d also like to do new and unique places that people haven’t seen before.

GamesBeat: You had the big Heroes of the Storm 2.0 update, changing a lot of progression and adding loot boxes. How did players respond to that?

Dabiri: First off, Heroes 2.0 was a fantastic release for us. It was just ridiculous in terms of the player engagement. We had our highest numbers of all time, including the original launch of the game. A lot of the improvements that we made actually are fantastic improvements for the game, and the reception has been very positive. Again, just like with the BlizzCon stuff we’re talking about, we changed a lot. We’re changing a lot now. We changed a lot back then too. With this game, we’re always looking for constant improvement. Some of the changes, we got feedback on, that people wanted to see improvements. We’ve been making those improvements.

As an example, for loot chests, when we had our first event, we had event items have a higher probability of dropping, but they weren’t guaranteed. We got a lot of feedback from the community saying, look, you have this event, I want to get the cool event items as part of those drops. And so since then we made a change where now we guarantee those items in the loot chests. For Hallow’s End that’s how it worked. There’s other feedback that we get that we’re looking to make changes around in the future, stuff we’re not talking about yet here at BlizzCon, but very soon we’d like to make further changes. Overall the reception has been very positive. It’s made it so you can unlock anything in the game just by playing the game, which is really cool for all players. But we’re not like, okay, we’re done with that, let’s move one. We’re going to keep on improving.

GamesBeat: In the future, do you think it will be like these big yearly updates, or something here and there instead of a big 3.0 down the road?

Dabiri: I don’t know about Heroes of the Storm 3.0. But I think — first of all, our type of game requires constant updates. And so we’re going to stick with that. We’ll keep releasing content drops regularly. That’s the lifeblood of the game. I will say that a 2.0 moment in the sense that it was a larger moment was very healthy for the game. It was exciting. We brought a bunch of stuff at the same time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we do something like that again in the future. I don’t know that it’s going to be exactly like what Heroes 2.0 was, but there’s opportunity for us to have these larger moments, for sure.

GamesBeat: When you launched 2.0, you gave players Overwatch loot boxes as an in-game reward. Do you think you’ll do more of those kinds of promotions?

Dabiri: Yeah, those promotions have been incredibly successful. Because we’re this game that celebrates all the Blizzard universes, it’s natural for us to have these cross-promotional things. We have Overwatch stuff coming into the game. We have Diablo stuff coming into the game. Let’s do a cool promotion between the games. I think it’s something that we’d consider doing again in the future. We just did a whole lot of it this year, so we may turn our focus back to more promotions — we’ll still have a lot of events, but we might have more promotions within our own game for a little while here. We don’t want to burn people out on it. But I think we’re open to exploring that in the future. They’ve been extremely successful.

GamesBeat: Hearthstone and Warcraft draw from the same universe and the same characters, but Hearthstone does have some original heroes, like the Innkeeper and Reno Jackson. Do you ever think about bringing a pure Hearthstone character in the game?

Dabiri: Any character across the entire Blizzard universe, no matter what game it is, we feel — if they can be exciting, compelling, interesting, we’re open to it.

GamesBeat: We’ve had some characters, like Cho’gall, these really out-there designs. Do you think we’ll see more of that?

Dabiri: What I can say is that we’ll always continue to push ourselves. We always want to do something unique and compelling for our game, and also for the genre. I think the examples you have — Abathur is another example. They’ve really pushed the game and pushed the genre. What I don’t want to say is — we’re not going to do crazy things just for the sake of being crazy. We want them to be unique, but we also want them to be playable and viable. Those examples are playable and viable. What we did last year with Ragnaros, it was just this insane hero, but he’s totally playable. Alexstrasza is the same way. She has this cool mechanic where she can literally become a dragon on the battlefield, but she’s an awesome hero to play with on a day to day basis.

GamesBeat: A lot of these characters have fun voice interactions with each other. Is it difficult to get all those actors whenever you want? You want D.Va to talk to Alexstrasza, something like that, is that hard to pull off?

Dabiri: There’s scheduling between everyone, but we work with a great set of voice actors. A lot of our actors voice multiple characters across the Blizzard universes, and so we have a great relationship with them. It just naturally works out. If they’re doing more voices for another character, at the same time we might say, hey, we’re coming out with whoever, Hanzo, can you also do Hanzo for Heroes of the Storm? It’s a bit of a juggling act, but so far things have gone really well. We have some fantastic voices in our game.