by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

The most recent Heroes of the Storm patch brought with it a lot of the usual suspects. Balance changes, systematic upgrades, new skins, all that jazz. It also brought with it a new hero, a new map, and a totally new hero customization system, artifacts. Similar in nature to League of Legend’s runes, artifacts allow a player to accentuate certain hero facets, ideally allowing for an even more replete play experience.

Heroes each have three artifact slots, all available at account level 15. While the first is free, the other two will run an individual 2,000 gold per slot. Each artifact can be upgraded 10 times, and the costs go up by 100 gold for each rank, beginning at 100 gold. Essentially, it will cost a player 5,500 gold to max out one specific artifact. In return, players can receive boons to maximum health, damage, cooldown reductions, mount speed and much more. They’re not small bonuses, either. Bold Amethyst, the health bonus artifact awards a character a flat +15% right from the get go once maxxed out.

Artifacts essentially function as a gold sink, as, presently, cash cannot be used to buy them. It would take a player just over 77,000 gold to max out all artifacts, and even with recent upgrades to gold awarded, that’s still an absolutely crazy amount. The silver lining here is that they’re account based, meaning players won’t need to drop 5,500 gold maxxing out Bold Amethyst for Stitches, only to have to turn around and do it again for say, Muradin.

Pros

Customization: Realistically, I love being able to customize my hero further. I bought Rehgar and immediately maxxed out Bold Amethyst. Rehgar’s already pretty difficult to take down because of his Ghost Wolf form and capacity for healing and suppressing damage. An extra 15% health pushes him over the edge. Trying to gank my souped up Rehgar was fairly impossible for opposing teams, and in five games, my record was something like 65 – 10. Down the road, I might find more benefit in cooldown reduction. Who knows? It’s neat to be able to tinker, because deep down we’re all RPG nerds who enjoy character construction, right?

Tie-ins: One of the big appeals of Heroes of the Storm to me is all the references to the various Blizzard titles. I’m sure there will be a large percentage of the population that won’t care about this, but that’s not me. Having access to The Coin from Hearthstone honestly tickles me. Heroes of the Storm is all about taking the great aspects of Blizzard gaming and mashing them together. The artifact system just like, I don’t know, mashes these things together harder, which is awesome.

Pricing Point: The initial artifact ranks are not prohibitive. I went into this patch at account level 17. I played a lot before the first wipe, but after watching my account get wiped, I was not super stoked about grinding out account levels again. While other players had upwards of 80,000 gold, I had about 16,000, enough to grab Rehgar, max out one artifact slot and start another. Players who are playing a couple of a games a day will at least be able to tinker with different artifacts for a relatively low price, initially. This is a good thing as it will encourage players to try out the system.

Cons

The Grind: Some background, I play Heroes of Newerth aside from Heroes of the Storm. I tried League of Legends, but after seeing how much grinding I’d need to do to get runes, I was like, ‘nope, nope, a million times nope’. Heroes of Newerth has no loadout system outside of the core game experience. Players level up their characters 100% within matches, similar to DotA II. That’s what I generally want, if only because it means I don’t feel like I have to grind out these other features. We’re still in alpha, but eventually a day will come when tournaments are a community fixture. Players who want to do the higher levels of play will be expected to have all of their necessary artifacts maximized. That slays morale, and in a big way.

Grinding out artifacts. It’s a never ending story!

Those of us playing now have the benefit of being around from the start. We understand the system, we know what we have to do, we’re invested. We read blog posts, check Reddit, watch Twitter, et cetera. We are largely committed. That’s not a demographic Blizzard needs to worry about too much, I don’t think. Where it does need to be concerned is individuals who find this game at random down the road. They’ll already have to grind out individual hero levels in order to unlock all of the various talents. Additionally, they’ll be forced to grind in order to accumulate enough gold in order to have their required artifact kits. That will deter a lot of people. I know I’d be deterred by that, were I not so committed to kicking the crap out of people as my favorite Blizzard heroes. Strength of franchise might not be enough for some, and the MOBA market is decidedly crowded.

Toxicity: The MOBA genre is already incredibly toxic. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of the beast. MOBAs are all about competing. It’s a win or lose environment. There are seldom moments where individuals are like, ‘oh hey, this cute thing happened and I laughed, this was totally worth it’. Players are routinely called out for taking the wrong talents, missing moves, and more. Artifacts adds another layer, but one that’s much more difficult to fix. If a Malfurion takes Tranquility instead of Twilight Dream and is yelled at for it, the correct answer might just be switching that decision up going forward. How do players quickly correct not having a flat 15% health bonus? They don’t. Some are like to feel defeated by being insulted and simply exit out of the game, never to return. MOBAs already do a lot to destroy their own population, even with measures in place. Artifacts are likely going to contribute to that unfortunate tendency.

New Players: Word of mouth is powerful advertisement. Being able to tell your friends, ‘yup, I hopped on Zeratul and rolled some scrubs with my psionic laser blade’ is a pretty good sales pitch. Gamers who know what a Zeratul is are likely going to want to give the game a shot, and will be able to thanks to the F2P aspect of Heroes of the Storm. Unfortunately, the conversation following the first could look like this:

‘Okay, so install, right, pick a hero, no, not that hero, she’s not free this week. Yes, Kerrigan’s free. Okay, grab Kerrigan. Right, now it’s just nine short games until you unlock all of her abilities. Nice, good job. Next, grab account level 15. Oh, buying new heroes? I don’t recommend that because you need gold to buy artifacts, or else you’re going to probably get griefed by people, or at the least feel like a detriment. Yup. Three artifact slots. Two cost 2,000 gold. 5,500 gold per maxxed out artifact. Oh, also, hope you like those, because it’ll be another 5,500 gold if you want to switch up and max out something else.’

What part of that conversation makes the average gamer go, ‘HYPE’?

I don’t want to be overly critical of the system. I’m still enjoying Heroes of the Storm, even if I realize a long grind is ahead of me. I just feel like this system presents a number of issues going forward, especially for a game marketing itself as being totally different from the rest of the market.