by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Our very own Chris “The Beard” Arnone got a chance to sit down with Game Director Dustin Browder and talk all about Heroes of the Storm.

You can check out this interview in our Youtube channel along with many more BlizzCon Interviews.

If you prefer reading, I’ve got some highlights of the interview below.

On Bans:

Although they haven’t ruled out bans entirely, they are not planning on implementing them off the bat, and there’s a couple of reasons for it:

1. Games are relatively short at 20 minutes, Picking Heroes through Draft Mode is already going to add significant time, Bans would add even more. They don’t want an scenario where you spend 10+ minutes on the picking process, and 20 minutes playing. That’s spending a third of the total time during the set-up.
2. Since they won’t allow the same Hero on different teams, there will be 10 unique heroes in the battlefield, this means that you need to own at least 10 Heroes to participate in draft mode. If you add bans, then you will need to own even more Heroes. Considering that there isn’t that many Heroes yet, that could be a problem.

Despite this, they are going to monitor the situation and if they feel that bans are absolutely needed, then they look at ways to mitigate these problems so they can add the bans. They are also open to the possibility that bans might be “worth the cost” of having this issues, but they are in “wait and see” mode.

On Jaina:

Jaina is a classic mage, she fills the archetype of the glass-cannon, with difficult to manage cooldowns, intensive mana usage, not a lot of escape, but insane burst. They felt like they didn’t have something like that on the game and Jaina was the right choice to fill that niche.

On Thrall:
Thrall is a melee DPS, but he’s focused around his elemental abilities. They decided to make him a very aggressive Shaman. He’s got chain lightning, an unusual choice for a melee character. Overall, the team was very focused on making Thrall feel like WoW’s Thrall.

On Overwatch Characters coming to Heroes:
It’s not happening soon, but it is definitely something they are looking at. Basically, they want the Overwatch team to be able to play with the new characters first, so unless the Overwatch team specifically comes to them and say that they want a certain character in Heroes, they will wait until the game is released to welcome these new characters to the nexus. Regardless, they feel like Tracer would be a great fit for Heroes.

On the New Battlegrounds:

Sky Temple is a big map, and they expect that there won’t be much laning as the objectives will be up often and will make a big difference. On the other hand, Tomb of the Spiderqueen is a really small, dark, and gloomy map, which should feature a lot of laning.
In Tomb of the Spiderqueen you need to kill your enemies’ minions to collect gems. Then you need to drop off the gems to a central location to spawn the Spiderqueens are going to come to each lane and spawn a bunch of spider to push the enemy towers. If you die, you will drop your gems, and while your opponent can’t pick up your gems, they can guard your body and prevent your team from recovering these gems. The gems are going to despawn quickly, so there will be a lot of strategy regarding corpse defending.
They love the fact that all these Battlegrounds are so different as they expect different Heroes to excel on each battleground, they also expect your talent choices to be significanly different depending on which Battleground you are fighting on.

On Amount of Heroes Avaliable at Launch:
Dustin is not worried about it, he feels like he would be OK with the game launching with the amount of Heroes and Battlegrounds currently available.
The priorities for launch are:

• Securing Server Stability
• A more detailed scorescreen
• Ranked Play
• Profile with Stats

On Breaking the Rules:

They love having characters that change the way the game is played. Things like Abathur, Murky, and Lost Vikings really make Heroes of the Storm Special. They’d love to have many more of these characters but they know that it is a huge challenge and when they release a rule-breaker hero they want to make sure that it is balanced and good for the game’s health.

Is there a limit on the amount of Heroes they can release?

They know that Blizzard has an almost endless supply of characters that could make their way into Heroes of the Storm. At the moment they are not worried about releasing too many Heroes, but they know they might reach a point where a new player might be overwhelmed by running into different opponents all the time and having to learn what every ability does and how to counter it.

There’s nice tidbits of info all over the interview and if you have the time I’d recommend that you watch it in its entirety.