Tuesday, May 26, 2015

First Impressions of Heroes of the Storm

Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's own DOTA/MOBA game (I think MOBA has become the preferred nomenclature, given that Valve has got the trademark on DOTA, despite the fact that Defense of the Ancients was a mod for Warcraft III, a Blizzard game) is now in an open Beta, so anyone who wants can download it and try it out. In fact, this "Beta" is really just an early patch of the game in practice, as you can already purchase game elements that will carry over into the "live" game, which is the only way the game is monetized - it is... free to play. (Queue thunderclap sound effect.)

Anyway, this is the first time I've ever played this sort of game, so I'm coming at this from the angle of a 100% newbie. If you already know how these games work, feel free to skim, because a lot of what is totally new to me is old hat to someone who knows these games.

HotS is basically Blizzard's Smash Bros. It takes an existing genre and throws characters from its own IPs into the mix. There's a pretty tongue-in-cheek tutorial where you fight as Jim Raynor under the tutelage of Uther the Lightbringer in order to fight Diablo. Yep, that's a solid mix!

Right off the bat, one of the things that stands out to me is that this is a game designed for the microtransaction era, which immediately puts a nasty taste in my mouth.

That said, like Hearthstone, you'll be able to earn things by playing, albeit at a fairly slow rate.

There is a, I believe, weekly rotation of heroes that are available for free. Build up enough gold or take out your wallet, and you can permanently purchase the hero of your choice (I'll stick to the former.)

Pretty much everything else you buy with real money is purely cosmetic, and many of these can also be earned through in-game gold. The game encourages you to pick a favorite hero and focus on him or her (or it,) because as you level up your hero, you'll unlock new talent options (and at level 10, which I assume is the max, you'll get a "Master" cosmetic skin.)

After some brief experimentation, I picked Arthas, who focuses on melee attacks and is great at dealing with large swarms of minions due to a toggled AoE attack that burns mana as long as it's on.

Given how it grew out of WCIII, you can see a lot of the DNA of the RTS genre within the MOBA. Your goal in each game is to destroy the "Core" at the enemy's base. However, this will take a lot of time to do, as there are serious obstacles in place, not to mention the enemy team. You can play against AI, but at least for a new player like me, the bots pose a pretty significant challenge. I expect a well-coordinated team with voice chat would do better, though. I was playing with strangers.

Each map is mirrored, with a red team and a blue team (I don't know if it was luck, but I was always on the blue team - the superior color.) Bases will have a Core, as well as Forts, healing Fountains, and Gates.

Forts will periodically spawn small minions (I believe they're called "Creeps") who will automatically head off toward the enemy base. They'll clash with one another, but with the imbalance created by the players, they'll eventually start hitting the gates and bases.

Gates are protected by a pair of turrets, and these will hurt your hero significantly, but they will always prefer to hit your team's creeps, meaning that you'll need to wait for your army to get there before you storm them. The turrets can run out of ammo, but I'm not sure if they recover ammo over time (or if this is a mechanism to keep the game from going on forever.)

Fountains in your base can be right-clicked to give yourself a significant heal over time, but they'll go on cooldown for a minute afterward.

As you defeat enemies, you'll earn XP for your team. You'll level up, gaining talents as you go - and the higher you've "leveled up" your character through repeated matches, the more options you'll have at each talent tier. To clarify, there are two "leveling" systems. Over the course of a game, your team will level up as they kill creeps and enemy players (the team levels up together,) but over the course of several games, your personal skill with a character will level up. This won't make you unstoppable, but it will give your more talent options, as well as things like gold to spend on new characters, skins, and mounts.

One of the fun features of the game is that each arena is somewhat different. All of the areas have a very "Blizzard" design without technically belonging to any of the existing franchises. The arenas will typically have a special item that you can collect by defeating certain enemies or doing certain tasks, and then these can be translated into some large attack that will significantly harm the enemy team. For example, in the Haunted Mines map, there will be a mine area that opens up filled with zombies. Killing the zombies will allow you to collect their skulls, and later on, a Grave Golem will be spawned for each side, with power proportional to the number of skulls the respective team has collected. The Luxoria arena, which has a whole Egyptian thing going on, has various altars that will blast away at your enemy's structures while you occupy them, but you'll have to fend off guardian statues that activate while the altar is active.

Most of the arenas will also have mercenaries who, once defeated, will join your side as extra-powerful Creeps.

As always, Blizzard's art direction is wonderfully colorful, and you get that Smash Bros. joy of seeing figures from different franchises duking it out. This is a game designed for the eSports world, though, and if you're looking for stories, don't look here. I'm thankful that one can face off against AI, but fundamentally, this is a game built around PVP, so you can expect that the gameplay isn't going to undergo any big changes, and your first match won't be fundamentally different from your hundredth (except you'll probably be a better player by then.)

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