Heroes of the Storm Game Review (PC)

This post is by guest writer Hyung Lee.

Disclaimer: The article below was written after playing the beta version (34659) of the game.

The Waiting Game

Blizzard had taken RTS games to a new level with Starcraft/Warcraft, dungeon-crawlers with Diablo, and MMORPGs with World of Warcraft. Heroes of the Storm (HotS) is Blizzard’s attempt to elevate MOBAs in their own way, and I couldn’t wait to jump into the game.

I had waited a long time to get into the beta, and luckily after resisting the temptation to purchase the Founder’s pack, I finally got a chance to start the game a few weeks ago by acquiring a key from a friend. The game is undoubtedly in beta, and I expect the game to be different when it reaches the market. My first impression was that Blizzard is focused on balancing and releasing new content, and they introduced many new novel ideas such as talents and map variety. There were also many issues that I was not able to overcome in this period, and I felt I never got a chance to play the game in its proper competitive form.

The 1 Hour Review

As soon as you log in, you go through a short tutorial discussing the backstory of how the heroes from different Blizzard universes came together in battle, and brief descriptions of the gameplay. After the tutorial is complete, you now have access to a level 1 profile and a handful of free rotation heroes to be used in one of four modes – Practice (you and 4 AI vs 5 AI), Cooperative (5 people vs 5 AI), Quick Match (5 people vs 5 people), and an ability to create your own match via Custom Game.

The similarities to other MOBAs like League of Legends and DOTA are plentiful such as the controls, the 5v5 team nature, and the win condition of destroying the enemy’s main base. The major differences start with the idea of “talents” — it’s like Diablo where you can put points towards a specific skill such as icebolt or firewall for your Sorceress, but within the framework of around three basic abilities and one of two ultimate abilities (heroic ability) which will be determined and upgraded based on the talent tree. Blizzard pushes the concept of a team by enforcing a global experience level, so your entire team will level up together. You get seven different talents as you level up your team from 1-20, and the heroic ability is learned at level 10. Learning a talent is entirely optional, and you can technically finish the game not learning any (at a great disadvantage).

This idea is really cool — you can build your hero in different ways every time you play.

You get about four major paths for your hero, and can mix and match a variety of talents if you want to play a hybrid style. For example, you can level up your tanky champion to be more of a damage dealer by upgrading his skills’ damage/range/effects, or make him into a meat shield by learning barriers or improved health regen.

Talents also allowed the elimination of items, and in turn the need for gold. Other MOBAs rely heavily on the players’ ability to last-hit minions (landing a killing blow) for the bulk of income, and the constant physical and mental constraints of farming are not in Heroes of the Storm.

It’s not all upsides though — items in MOBAs allow a common set of customizations that applied to every hero/champion. Especially with games having a roster of a hundred unique characters or more, items provide a foundation of the concepts around building and optimizing. Instead, HotS has a unique talent path per hero, which means you have to learn and understand around 20 different talents, possible skills, skill modifiers, cooldowns, ranges, etc. per hero. Once you learn a hero, it’s not really an issue. But if you want to understand what types of skill modifiers will generally make you a better damage-dealer, for example, you have to start fresh with each new hero you play.

Another major difference you notice right away is the variety of maps. Each map environment favors different types of gameplay and heroes, and they come packed with awesome global effects and events. There are lasers and cannonballs that blast away at enemy buildings, and fun AI allies like giant skeleton golems and spider queens, to name a few.

These maps are a breath of fresh air as other MOBA games are played basically on one constant map, but it also adds gameplay complexity as different maps have their own objectives, timing, favored team composition, and power creep. Blizzard has a hard task of retaining the core gameplay throughout the various settings, but it played extremely differently map to map. It’s exciting to have more than just one playground for your heroes.

Regardless of the differences, it was relatively easy to get started with HotS as I’ve spent an unmentionable amount of time on other MOBAs, and watched HotS being played/taught by high ranking Korean players. However, I also noticed that my profile and heroes leveled up much too slowly as I completed each game, and my biggest deterrent became more apparent.

The 5 Hour Review

Early on I acquired a Stimpack as well as the Heroes of the Dorm bonus, which pretty much tripled my XP and gold gain from Quick Matches. The combination of boosts took both my profile and heroes quickly through the lower levels, and the unlockable bonuses had banked a couple thousand gold in no time. The ultimate goal for a competitive player is to reach level 30 for your profile since that is when you can finally play the game as a ranked player. You also have to own 10 different heroes, and the goal for them is to reach level 4 where you will unlock all available talents. Let me elaborate on this later on, but it was a dealbreaker for me.

Another major difference became painfully obvious by this time — you really can’t do anything by yourself. The game is designed to be a team game with emphasis on team experience, team composition, and team fights, all leading up to controlling the map objectives. The map objectives are extremely powerful, and are the core snowballing mechanism in your path to winning the game. Other MOBAs are a bit different where it really is a free-for-all. Each player has their own stash of gold, and their specific character/champ/hero levels up individually. The maps are bigger, objectives are fairly infrequent, and the isolation provides a good platform for individuals to shine.

Heroes of the Storm is a team game to the bone. Smaller maps, more frequent fights and objectives, and a faster pace (games ending in less than 20 minutes is a huge plus!) all promote a constant level of team interactions. With such emphasis on teamwork, I was hoping that there would be better guides or coaching for the players who want to learn the game properly — but I was unable to find any. It labels heroes with classes such as supports and warriors, and they obviously play a huge role. Blizzard released this article where they address the fact that teams with no supports do worse against teams that have them. While it seems obvious that a properly formed team will generally do better than a hodgepodge, what worries me the most is that this only became a discussion point due to win rate balancing, and not from wanting to educate players on proper group strategy.

It would have been awesome to provide a better tutorial on team composition, ideal positioning, how to prepare for a game — basically all the things you would learn in a proper team game environment in any sport. You can’t just have 11 kids play whatever they want on a soccer field, and then have them play a match with other kids. A lot of player knowledge and experience comes from trial and error, and the trial and error period is an excruciatingly long process.

The point earlier of needing to level up your profile to 30 just to play the game in its competitive setting is an extreme timesink. You need level 40 if you want to play as a team, which is even worse. I am a huge believer that games must provide the complete experience as soon as possible. It’s unfair to force all players to “ramp up” without first ascertaining what knowledge they bring to the table. Yes, you can cut the lead time in half by paying for the Stimpack, but half of unwanted time spent is still a lot of unwanted time spent.

There are many potential reasons why Blizzard implemented this policy, and the two leading legitimate arguments are:

1. It helps players learn the game
2. It encourages players to pay for the game

The first argument is false, since HotS has very little in the way of teaching or helping players. Instead, how you spend game time to level up doesn’t matter — you could just idle in a game and collect experience while your teammates suffer for 20 minutes just so you can get to level 30. Literally the only requirement to reaching level 30 is to spend time. If Blizzard really does want to enforce this, even something like “Win 100 games in Practice Mode” is a much better, honest, and healthier way than the way it is set up now.

So it implies that the second argument is probably the main driver and there is nothing wrong with that. Blizzard is a business, and I support that different businesses have different business models. The problem is Blizzard shouldn’t lessen the timesink, it should eliminate the timesink. Let me pay $150 up front, rather than $20 and 40 hours, or $0 and 100 hours. Time is my most valuable commodity, and Blizzard doesn’t let me preserve what matters the most to me.

The 10 Hour Review

A similar mindset exists on hero levels, where you get access to only half of the talents when you first start playing a hero. As you level up your hero, you will then unlock additional talents that were not available to you before.

Again, the intent clashes with reality. This system is intended for you to slowly get a feel for a hero’s functionalities by limiting the first few games. However, unlocking new talents doesn’t require you to use or try them. It doesn’t encourage that you build your heroes in different ways, or that you even learn what the newly available talents do. It also doesn’t help the players in recommending synergistic or compromising skills, except being unable to upgrade skills you never learned. Without guidance, these roadblocks that seem to be designed to help players learn, aren’t helping.

Making things worse, the core gameplay shows more flaws the more you play. I thought not having to last-hit was an awesome idea, and it is an awesome idea to eliminate such burden on the players. But I feel that it was implemented incorrectly in HotS. In other games, it was rewarding to last-hit — each time you succeeded, you earned something for your efforts. It was exhausting, but at least it had significance and was an art to maintaining proper minion waves and managing income.

In Heroes of the Storm, I stopped caring about them. Minion waves to me became mere sources of experience or the beloved orbs that healed your hero. Teamfights and map objectives are the biggest priorities of the game, and the experience level drives the engagements since the team with talent-advantage is so much better suited. Minions are there just to serve the purpose of forcing heroes to babysit a lane in order to soak up experience, and the feeling is one of obligation. It also caused a lot of disjunction amongst the team members who overvalued minions since the game tracks and displays experience as a core contribution metric (or came from other MOBAs). The conflicting priorities are difficult to resolve in-game, and this often resulted in a complete collapse in many matches.

The 15 Hour Review

Grinding continues, and at first Daily Quests seem like a great idea in providing players with ways of obtaining gold as well as encouragement to expand their game knowledge. Some examples of quests are “Play 2 games as a Diablo Hero” and “Play 3 games as a Specialist”. I believe these quests were designed to let you play a hero or position you don’t know for learning experiences. When players know more, they potentially become a more well-rounded player. On top of that, Blizzard will give you gold for doing exactly that! It sounds reasonable on paper — in reality, it makes players not play the game as they want to play, dilutes team composition, lowers match quality, and creates an addiction to rewards that are disproportional (you get around 20-40 gold per Quick Match while Daily Quests give you 200-800 gold each.).

If Blizzard really wanted to reward you for playing the game or learning new characters, there are many other ways to do so. You could make Daily Quests only available through practice mode. You could also set specific skill goals or reward successfully accomplishing tasks that make you a better player (pinging correctly, or responding properly, etc). Outrageous gold costs per hero (the most expensive heroes cost 15,000 gold) and high reward Daily Quests are not the proper way of teaching players about the game. Yes, they are optional. Yes, you can just spend the money to buy heroes. But it’s not uncommon that the gameplay and user experience will be tainted due to people playing sub-optimally — or worst case indifferently — just to earn gold. It doesn’t make any logical sense to implement the feature this way, and it implies that Blizzard just added it to increase daily logins and/or to have continuity with Hearthstone.

The 20 Hour Review

I have bought many champions at this point with an active Stimpack, had double XP bonus for about a week, and was still nowhere close to being able to play the competitive Hero League mode (unlocked at level 30).

Blizzard is hiding the (potential) gem underneath layers and layers of hurdles, and I don’t know how they expect players to jump through all of them.

It’s extremely disappointing that even with such drastic changes in the environment, Blizzard hasn’t really revolutionized the genre. It promotes combat (which I love), team play (which I respect), and offers many interesting ideas that try to lead the gamespace. It has amazing potential, and I can see it setting a new standard for MOBAs. Unfortunately I don’t have the patience or the drive to spend so much time playing the game in a way I don’t want to just to get a chance to play it competitively. Even if I had gotten there, there are pages and pages of complaints regarding the ladder system which I am not even going to touch on since many players won’t even get that far. Blizzard is hiding the (potential) gem underneath layers and layers of hurdles, and I don’t know how they expect players to jump through all of them.

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