So, discussion thread for Blizzard's entry into the MOBA stage. For anyone who hasn't played or doesn't know much about it I'm going to splurge words all over a page below.
I've recently been getting really into the Heroes of the Storm closed beta. I was really bored one day and decided I'd give it a go, I had never really intended to bother with it. It's just going to be a standard MOBA with Blizzard characters and nothing to distinguish it otherwise, right?
It has ragdoll physics.
Not quite. I'm definitely not a MOBA aficionado, I've played League of Legends, Awesomenauts and a small bit of the original DotA back in WCIII:tFT (which is the reason why for many many years I refused to even acknowledge that MOBA was a genre worthy of my time: I sucked at it and it devoured the online community. You want to play Island Troll Tribes? Fuck you, play DotA. Vampirism Fire? No: DotA. Little bit of Parasite or Jurassic Park, maybe? Not here, this is the DotA isle. /endrant) but HotS seems to have made a fairly big effort to stand out from at least the major MOBAs out there.
For starters there's much less importance on laning and more in timed map objectives (varying over about... 6, I'll say, maps) which reward a team with considerable pushing power for completing objectives like controlling shrines, collecting items dropped from spawned mercenaries or collecting a single item spawned at random, and so on. The rewards vary from bombarding enemy structures for massive damage to allowing a player to assume the form of an incredibly powerful monster with unique abilities, summoning an incredibly powerful golem in one lane that is summoned again from where it last died, and drastically weakening all enemy minions and disabling their turrets for a short period. It's, for the most part, all incredibly overpowered which means that if you're slacking on these objectives you will lose.
Another thing that I found to be quite unique was the in-game levelling system and character building. For starters you just flat out do not level independently as a team. Experience is applied to the team. Second of all there's no items. You don't go to the shop and buy Archimonde's Toolbelt so you can counter that Zeratul who has four Tal'Darim Sandals. Character building is far more simple to execute but the consequences of it are... arguably greater. You see, every few levels you get to choose a talent. These talents vary from an extra ability you an use (a buff, a team buff, a teleport of a DoT execute for instance. Sort of like League's summoner spells.), giving an ability a shorter cooldown, an extra beneficial effect, more damage or a wider area, even permanent stat boosts based on enemies slain or items picked up which can effectively allow you to never stop becoming stronger. One tier of talents is even choosing between which of two ultimate ('heroic') abilities you want to have for the game. Off the bat it doesn't have any immediately drastic effects but by the end-game your character will be quite different from how they could be had you picked different talents. I suppose this is fairly similar to the Awesomenauts build system, with the removal of money, come to think about it.
Then there's the heroes. For the most part they're fairly standard fair, sorted by melee/ranged warriors, supports, assassins and specialists. Not going to bother explaining that. Most heroes are fairly standard as far as abilities go. There's one or two that manage to be fairly unique, the most notable of which is definitely Abathur, who flat out does not (or should not) enter the battlefield, instead turning into a cocoon and spawning a thing that sends out a minion every now and then, and attaches himself to any allied minion or hero to cast his own abilities from them, including an ability that clones the hero he's attached to, with all its powers. He's a bit weird. There are a few others that stray from the normal (Murky, Sgt. Hammer) but I won't bother with that. Point is, for the most part it's all what you'd expect. You do have to buy heroes, either for gold earned by winning games, gaining player and hero levels or completing daily quests (pretty much the same as daily quests in Hearthstone) or with real money. Quite a bit of real money actually. Most heroes are around about $9-10 which to me seems a little pricey, skins are the same except they can only be bought with money which isn't so bad but again, pricey. The heroes are for the most part recognisable characters from Blizzard's main IPs: You've got Thrall, Arthas, Illidan etc. (literally E.T.C.) from Warcraft, Diablo, Azmodan, Nazeebo and Sonya (Aka Witchdoctor and Barbarian) from Diablo and Raynor, Kerrigan, Tassadar and Tychus from Starcraft. No Lost Vikings. Yet. But then there are some less recognisable characters; characters that I feel were either created for the sake of variety or are just from novels/comics. Sgt. Hammer, a female Terran Siege Tank pilot, Rehgar, an Orc Shaman, some Faerie Dragon for whatever reason, the Elite Tauren Chieftain because apparently the band needed to be anthropomorphised into a never before seen entity and put into the game. But hey, there's no problem with that, they can't just stick to mainstream characters.
Anyway, I'm going to finish this shitstorm of a thought process.
Have you been playing HotS? What do you think of it so far?
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Topic: Heroes of the Storm - Surprisingly not League of Warcraft! (Read 6243 times)