The Queue: Hit the box

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

If Battle for Undercity counts, it’s that one, but with a few limitations. Battle for Undercity was great when it was new and people were still running it en masse. If you ended up in Battle for Undercity alone as an Alliance player, it was hellish. That worm boss ate a nearby player at random, crowd controlling them for something like a full minute. If you were the only player nearby, you’d get eaten for the entire fight and need to rely on the DPS of the NPCs to kill the boss. That sure made the scenario less epic. It was great when other people were there, though.

Azurewatch or the Night Elf starting town of which I cannot remember the name. Dolonaar? Something like that. Alliance players don’t like going to Kalimdor. Mostly because Kalimdor sucks. That means those areas are mostly abandoned during the holidays, which is perfect.

I think it’s easier for Heroes of the Storm to do these things rather than the other way around. While I’m not a game developer and don’t know any of the exact limitations, I’ll speculate about Zarya’s Thunderguard skin a little. In Heroes of the Storm, hitboxes are just a ring around the character model. It’s represented by a visual ring on the playing field. If a spell effect is inside that ring, you’ve been hit by it.

In an FPS, it’s a little different. Assuming the hitboxes have been rigged up decently, the actual physical form of the character model represents the hitbox. If a skin wildly changes a character’s silhouette, it might also change or obscure their hitbox. If the Thunderguard skin makes Zarya’s silhouette bulkier, what gameplay implication does that have? Do you make her hitbox larger, making her easier to kill? That sucks. Do you leave the hitbox the same, meaning projectiles will simply pass through parts of her now? That also sucks.

And as Archmage RC mentioned, taking things from Heroes isn’t necessarily taking things from Heroes. Most of what’s in Heroes of the Storm was inspired by the original franchise, and in many cases, Heroes of the Storm is using things the original franchise forgot. Gazlowe is a Goblin circa Warcraft 3. Characters who do what Gazlowe does should’ve been in WoW the whole time.

On top of that, WoW certainly has already borrowed Heroes of the Storm‘s original Warcraft characters already: Murky and Lunara are in Legion.

I’m in Camp Tattoo. I primarily play Human characters and I’ve wanted them to implement tattoos ever since I saw NPCs with them in Wrath of the Lich King. Come on, we’re adventurers! Soldiers! Warriors! We should all be tatted up like crazy by now. Give me tattoos, Blizzard. Give them to me.