What made Heroes of the Storm special… and why it’s still worth development

It’s been three years since Heroes of the Storm officially entered maintenance mode — meaning only small updates, and that there would be nothing new added to the game. In that time, we’ve gone from seeing the occasional balance patch to a more consistent balance patch cycle with larger mechanical changes about every two months, with Blizzard adding three pieces of new content that were in a state of near completion when the development stopped — new skins for The Butcher, Thrall, and Gul’dan. Clearly, the game still has some life left in it, and Blizzard agrees — or we wouldn’t be seeing the effort that we are. This has led me to think about what makes Heroes the game that is still getting these updates, and also the things that Blizzard has lost because it is no longer actively working on it.

Heroes wasn’t the first game of its type and had major competition in both League of Legends and DOTA 2, which had similar gameplay and mechanics. The game was always facing an uphill battle to get attention, but Blizzard’s level of polish and characters really went far to sell it. Diablo, Raynor, and Thrall are all easily recognizable characters from their respective games, and getting the chance to smash them into each other like action figures was really fun. If you played Warcraft 3 before playing World of Warcraft, I’d even say that the feeling was similar to the first time you saw a building or a unit up close and personal — joy at a new way of interacting with iconic properties.

But the game didn’t stand out from the competition just because of the roster of characters. Heroes took some of the established gameplay mechanics from other games and managed to streamline matches down into faster-paced and more cooperative affairs. No longer would you be fighting over every minion with your teammates; everybody got experience at the same rate and earned their upgrades at the same time, freeing you up to focus on the bigger picture and helping take objectives with your team.

These are some of the reasons Heroes of the Storm is so great, and why after three years in “maintenance” mode I keep coming back to the Nexus.

Characters got to shine

Throughout Heroes, you could see that Blizzard was really playing to its strengths. It was taking these massive tentpole characters and giving you fresh takes on their abilities and looks — but also playing with characters who might not have had a decade of the spotlight to show how awesome they were. Back in Warlords of Draenor, a new Draenei character named Yrel was created. Being an Alliance race, players like me, who were mainly Horde, only got to see her briefly throughout the campaign. Those brief moments included a great cinematic at the end of a zone where she showed off her skills as a Paladin. I wasn’t about to create a whole new Alliance character to see more of her, but when she was added to Heroes, I got my chance to experience how cool she was.

It turns out, pretty cool! She plays like an in-your-face arbiter of justice, punishing the weak and anyone who wanders too close to a wall. Able to leap into combat and pull focus from the whole team, or just chase down the last foe left alive to flatten them with her big hammer, Yrel became a favorite character of mine in Heroes, and I had a new appreciation for her when she popped up in Warcraft. 

This wasn’t the only character that showed up in Heroes that I had this experience with, either. It seemed like every character had some new facet that let me appreciate them more. Hogger turned from a vanilla World of Warcraft meme into a whirlwinding dervish, always chasing meat, dynamite, and cackles. Deathwing got to shine as a giant arrogant dragon while walking over enemy teams like they were wearing last season’s gear. Sure, that overpowered-ness got fixed pretty quickly, but even afterwards noting compares to crashing down in the middle of a team and watching them all run in terror. Even our nameless heroes and units from Diablo and StarCraft got to become characters in their own right. The Nexus took basic units and faceless characters and made them into pillars of Sanctuary and icons of the war in the Koprulu sector.

The creativity flowed both ways

Heroes of the Storm wasn’t a one-way street for character development. Several of the characters fleshed out in Heroes were snuck into their original games. Diablo 3 saw items referencing all of the newly named playable characters, and both Diablo Immortal and Diablo 4 name drop characters who only had names in Heroes of the Storm. Some of the talents for Overwatch heroes were taken back over to Overwatch in its now-scrapped PVE mode. Warcraft has seen characters like Lunara and Brightwing popping up in the Druid class hall in the Legion expansion. I also can’t count how many spells and abilities on NPCs and player classes have been swapped back and forth between Warcraft and Heroes. 

Murky even got his own quest chain! You controlled Murky and used all of his Heroes abilities to fight crabs and Naga. These crossovers were delightful and always a fun to stumble on. Murky’s quests really gave you insight into what baby murlocs go through just trying to grow up. Maybe not enough to stop your next wholesale murloc slaughter for a daily quest, but enough to give you a pause before totally decimating all of them.

It must have been so refreshing for developers on either side of the equation to have talented co-workers all pulling together to make the best possible version of these characters, no matter what game they were popping up in. If you needed to give a new boss a few abilities, why not borrow a few talent names from Heroes to give them some extra flair — and a fun easter egg, which players certainly noticed.

No consequence fun

Obviously, the Warcraft developers couldn’t have made Jaina into a Dreadlord during the Legion expansion, matter how many videos players made speculating on it. It would have been too big a swing for her to be evil, especially with her big role in the Battle for Azeroth on the horizon. Heroes, luckily, wasn’t so hamstrung by the long-term ramifications of having one of your most recognizable characters be an evil demon. Thus, Jaina got an excellent skin that showed her off in all of her Fel glory.

The developers got to stretch their fun and creativity to the nines with Heroes. There was the summer fun at the beach skins, the mecha anime skins, Greek gods, Luchador wrestlers, 1920’s gangsters, even cuddly toy versions of your favorite heroes — every new skin and event theme was a winner. It was taking your favorite toys and telling new stories with them for an afternoon, and then doing it again differently a month later. I’m just sad that we never got to see how weird things could truly get before the end. The new Thrall and Gul’dan skins that were added in recent months are both cartoony and cel-shaded in a massive departure from the usual style of the game, and I wonder how far that idea would’ve been taken. Could we have seen a full cel-shaded version of one of the maps? A single lane map for the All Random All Middle game mode could’ve been possible at the very least.

Letting heroes from across the Blizzard universes meet up and hang out turned out to be exactly what I was looking for in a game. The potential is still there waiting. Heroes of the Storm‘s updates have been consistent and regular. It might not happen overnight, but clearly, there are still devoted developers working on the game and trying to make Heroes the best version of itself with limited resources. If the game returned to active development, Blizzard could even include some Halo skins now that Microsoft owns Blizzard. I could see Master Chief Raynor or Zeratul the Arbiter not standing out in a distracting way. Like all of the other crossovers, in the game this could be a fun addition.

Heroes of the Storm is still played daily by a passionate fan base who run tournaments, theorycraft, and play “just one more game” with their friends — and they’re all ready to welcome new and old players back into the Nexus.

I still dream of a day when Blizzard gives this game its full support, but for now I know I’ll see you in the Nexus.