Heroes of the Storm
- Thread starter Mures
- Start date
This game is really starting to grow on me. It's basically taken over LOL at this point. Anyone interested in running a perma 5 man for a while? I have 4 people that can play at scheduled times each night. We are pretty flexible as positions go. Let me know if interested and can play around 11pm EST until 2am EST with scheduled days (say M-W-Th or something).
Any word on when we can buy in? im way to eager to have my expectations shot down, all the comparisons to LoL and me being a dota guy makes me sad, but its blizzard characters! who doesn't wanna play as Kerrigan and shit.
Theres two kinds of people in this world DoTa players and LoL players, theres no in between.
Theres two kinds of people in this world DoTa players and LoL players, theres no in between.
Yes.
And this is neither. You might trick yourself into enjoying the simplicity for a bit. Maybe figure out how to optimize a few heroes and the best methods to conquer some maps. Unfortunately there isn't enough depth to sustain long term interest. With that being said, it's probably a really fun game to play with a group of casual friends.
drtyrm
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ronne
Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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Well, he has a point in a way. Dota/league are so big at this point, is there really room for another moba to be successful? Games like Strife/Dawngate/Infinite Crisis, while at technically fine games, are pretty much going to be DOA because who is going to play them over league/dota? The moba playerbase is already heavily invested between those two titles, and convincing them to switch to something else is a pretty huge hurdle.
I don't think HoTS will be in as much trouble as other mobas of late because of the Blizzard magic, but it's still going to have an upward battle to draw any significant playerbase away from the big two.
I don't think HoTS will be in as much trouble as other mobas of late because of the Blizzard magic, but it's still going to have an upward battle to draw any significant playerbase away from the big two.
Heroes has way more going for it than the other games you listed, and it's really because of two factors -
1.) Blizzard
2.) It's not trying to copy League/DOTA
While it's still arguably in the same genre, Heroes goes at the genre in a wildly different fashion than the other games you listed. The game is effectively aimed at people who dislike excessive game length, and people who dislike the lane/farming phase of league/dota but enjoy the actual hero fights. I think there's a great deal of people that play dota/league that'll end up switching just because of those changes alone.
This post is entirely full of shit. Given how very, very few people are actually playing the game at anything resembling a high level right now, I can't help but roll my eyes anytime I see someone try to claim that the depth in the game is lacking.
While I agree with your points, HotS doesn't look like it's putting any sort of dent into the genre at the moment. Unlike Hearthstone, this game is bombing in twitch views during early beta stages (they call it alpha but it's a fucking beta)... we'll see what happens in the next few months.
Comparing it with Hearthstone is a bit misleading. Games in this genre get views from people in large part after they've played it rather than before. It's ridiculously difficult to follow a game like DOTA or League if you haven't played the game before watching it. There's just too much shit happening on screen at the same time to make watching games intuitive. Hearthstone is slow paced to the point that you can perfectly follow everything that's going on in the game even if you've never personally played it yourself. You don't need any sort of in game knowledge or experience to make watching Hearthstone enjoyable like you do with MOBA-esque games.
All of the big streaming personalities (who would get 2k+ viewers in any game) lost interest very quickly compared to Hearthstone as well... yes it's a team game, but that doesn't stop LoL/DotA players from streaming solo.
Not trying to be condescending here. Without waiting for a professional player to do it for you, can you explain how this game in it's current state potentially offers more complex play than it's predecessors of the same genre?
drtyrm
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Who said Heroes offers more complex play or even needs to? Goalpost movement: complete.
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Part of the reason why twitch views completely died out is because 1) they don't invite many people in and 2) they only invite US people. There was someone who posted on reddit the google search locations on Hots, and during the early announcement it was worldwide stuff but a month later or so it was basically only the US who did searches for it, europe had lost all interest since there was no way for euro players to get in.
I don't think it's necessarily because the game genre is hard to watch, in fact I'd say while you don't understand everything, it's still fairly fun to watch as an unitiated player and you pick up on stuff, especially if you've played any other game in the genre before. Hots is also a lot easier to understand even without knowing the game. I think it's more people lost interest in an alpha they can't get in themselves. A lot of people who watch streams watch because they themselves play the game and want to see better players playing or a different point of view. Since currently it's impossible for most people to even have a chance of getting in, people aren't interested.
They also have been patching at typical blizzard pace. For a game that's this early in developement, you'd think they'd be churning out builds and content. Instead they patch once every 2-3weeks with minor stuff mostly, and sometimes do a kinda big patch with not that much in it. If you look at Valve, motherfuckers don't patch much anymore at all on dota2, but during early beta, they were adding heroes every 2weeks and constantly adding features and bug fixing. There was a weekly patch, patches inbetween and bi weekly large patches. With so little content currently in the game, you watch a bit then it gets boring because you've seen all heroes and all maps. There's no other pull to the game other than seeing stuff you haven't seen(no competitive scene yet, no chance to get in for most people) and since they're not adding much in this regard, there's just not much to follow.
Doesn't say much about the success of the game once it releases though(or even once it opens beta with packs letting you buy access). That's just how it is now because of the choices they've made for their technical alpha. I think in some ways, it might have been better for them to not lift the NDA for this.
I don't think it's necessarily because the game genre is hard to watch, in fact I'd say while you don't understand everything, it's still fairly fun to watch as an unitiated player and you pick up on stuff, especially if you've played any other game in the genre before. Hots is also a lot easier to understand even without knowing the game. I think it's more people lost interest in an alpha they can't get in themselves. A lot of people who watch streams watch because they themselves play the game and want to see better players playing or a different point of view. Since currently it's impossible for most people to even have a chance of getting in, people aren't interested.
They also have been patching at typical blizzard pace. For a game that's this early in developement, you'd think they'd be churning out builds and content. Instead they patch once every 2-3weeks with minor stuff mostly, and sometimes do a kinda big patch with not that much in it. If you look at Valve, motherfuckers don't patch much anymore at all on dota2, but during early beta, they were adding heroes every 2weeks and constantly adding features and bug fixing. There was a weekly patch, patches inbetween and bi weekly large patches. With so little content currently in the game, you watch a bit then it gets boring because you've seen all heroes and all maps. There's no other pull to the game other than seeing stuff you haven't seen(no competitive scene yet, no chance to get in for most people) and since they're not adding much in this regard, there's just not much to follow.
Doesn't say much about the success of the game once it releases though(or even once it opens beta with packs letting you buy access). That's just how it is now because of the choices they've made for their technical alpha. I think in some ways, it might have been better for them to not lift the NDA for this.
The game has WAY more depth than you would think. Here is the bottom line. HotS is like LoL, but without the early game (laning phase). Once you start thinking of it as a massive dragon control/baron control battle, you start to see the depth. There is just as much, if not more, strategical depth to this game as there is in LoL. FYI, i love LoL and have thousands of games played. But HoTS is something different and it has a chance to be really good.
That's all well and good, but nobody seems to want to play the game, that's kind of a problem. Every single person I game with is in the HoTS alpha, and nobody is playing it. That's pretty rare for a Blizzard game, most of us played the shit out of Hearthstone.
Fair enough. And that's what was enjoyable about the game. After coming to that conclusion, I basically started skipping the lane phase, played roaming assassin and solely took objectives.
The game felt overly simplified to me and couldn't hold my attention. Clearly that's not the case for everyone. It's nothing to get bent out of shape over.
Lets be clear - the argument here is not one of complexity, the argument here is one of depth. Complexity and Depth are two very, very different things. A game with a vast amount of complexity incorporated into it doesn't necessarily add meaningful gameplay depth. Likewise, a game that seems simple on face value might have an enormous amount of gameplay depth. Look no further than the board game Go if you want an obvious example of this. Blizzard actually already fought the complexity vs depth war ages ago with how they handled SC1. People tend to forget, but RTS games before Starcraft usually had far more units and a sprawling incomprehensible tech tree. Starcraft was Blizzard's take on the genre that distilled it down more into its base parts, but without the hilariously unneeded complexity that marred other RTS games at the time. Needless to say, I think it'd be hard to make an argument that Starcraft was lacking in depth due to its relative lack of complexity.
The design behind Heroes looked at games like DOTA/League and took a swing at what made those games fun, and eliminated what was unnecessary for that fun. Heroes shortens game length, and removes the excessively long laning and farming phases that DOTA/League have. In return for pruning those aspects of the game, you instead get a game that's focused entirely on Hero v Hero combat with stronger map control aspects to support it. Rather than having to beat a team in a full (note: even or close to even) team fight 2 or 3 times over the course of 50 minutes, you instead have to win 6+ of those fights over the course of 20 minutes. The end result is that the depth of skill in how to approach those fights for both positioning, skill selection, and just general team prediction (ie: predicting where the other team is, how they'll approach a fight, etc) tends to get rather deep.
As it is right now, there's a huge difference between how a top level premade approaches team fights and how your lower level premades/players approach team fights. You can clearly see differences in skill at every facet of gameplay. Here's a not so short list of factors that have depth when you start combining them in a team format - landing skillshots on a prersonal level, landing proper combos between teammates, zoning people out, isolating targets, proper heal prioritization, proper utilization of up to 5 cooldowns on top of your qwerd, initiation/counter initation, timing when to go for things based on levels/objectives - I could go on but you should get the idea at this point. There's a huge list of things to consider before every single Heroes engagement, and the fact that you have far more of them in a given game when compared to DOTA/League counterparts means that you generally need to pull out more tricks/plays in order to stay ahead of an equally competent opponent.
The thing about video games in general is that in a lot of cases it's hard to remove things from a game to the point where you actually harm the skill depth to any serious extent. It's just that the depth of skill and what people focus on ends up shifting to other areas. Starcraft 2 technically made things much easier to play when compared to Starcraft 1, but the mechanics that powered the game were more than deep enough to still power an intensely deep skill curve. People to this day in SC2 still don't play the game anywhere close to perfectly despite the laments about the game being simpler. Just like no one today in Heroes (especially on the team level) really comes close to perfectly handling team fights, despite the fact that the game has put a larger focus around them.
If there were to be cliffnotes to this post, it'd simply be that there's enough depth to Hero vs Hero combat in these games that shifting the focus specifically to that and removing some of the other stuff doesn't actually harm the skill curve in any appreciable way. Just like in League/DOTA (or most skill based competitive games), you're never going to be able to look at an individual game and say that a team played anywhere close to perfect. The mechanics are deep enough that even among the best of teams there'll always be wide room for improvement. Posts like yours dismissing the game and attempting to call it simple and easy fail to see what's actually going on and how deep the skill in the game already goes.