Blizzard pt. 1: Heroes of the Storm

 

            Hello. I was pretty sure I already ranted about this before; I know I did over on Rooster Teeth before they broke their website for the final time but all my post got sent to the void with their update. This might be part one of a two or three part rant towards Blizzard. Blizzard was another company, like Ubisoft, I held in high regard growing up and they just seem to be a shell of their former selves. So now I have to find all these YouTube videos again to explain my points, ffs. Alright, let’s do this again, I’ll try to be as coherent as possible.

            So, the subject for this blog is Heroes of the Storm. I really enjoyed HotS when it started. I also wouldn’t mind playing it now from time to time. I can, for the most part, ignore parts of the game that irk me because most of the reasons are quite arbitrary. I’ll explain as I go but, from the beginning; Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA by Blizzard where they use characters from their franchises, mostly being WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo. When it was first shown off it was called Blizzard DOTA then Blizzard All-Stars. In the trailer it says there are “two dark and terrible gods, one red, one blue. To amuse themselves they kidnapped great heroes from time and space… These heroes are forced to fight to the death in an endless battle with no purpose other than ladder points.” That, right there, is what Blizzard should have just stuck with. That should have been plastered over everyone’s heads in the office. For probably half of the games’ life they held true to this but somewhere down the line they decided to inject lore into the game. Ah, that’s where I’ve talked about this before, okay well I’ll get to that later on as well but for now I’ll try to continue. So for the most part the matches you played were set in different “realms” with mostly the same kind of mobs; knights, archers and catapults for the lanes. Giants and skeletal knight camps to defeat and help push. The realms themselves had different objectives and “realm lords,” the voice of the map telling you when objectives are up, when you lose a keep, when your core is being attacked. Some maps seemed connected or within the same “realm” which would be fine, if it was left at that. Dragon Shire and Garden of Terror were in the same realm. Sky Temple and Tomb of the Spider Queen. Cursed Hollow and Haunted Mines. They shared assets is all I’m saying, there’s no real reason to dig deeper. Fan theories, in my opinion, are fine and fun. It gives YouTubers something to speculate on and, as long as you don’t get a real answer, you can believe whatever you want to believe. So where am I going with this? Um, the game was fun, the setting was neat and the heroes were pretty much playthings to the realm lords. You could see other people all around the map just watching the match happen, leaning on fences and stuff. They knew they weren’t in any danger; it was like watching jousting to them. The realm lords wanted entertainment for themselves and their citizens.

            Blizzard started introducing maps that were based on their franchises. I would have preferred they didn’t but I can see why they did. In my mind, the first few maps are the realm lords looking at where these heroes came from and tried to conjure up a similar battle ground. I remember seeing someone complain about the Diablo maps because the angels in the lanes had wings that looked more armor than anything when in the “lore” for Diablo they are “made of pure light.” So like I said, I didn’t really have a problem with that but other people who are really into Blizzard lore did. These are silly things to get hung up on in a multiplayer only game but these are the things that people like me get stuck on and it ruins the experience for us which is too bad. I wish I could overlook certain things but I can’t for whatever reason.  But, overall, I liked the Diablo maps, I wish they made it more Nexus then Diablo but oh well. I really didn’t care for the StarCraft, WarCraft or Overwatch maps though. By the time they did the maps for OW and WC it just felt more ripped from those worlds and less like a god like being remade it in their own way, if that makes sense. If they had taken the concepts and made them in a Nexus like fashion then maybe I wouldn’t have minded so much.

            Almost a year into the game Blizzard adds Tracer from Overwatch into HotS. Her trailer was perfect. The other heroes are standing around talking with each other as she zips around looking at everything. The main point being that there’s no “good” or “bad” at this moment. Now adding Tracer makes sense and in my opinion should have been the only Overwatch character in the game. Skins I’m cool with. Widowmaker skin for Nova, makes sense. A Brigitte skin for Johanna would make sense. They’re practically the same character. Tracer is essentially the mascot for Overwatch so it could get players interested in OW to see what it’s about but they just kept adding more and more OW characters in. My issue with this is one, OW is already it’s own, multiplayer only game, you don’t need to dump everyone from that game into another one and have the characters play the same way. Like it just seemed lazy to me.

“Hey guys we need a new tank.”

“Hm, well how bout Reinhardt, he’s a tank and we haven’t put in a new Overwatch hero in a while.”

“Okay, make his kit work for HotS.”

He’s not in the game but you know? Not much thought has to be put in which is a reason to do it, like you have the blueprints right in front of you, you just have to adept it to a different game. (It seems with adding Mei they made her into a tank for HotS when she is usually DPS in OW so that’s at least a little interesting. Something different.) Reason number two I don’t like so many OW heroes in HotS is because within OW, StarCraft is a franchise of which D.VA is a “pro-player” of. If that’s the case then why is she in HotS? Why is she in a game with units from a game she plays? This is why lore is bad, it breaks morons like me. The third reason for me is; if you’re going to put so many characters from OW in HotS then why not just make an Overwarch MOBA? I feel like that’s what OW should have been from the beginning. You can argue that there is a ton of WarCraft characters so why not just a WC MOBA and to that I would say I’d be completely fine with it. But WarCraft 3 and WoW both are very different then a MOBA and I feel Overwatch is very similar.

            Up to this point of Tracer being added in I was cool with everything more or less but two months after Tracers intro video, Medivh’s trailer drops and with it so did my interest in the game. They start to suggest that there is “good” and “evil” within the Nexus and that these characters can have some kind of aactual influence to the Nexus and its citizens. In Gul’dan’s trailer, released a month after Medivh’s, they have words, Medivh saying “You will not destroy the Nexus.” To which Gul’dan responses “Destory it… this realm holds more power then I could ever dream of and it will be mine.” Like fucking shut up. You were brought here by literal gods, they could easily blip you out of existence. You are a plaything here. The whole “good vs evil” thing in this setting is so fucking stupid. It’s like in Overwatch, there are clearly “good guys” and “bad guys” but that doesn’t translate to the game itself so why the fuck even acknowledge it?

            Two years later, in 2018, is when the end was in sight. Blizzard started this plot within Heroes of the Storm called “The Dark Nexus.” Like, how fucking middle school is that? “Duuuhhrr, the DaRk NeXuSssssss.” For crying out loud. As the name suggests, and as you can PROBABLY guess, it’s about some super awful thing within the Nexus that threatens all life. As the story goes the Raven Lord of Cursed Hollow was the only one aware of it or was secretly holding it back but now it’s just too powerful or something along those lines from what I skimmed. They had a webcomic about all this but within the story the Raven Lord killed the Dragon Knight of Dragon Shire. This then changed the in game announcer for Dragon Shire to go from the Dragon Knight to the “Lady of Thorns,” the Dragon Knight’s wife. Along with having a different announcer the wings and armor of the knight went from being red to blue. Many people were confused about the changes and didn’t know why it happened at all. In most cases, competitive players in games don’t have the faintest idea of the lore so why would you do this? During all this they introduced Orphea, the first original character to be added into HotS. She is a Nexus being and the daughter of the Raven Lord himself. So hold up right here, if you can’t guess, I think this is fucking stupid. HotS started out as two groups just fighting each other for entertainment and now a Nexus citizen is going to be apart of it too? Seems kind of dumb to me but what do I know right? When I see Orphea I just think she could’ve been a Pandaren who controlled a Sha or was possessed by a Sha, just seems like a wasted opportunity to me. I’ll just leave it at that with the lore.

            I think that about does it actually. To me the Nexus just seemed like this utopian kind of place where there was no war or anything and the realm lords just wanted to have something to watch much like us and football or UFC. Even the Raven Lord would say “I grow tired of your petty squabbling” during his matches. The heroes pose no threat to him at all. It was just suppose to be entertainment for beings that have god like powers. If you want to make comics about the Nexus beings and things that go on behind the scenes then fine, do that, just keep it out of the actual game. Leave it there for people who actually want to find it. It’s like in most games that have all this extra lore text that you find. How many people actually read that? What’s the percentage? I can’t imagine it’s much. Like I feel bad for the poor souls that write all that stuff to have a majority of people skip over it. They could be working on something else. There’s a little bit more I have to say on Heroes of the Storm but I think it’ll work better in my next rant. See you soon. Oh! My bad, how rude of me; What are YOUR thoughts on lore in multiplayer focused games? Do you read random books you find in the game? Do you or did you like Heroes of the Storm? Let me know in the comments. Ha, right.

                    @AztecSauce