It still has the magic in spades.
Heroes of the Storm has announced that, to celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary, all heroes will be free for all players until June 15, there’s one new skin, and if you login, you’ll get a few little bonuses to boot. It’s been five years since HotS got a new hero, and three years since Blizzard officially put the game into “maintenance mode”, but as we recently noted it’s looking awfully spry for what some call a “dead game.”
That’s probably because, even if it never turned out to be the LoL/Dota 2 competitor that Blizzard was hoping for, it has since launch been a brilliant game, and the only MOBA I’ve ever really loved. Whatever that Blizzard magic is, HotS has it in spades: the match length is perfect, almost every game seems to produce a genuine push-and-pull between both teams, and even basic elements like fighting mobs still feels exciting.
I played HotS solidly for years before falling off, and seeing the 10th anniversary celebration had me jonesing for another quick fix. So I downloaded it (around 35GB these days) and was first of all blown away by just how many heroes the game now has: 90 in total, from across all of Blizzard’s games and not just the biggies.
One of my favourite heroes, for example, is The Lost Vikings. I would never say I was particularly great with them, but they work in a very similar manner to the rock-paper-scissors mechanics of the original platformers where each viking has a very particular skill. So in HotS Baleog the Fierce is a damage-dealer, Erik the Swift runs around with his slingshot inflicting constant ranged damage, and Olaf tanks for the group: the twist is that you can control them as a group, or split the individual members across the map for different tasks.
Obviously none of the vikings is as strong as a “normal” solo hero, but it makes them a unique proposition within HotS, and many other heroes are similarly distinctive. I didn’t quite think I’d be up to controlling three characters at once on my grand return, however, so decided to go with one of the more vanilla characters: Diablo’s Valla, who’s a ranged assassin.
Playing Valla is a tonne of fun and I mained her for a while, but it’s a pretty straightforward style: hang around near fights peppering enemies with constant crossbow shots, mixing in your two special shots every few seconds, and flip away from danger when something tries to target you (though you can also use this ability to chase down enemy heroes). Throw in the occasional ult, rinse and repeat.
What could go wrong? Well I forgot how squishy Valla was, for a start, and gave away an early kill after getting jumped. But this is nowhere near as big a deal in HotS as in some of the competition, and the game proceeded apace. I wasn’t doing outstanding but I was getting all my abilities in, joining team fights, and pushing gates effectively.
Soon enough I was back on autopilot. “Still got it” I thought as I chased down and ulted two enemy heroes trying to escape a team fight, nailing both. “Why did I ever stop playing this” I thought as another set of towers fell: we had an open route to their Nexus. Then it all went pear-shaped.
My team focused on the top lane, where we’d broken through, and started hammering the last line of defences. But the enemy team had broken through on our bottom lane after killing our defending hero, and were doing exactly the same: I could see they were going to get our Nexus first, unless a hero stepped up to save the day.
I hearthed back to base and pinged the enemy team like mad. None of my teammates joined me, and the one who’d been killed still had a 30 second cooldown. I put up stiff resistance, peppering the enemy team and distracting them from the Nexus, but it was a losing battle. I kept pinging. Then disaster: an enemy dropped a stun on me, the entire team unloaded in my direction, and I was dead with a big cooldown.
All-too-late the team returned to base to try and make this defence work. It didn’t: our Nexus fell, and the game was over. “Valla” read the chat from one of my teammates. “Ur a NPC.” Breathe in that rarified air: that’s the true MOBA experience.
Who knows but I might have another go tonight. Because HotS still occupies a niche that no other MOBA does and, despite the whole maintenance mode thing, Blizzard keeps quietly issuing near-monthly patches that keep things ticking over. Who knows how many people are playing this thing but I had two matches last night and with both the queue time was less than a minute.
Heroes of the Storm may lack some of the genre’s more granular complexities, such as last-hitting, but almost every time it delivers a concentrated burst of the good stuff that makes these games so compelling: teamplay around objectives, great big fights, huge swings in momentum.
Oh, and there’s one more reason for lapsed players to have a little swing by HotS town once more. This anniversary patch also updated the homescreen and startup music (“CAUTION: May cause nostalgia”). Someone at Blizzard really does still care about this game, even if it’s just the janitor.
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