Up until a few days ago, I thought I hated MOBAs1. Turns out I just hated Dota 2.
Actually, let me qualify that. I hate playing Dota 2, but I don’t hate it. It’s one of those games that, like Dark Souls or any fighting game released after the original Street Fighter II on Super NES, I feel like I’m doomed to never be any good at, and consequently have reached a point of acceptance where I feel I can and should respect it from afar, but not even attempt to get into it. And that’s fine by me.
Let me qualify that further by saying that I feel there are way too many MOBAs on the market these days, as many developers appear to be seeing it as the new2 fad to latch onto in the (usually vain) hope that they will attract a large, world-beating multiplayer community.
With all that in mind, well, Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm is really good.
Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA that brings together a series of characters from Blizzard’s various games from over the years — primarily Warcraft, StarCraft3 and Diablo, with a guest appearance from The Lost Vikings — and throws them into battle against one another in the usual 5v5, destroy-the-other-team’s-base-before-they-destroy-yours MOBA gameplay.
Heroes of the Storm has a few little twists on the formula, though. For starters, individual players on your team don’t level up independently of one another; you have a collective pool of experience that you share, so you all level up at the same time. You still need to do your part to make sure your team levels up faster than your opponents, particularly in the early stages of a match, but there’s less feeling “left behind” than there is in stuff like Dota and League of Legends, in my experience anyway.
Tied in with this is the fact that a lot of the stupid arbitrary maybe-skill-maybe-luck-based bullshit that Dota includes — “Last Hit”4 being the one that always wound me up the most — is conspicuously absent from Heroes of the Storm, and it’s much more fun as a result. It means you can focus on the overall team strategy rather than micromanaging your character to such a degree that it can become very distracting — if you’re a newcomer, anyway; I’m sure veteran Dota players can Last Hit pretty much at will.
Then there’s the fact that there’s more than one map, and each map has its own little quirks. Some have two lanes to attack down, some have three. Some have objectives you need to defend to gain a temporary advantage, some have special enemies you need to defeat. Some have collectible items to unleash powerful attacks, and one even has an entirely separate “dungeon” map for you to descend into when the time is right. The objectives and the rewards you get from them don’t necessarily make or break a whole battle, but they can make things swing one way or the other — and even provide a means for a struggling team to make a spectacular comeback, rather than being stomped into the ground.
All of this is wrapped up in matches that generally don’t take any longer than twenty minutes to play, as compared to the 30-90 minute slugfests that games of Dota can easily become. It’s simple to understand, accessible and actually enjoyable to me, even as a newcomer and someone who is not generally very good at strategy games.
I haven’t yet dared play a game against human opponents, but I feel much more inclined to give it a shot in this than in the notoriously elitist and short-tempered communities that play a lot of Dota and League of Legends. If you, like me, have been skeptical about MOBAs but like the idea of them, give Heroes of the Storm a shot. It is free, after all.
1 MOBA: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, a team-based game where two teams compete for dominance of a map by attempting to destroy the other team’s “core” by infiltrating their base.
2 Well, not that new any more, I guess.
3 The way they’re capitalised differently has bugged me for years now.
4 Last Hit: a mechanic whereby you only get experience points for a kill if you were the last person to deal damage to it. Satisfying to veterans, the most fucking annoying thing in the world for newbies.