

Shacknews: I'm fascinated by the way you decided to distribute Cho'gall. I should be able to attack him and inflict some damage," or "Oh, I don't have to worry about it." You do have something to worry about with Cho'gall, because he's essentially two characters in one. Especially when he comes out, people will find, "Oh, that's a single Hero in the lane. I did notice from the internal playtest that he can kick out an insane amount of damage. Balance considerations are that if Cho'gall gets ahead, he'll start steamrolling people, but if he was behind, it was very difficult to come back from. Cho'gall causes teams to think differently about balance. Hodgson: I'm not gonna lie, it's been a lot in our internal playtesting. They're really close! They can practically read each other's thoughts! How much damage could that Cho'gall cause? Shacknews: That was my next question: What kind of damage can this guy cause? Let's say you have a pair of teammates that are completely in sync with each other. You can't cover as much ground, but you're much stronger than players might think you are. Having a Cho'gall on your team means your team has essentially four Heroes, instead of five, so there's crazy gameplay implications for that. And another player controls all of the magic and heavy firepower, so it's kind of a heavy tank/caster class. The way that it works is that one player controls the legs and has one set of abilities. Wouldn't it be awesome if you and an allied player could control the same Hero? We spent a lot of time iterating on Cho'gall, because he was the obvious two-headed ogre with the Blizzard history and lore behind it. We tried to do that before with Abathur, a Hero that doesn't engage in combat Murky, a Hero that constantly dies Leoric, a Hero that never dies! So we wanted to spin off this concept where we had the Lost Vikings, which were three Heroes controlled by one player.
Heroes of the storm push hero full#
Hodgson: We feel like we really just wanted to explore the full space of heroes. Shacknews: I have to ask about Cho'gall! How did you come up with the idea for a two-player character and, logistically, how is this even going to work? Hammer or everyone will be playing as Murky. The other cool thing is, you've seen in the opening ceremony video, we'll also do wacky games every now and then where you might get the same Hero. You immediately are dumped right in and start battling it out in this insane game mode for three rounds. The three random choices you'll get are from a specific role, so if you've got warrior, you'll have three different warriors to choose from. Right away, you've got your Ultimate, everyone's picked these random heroes, essentially. Everybody will start off at level 10, you'll get to pick your Heroic ability, and it's just a no-holds-barred team fight.Īlan Dabiri, Technical Director: It's basically constant team action from the start, because it's a much more condensed version of the game. Every Hero that we have starts at level 10 and instead of picking the Hero at the beginning of the game, you are presented with three Heroes to pick from that are randomly selected, kind of like Hearthstone allows you to select three different Heroes at the beginning of their Arena game. We have some of the themes of the current maps that we have. It could be anything from control this point, like a 'king of the hill' style map, collect certain map objects. In Arena, there is a specific objective on each map. John Hodgson, Technical Designer: The standard mode is very much a traditional Heroes of the Storm experience, where you'll start at level 1, you'll earn experience together, you'll complete map objectives, you'll try and destroy the enemy core. How is this new game mode going to work and how is it going to be different from what we've seen from standard Heroes of the Storm games? Shacknews: You unveiled Arena Battlegrounds.
