RPS: Over the years, I've developed a wild theory: Blizzard is not, in fact, an altruistic charity like everyone presumes, but is instead some sort of business. So I think we're going to have a lot of fun with relationships that already exist and ones you might imagine would exist if these characters came together. We certainly had discussions about Kerrigan and Raynor when they're on the same team, when they're on separate teams, etc. We have a line where Nova kills Arthas, and she's like, 'Who's the ghost now?' We'll try to have relationships. We've got heroes who will talk back-and-forth to each other.

We're doing some character interaction stuff, though.

To see this content please enable targeting cookies. I mean, this is a game where at some point a murloc is gonna get Diablo in a headlock and kill him. It's not canon or because Thrall died in some battle and now he can't be in Orgrimmar or something. For glory, for honor, and kind of just for the fun of it. Heroes meet in the Nexus to battle it out. RPS: Is there any sort of story here - if not with narrations and cut-scenes then through, say, little mid-match character interactions ala League of Legends?īrowder: It's very light in terms of how it's done. Inside the studio, I think you get all three of those answers to where it comes from and what it means. That's where it's come from. And some people just thought it was a cool-sounding word. Other people have said the Nexus is sort of a storm of worlds crashing together. Some people have said that it's Heroes of Blizzard, because yeah, Blizzard is a storm. Is it just another way to say Heroes of Blizzard?īrowder: Honestly, theories differ. RPS: What is the Storm? How does one become a hero of it? Is it at all important to any sort of story? A blizzard is a type of storm. Unfortunately, Browder's perspective on the MOBA genre's epidemic of absurd, hypersexualized female characters turned out significantly less so. I discussed the surprise hit of BlizzCon with game director Dustin Browder, and we touched on everything from business models to plans for a map editor to whether or not Heroes counts as a 'casual' MOBA.

And yet, for all the 'because why not'-ness of the game's premise, Heroes of the Storm plays quite nicely, taking MOBA mechanics and sanding down the rough edges to a point of real intuitiveness - sculpting a svelte ice swan from a figurative iceberg. Papa Blizzard, Papa Blizzard! Why are Aunt Kerrigan and Uncle Diablo fighting? No, seriously, why? I didn't even know they were from the same side of the family.

Heroes of the storm models