Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Heroes of the Swarm and The End of MOBA History!

Lately I've been playing a great deal of Heroes of the Swarm, which is a little strange for me.  I've hinted at my true feelings for it in a few other posts, but here I'll just come out and say it directly: I think it's an odd mishmash of cash-grabbing fan-service and haphazard groping at a title in the MOBA genre, one of the few genres Blizzard seems to be unable to carve out an effective niche in of late, and while I'm sinking hours and hours into it (in fact, it's currently one of my go-to de-stressing titles) I find it very problematic on the whole, even when I'm enjoying myself.  I have a complicated relationship with it: there are some great gameplay elements present, and the core game, the mish-mashing MOBA play structure, delivers on some of the best parts of the feedback loop that MOBAs are known for.  But that core game steps away from MOBA play structure in some pretty particular ways that limits HotS' overall depth and viability as both a competitive structure.  While Blizzard has done some work to alleviate some issues that MOBAs typically have with accessibility, in doing so they've also created a bevy of new problems that undermine the fundamental balancing mechanisms of MOBA play, largely by removing the tools that have been traditionally used to address gameplay balance issues in the genre.

Let me explain.

The original MOBA, DotA, was just a WC3 mod, which achieved its most distinct success after WC3's expansion was released.  I spent hours and hours fucking around in DotA when I was a college student, and I arrived just in time to see it transform from a wholly alienating shitfuck of a game that broke in new ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, every time it was patched. The version of DotA I started playing prominently featured thoroughly broken heroes who could, if properly nurtured, eradicate entire enemy teams or, better yet, teleport across the map into the enemy base and destroy the tree-of-life from full health before the opposing team had time to respond.  I watched that mess turn into an alienatingly complex game that started to drop hints at just what it wanted to be, and how it wanted to develop.  Around when I stopped playing, DotA had started to ease up on new players, giving them more money to play with and shorter matches to learn their early lessons through.  It never shook its reputation as a punishing game that broke players, and demanded ceaseless attention and practice from players if they wanted to achieve even moderate success, but it did compromise a little by making it easier for new players to begin plumbing the depths of the game.

And what depths they were!  DotA's progression structure was based almost entirely around WC3's hero progression and item system, borrowing heavily from The Frozen Throne expansion's RPG-style campaign's character growth system.  Heroes have three skills and one "ultimate ability," unlocked at higher levels. They also have six gear slots to equip items in.  Players can trade a "skill point" for a small uptick in all of their abilities ahead of schedule, equivalent to the purchase of a low-level item, which makes a tremendous difference early on in the game, but eventually becomes effectively inconsequential.  With dozens of heroes, each of whom has four skills, and hundreds of items, which can be built in different orders or configured in different ways to sometimes present sympathetic or complimentary relationships, the game was unwieldy in its complexity.  Many of the "best" heroes, heroes that broke the game, became "the best" only when constructed around a painstakingly precise build.  Other heroes, who were easy enough to play at first, might vanish completely from play with experienced players, because their patterns of action were too predictable, or their growth too conservative when compared to other characters.  The end result was a game where balance was non-existent, a fiction imposed upon the game by its fans, cried for constantly.  Its insubstantiality was eventually immortalized in what would  become the preferred tournament style for many players: ban-draft or banning-pick, which involved each team selecting a set of heroes that would then become off-limits to either team.  In order to become a competition-ready game, DotA had to introduce mechanics that allowed its player base to self-police its more broken elements.  The end result was a mish-mash of stopgap solutions that came to rely on a set of stopgap tools that players could employ to impose limitations and simulate relative game balance, and it stuck.  To this day, even DotA 2, the most DotA-like member of the MOBA family, goes through massive periods of rebalance, and tournaments still use the de-facto-balance-referendum facilitated by ban-draft style selection while establishing hero make-up for the teams playing those tournaments (though they now call it "Captain Mode" or some such tomfoolery).

This was a necessary evil, especially in the earliest versions of DotA, because of how volatile gameplay shifts could be.  Certain characters could permanently disable players, which made the game keyboard shatteringly frustrating, and often allowed players to establish runaway power imbalances.  But each time a patch came along and attempted to address those issues, sometimes a new pattern would emerge, referred to by veteran players as "a new meta," or meta-game structure.  This "meta" could shift dramatically, in part because of how complex the interplay of factors within the game could be: a slight change to a hero, paired with a redesign of an item, paired with a tweak to another item, could all coalesce to make a previously innocuous hero "broken as shit" for lack of a better phrase.  It could also lay previously unassailably badass heroes low, "nerfing" them in one fell swoop without necessarily meaning to.

This complexity was part of the game's draw, of course: "difficult to master" can often translate to "fun to dump time into."  But new players found this alienating, especially as the game grew even more complex over time.  Games like Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends sought to reduce the complexity of the game in some ways, while occasionally amping it up in other ways.  Dawngate did away with items altogether, instead having players purchase "statistic" investments that they could develop along particular paths as the game progressed.  Some level of developmental complexity was always part of MOBA structure, however, and that developmental complexity constituted an important ingredient in the game's overarching structure, a kind of volatile, rapidly shifting variable that could make impressively unpredictable things occur, and let players explore the game's systems in creative ways that made competition fun, and made competing as a player require a serious commitment of time and energy.

Heroes of the Storm largely abandons this complexity, removing items from gameplay altogether, and locking player choices to a selection between four "traits" every few levels, some of which add new abilities to a player's arsenal, most of which just tweak existing abilities, or add passive effects to a hero's arsenal make them a little more effective under certain circumstances.  The other tweak, the ability to select one of two "ultimate abilities" for one's hero, seems to have been intended to give the game a sense of depth, but the end result is actually rather predictable: there is, more often than not, an unquestionable "best build" for each hero in question, and those skill choices usually consist of a "right" one and a "wrong" one.  The complexity that MOBAs usually present by making the developers less involved in issues of balance are absent, replaced by an attempt at ground-up game design that doesn't quite mesh with the genre it seeks to re-define.

It isn't that the outcome isn't fun: it's that the outcome is fairly predictable.  If you play HotS for a while you'll notice the same characters appearing in most matches, and the same characters being absent from most matches.  It's no mistake that people love Jaina Proudmoore and Nova: they're incredibly powerful characters.  Likewise, no one in their right mind will play the E.T.C. unless they're trying to level him up for money.  And therein lies the rub: if your game has a collection of effective and ineffective heroes, and your game's internal pricing structure hints at your perceived valuation of these heroes, your game probably is probably kind of predictable.  And predictable structures usually aren't the best vector for e-sports, a crucial aspect of most MOBA communities.

Outside of North America, video games are more than a viable sport: they're downright popular.  Hell, in some parts of Asia they're the most viable sports, financially and culturally.  League of Legends and DotA 2 both host international tournaments that draw global communities and feature hefty purses for winners.  Blizzard clearly wants in, and why shouldn't they?  They essentially birthed the current e-sports culture when they release Starcraft in 1998, but in the MOBA arena they've been falling behind, and they're clearly aware of it.  They recently launched a campaign to make mainstream North American culture and the world-entire aware of HotS as an e-sport, broadcasting a HotS tournament called "Heroes of the Dorm" on ESPN 2, and offering a massive chunk of tuition to the winning team.  The event received mixed support, but the nature of the event is quite telling: e-sports usually draw professional players, players who literally do nothing but play their game and train on a daily basis. Blizzard had to tap college level players, players who one would assume categorically couldn't make it in the professional circuits surrounding other MOBA titles.  That meant they were tapping into a market of amateur/professional athletes, college athletes who, unlike the athletes who are regulated by the NCAA, were still expected to complete their classes, and still theoretically had time to do so as well.

I missed the tournament myself, but it was, by all reports, quite a bit of fun to watch, and it apparently got some new love for the genre and for HotS, along with all the shade that one would expect to be cast upon ESPN for airing video games on TV as a sport.  And it could be that HotS will occupy a kind of niche within the MOBA framework, a kind of welcoming public space to players unfamiliar with the genre.  But all of the larger concerns I have about the game, from its relative lack of depth to its problematic developer-oriented balance, manifest, in a sense, in this tournament, and its adjacent factors: it consisted of non-professional athletes selected entirely from North American colleges, easily the weakest market for emerging cyber-athletes, perhaps partially because of the competitive nature of North American post-secondary education and perhaps partially because a social stigma still prevails in North America surrounding adults who play video-games.  The consensus seemed relatively clear that audiences would accept video games on TV, but that the people who usually watch e-sports, people who digitally stream content, were more or less nonplussed.

It's tough to blame them: HotS is fun, but it lacks depth, especially when you compare it to other MOBAs.  It's flashy, but once you strip away the upper layers of flash that occupy the game, the systems are relatively shallow, and many of the fights are decided before players even enter battle.  HotS lacks the dramatic reversals and "maker-plays" that often occur in MOBAs, and that relative stability means that most of the time a winner is clearly established before the midpoint of the game, and gaps in team-progression, a problem in any MOBA structure, are nearly insurmountable. In a DotA 2 game professional players are known to turn the entire match around with a single bold hail-mary play, but, while reversals sometimes happen in HotS, they're nowhere near as dramatic.  It's not that it isn't a good title in its own regard, it's simply that, as a MOBA, it feels like stripped down version of other games in the genre.

It also frequently leans on singular approaches to winning, which can be pretty uninteresting to watch.  In HotS, objectives are usually key to victory, so much so on some maps that players can win an entire game without ever directly attacking an enemy's base.  That strategic layer is something new, something that belongs entirely to HotS, but it is, like many of HotS new developments, a bit problematic when you begin to look at it closely.  If one strategy is considerably more effective, and less risky, than another strategy, players will never choose any other strategy, at least at higher levels of play, and, as a result, games will play out more or less the same way every time.

This is what I fear will become of Heroes of the Swarm.  It's not a bad game, not by any stretch, but it is a game with issues, and those issues seem to emerge from the fundamental approach developers have taken to developing the title: by attempting to encourage play that breaks the lane-oriented structure of MOBAs, Blizzard has essentially just replaced lane-management with a scrum for objectives every once in a while.  By attempting to do away with massive, alienating meta-shifts that break balance, Blizzard has removed the tools that players used to use to correct those balance shifts on their own and, in doing so, introduced a new host of balance issues to their project.  In trying to make a game that speaks directly to their fans in North America, they've lost track of a larger global market, a market that doesn't seem to have need or desire for the game they're trying to produce. 

And that's a bit of a shame, because for all its flaws, Heroes of the Storm is a very pretty game, and, with a different direction to it, it could have become a real challenge to entrenched MOBAs.  If there's one company that could smash the DotA 2/LoL schism into dust and emerge as the victor, it's Blizzard.  But in trying to please their fan base while appealing to a broader audience, Blizzard has created a gorgeous house with relatively little furniture inside.  It's well constructed, and safe to stay inside, but there's only so much to do in there before things start to feel old.