Heroes of the Storm is a Smash Bros.-style mascot brawler for Blizzard’s iconic PC games, meaning the rockstar PC developer borrowed tons of ideas from its other games when crafting HOTS characters. The latest patch for Diablo III shows that creative inspiration works in the opposite direction too.
Data-mining experts that they are, Blizzard fans (Diablo fans, specifically), recently cracked open Diablo III’s highly anticipated 2.3 patch and began combing it over to see what sorts of game-changing adjustments they could expect. Gamers on the Diablo and Heroes of the Storm subreddits caught one interesting detail concerning the Witch Doctor, the Diablo III character who can summon lots of gross-looking monsters to fight by his or her side. It had to do with the Doc’s zombie conjuring ability, which forms a wall of writhing undead corpses in Diablo:
Heroes of the Storm has a character modelled off Diablo’s witch doctor named Nazeebo. He has a similar zombie-conjuring ability, only his zombies pop up in a circle instead of a straight line. See the top middle square of this Heroes Nexus image:
HOTS is a MOBA, and in MOBA terminology this zombie circle provides Nazeebo with a powerful crowd control-type ability — allowing him to trap his enemies for a few seconds so he and his teammates can wail on the immobilised opponent.
Apparently, Diablo III’s developers thought the tweak to the original Witch Doctor ability was a good enough idea that it should be in their game too. DIII designer John Yang said as much on Twitter in response to a fan’s suggestion:
@Thunderclaww Definitely liked the @BlizzHeroes version of Wall of Zombies. Works well in @Diablo.
— John Yang (@_JohnYang) June 26, 2015
It’s cool to see this sort of cross-fertilisation of ideas taking place between different Blizzard games. I mean, it makes perfect sense that Heroes would give other Blizzard developers new ideas. “MOBA” is essentially a hybrid genre that exists somewhere between an action-RPG like Diablo III and a real time strategy game like StarCraft II.
Hopefully Heroes of the Storm will give the developer some more ideas for how to finally make another Warcraft RTS as well. Blizz please.
Comments
8 responses to “Heroes Of The Storm Inspired A Character Change In Diablo III”
“Heroes of the Storm is a Smash Bros.-style mascot brawler for Blizzard’s iconic PC games” … yeah or you could just call it a MOBA Style mascot game seeing as its nothing like Smash bros or a brawler, its 5v5 team based MOBA, either way its a terrible game that most new mobas try to follow and thats the League of Legends format where its pay for characters to win even thou every week you get a new character, that shit is annoying, why not make it cosmetics is the only thing you pay for? 2 great games that do this is DOTA 2 and Path of Exile, both free to play and both don’t have any game breaking pay to win transactions, all transactions in the game are purely cosmetic and you are actually playing the full game and thats how they make there money, but theres a few games for example that have came out recently and they are pay to win and thats half the game you can only access, games like HotS or Infinite Crisis, Dirty Bomb to Blacklight Retribution, its mechanics in games that ruin it, yes its all been said before but why is it that companies don’t listen and keep repeating mistakes?
Lol isnt pay to win, you can earn in game currency to buy champions as well and be competitive without spending any money. Pretty much the only things that require you to pay are the Skins (cosmetic).
On top of that league has reasonable balance and at the lower ranks its entirely possible for any character to beat other characters.
Pretty sure you dont understand what pay to win means.
I haven’t played LOL (solid Dota fanboy here), but surely there’s an element of P2W until you have all the heroes unlocked? Sure, a fantastic player will out-play a terrible player regardless of which hero/champion they choose, but if two relatively evenly matched players face off, and one hero is a natural counter-pick to the other hero, then the one with the hero advantage is going to have a better time, right? So if two people of the same skill both start playing, but one pays to unlock all heroes and one doesn’t, the one that paid is going to have a better chance of winning (since he can counter pick more successfully) up until the other one has unlocked all the characters.
I agree with flash, you shouldn’t have the option to pay for anything that impacts gameplay. Valve has obviously shown that charging just for cosmetics and non-game-influencing items is a viable model, and totally avoids all the P2W shenanigans.
Pay to win implies you can’t win unless you pay or that things are locked behind a pay wall, which is simply not true. More likely people who buy every one straight up are just gonna be bad at alot of heroes.
Counters don’t mean much until much higher levels of play. By the time you get to lvl 30 and can play ranked you have usually practiced a few comfort picks which are your go to anyway no matter who you are vsing, no way someone can be skilled at everyone and mechanical skill is transferable. It is really unadvised to play a character you havent practiced in ranked even if they are a counter because you’re likely to lose. Also add to that that most people play Blind pick (no unranked draft picking in Oce) so who knows who you are vsing even if you have all the heroes.
Not saying its a perfect system or anything, i just find there is no pay to win element, there is a pay to speed up unlocks.
Heroes of the storm is a moba, nothing at all like Smash Bros. Watching even one video of it would tell you that.
silly misinformed artilce is silly.
how is a MOBA like a beat em up? O_o
nah I like it when they reference stuff that isn’t DOTA when talking about this garbage
I think, by that, they meant ‘it’s popular’. In which case it’s probably appropriate to leave DOTA out of it. 😉
Is it that hard to realise its like smash bros because it draws in existing characters from other game series.