Pour one out for Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard’s belated entry into the genre that spawned from an old Warcraft mod, and the only MOBA I’ve ever loved. HotS is a brilliant game but arrived on the scene a little too late to make any kind of serious impact, with the field dominated then as now by League of Legends and Dota 2, and despite Blizzard’s best efforts and a 2017 reboot as HotS 2.0, development began winding down: in 2022, the developer finally announced it wouldn’t be creating any new content for the game.
You can say a lot about the journey of HotS since its 2015 release, but I think it’s inarguable that Blizzard really did support this game, and did so beyond the point where it was no longer really viable. This thing launched with around 30 characters and now boasts 90, as well as a boatload of maps, modes, and other additional content: all free, of course. One of the more bizarre aspects of HotS now is that players generally feel 2.0 didn’t monetise enough.
All of which is prelude to noting that, while HotS may now be in maintenance mode, Blizzard continues to plug away at the game and release regular updates. There’s no new content, sure, but the developer continues with seasonal events, mode rotations, and considerably in-depth balance patches.
The latest was released two days ago and it’s enormous: simply reading through the list of fixes and tweaks has taken me around 10 minutes. I won’t bore you by going in-depth on the buffs and nerfs to Abathur et al, beyond noting that there are still people at Blizzard (whom some members of the community humorously refer to as “the janitor“) who really care about this game and are issuing near-monthly fixes and adjustments across a huge part of the roster.
Also: this particular patch fixes loads of issues relating to shrub visibility, among which is an apparent bug where players could invisibly farm while in a shrub. Maybe it’s just the echo of the Knights Who Say “Ni!”, but I find it very amusing that somewhere in California lurks the coding master of the HotS shrubberies.
It’s also left the remaining HotS community in quite a nice place. I’ve always found MOBA communities to be quite spiky, and HotS over its lifetime has certainly had an element of that, but the HotS players who are still sticking around on the game’s Discord and subreddit (as well as the official forums) seem like a pleasant bunch: both resigned to the fact that their beloved game is in its dotage, and pleased that Blizzard is still listening, still updating, and still supporting the game long after the rest of the industry has moved on.
Look at the subreddit thread on this patch, and you’ll find any rancour drowned out by people discussing whether a given change is a nerf or a buff, what this means for Raynor when split-pushing, and why Brightwing remains cheap as hell and OP. Since the patch has been released there have been 333 comments on this thread: a lot of games would love that kind of engagement.
Players’ expectations for any game these days can be unrealistic. There’s a sense that developers owe a community constant updates and free new content, and responsive support is not just expected but demanded. HotS though is kinda past that. Everyone playing it knows that the jig is up, and hell everyone working on it knows the same. But they clearly share one thing: a pure love for the only actually good MOBA.
Blizzard gets more than its fair share of criticism, much of it deserved. But here’s one area where all you can do is doff your cap. I just reinstalled and hopped into HotS, went into quickplay with Valla, and found a great match almost instantly (I was bad and rusty but we won). It’s still as fun as ever and it’s just straight-up nice that, long past the point this thing has been commercially viable, Blizzard keeps it ticking over for the true believers. Credit where it’s due. Some might say HotS is dead: others would say long live Heroes of the Storm.
