The two orc characters have a lot in common

Jan 17, 2015 06:20 GMT  ·  By

Blizzard is sharing a few more details about Heroes of the Storm and what design principles it uses for the many different characters in the multiplayer experience, exemplifying this with Thrall, the latest addition to the roster, and Rehgar, one of the older mainstays.

Heroes of the Storm got a closed beta earlier this week and Blizzard soon started sharing plenty of details about its goals and ideas for the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) experience.

After going in-depth about the changes included in the new beta version, the studio now talks about the two major game design principles employed in Heroes of the Storm, which are top-down and bottom-up.

Thrall was designed from the top down

According to the studio's website, for the creation of Thrall, Blizzard employed a top-down strategy, as it wanted for quite some time to add the famous Orc Warchief into Heroes of the Storm, given the popularity of the Horde leader.

It became clear that he's a powerful melee fighter thanks to his huge hammer and the Orc shaman traits. However, the initial powers that were designed for him back at BlizzCon 2012 didn't fit his general idea, so the studio went back to the drawing board.

"It took a lot of iteration time to figure out which five abilities we could settle Thrall on, given how much Thrall could conceptually do. At this point, the mechanics – the 'bottom' – really helped us in identifying what Thrall needed gameplay-wise in order to feel fun and effective. So even though we started with the high fantasy of Thrall to generate ideas, we tested and locked down those ideas through the mechanics – starting top, going down," the studio explains.

Rehgar went from the bottom to the top

Meanwhile, Blizzard still had a nifty set of powers that really matched a support role, as such, the studio went back to the Orc pantheon to choose another character. The eventual winner was Rehgar, who was a great fit not just for the abilities but also for the spirit wolf idea, so the bottom-top strategy ended up working really well.

"Once we found a Hero for the kit, we gained access to the 'top' fantasy again, and we were able to complete the design with fantasy-driven concepts like the Ghost Wolf Trait. In other words, even though we started with the mechanics, we eventually came full circle to the fantasy of the character we were trying to create – starting at the bottom, and moving up," the studio adds.

As such, while Thrall and Rehgar look similar, their powers and their design strategies were very different.

Heroes of the Storm Thrall and Rehgar (5 Images)

Rehgar's base skin in HotS
Rehgar's Iron Claw skinThrall's base skin
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