14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has confirmed that it has plans to support the upcoming Heroes of the Storm multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) title with a suite of eSports features, from a spectator mode to replays and more, and that it hopes to repeat the Hearthstone situation.
After many years in development, Blizzard's MOBA experience – Heroes of the Storm – is finally in a closed technical alpha stage, and more and more details are slowly being released by the studio.
While talking with Eurogamer, Game Director Dustin Browder has confirmed that his team is certainly looking to supporting HotS as an eSport with a variety of specific features, so that players have the chance to turn it into a competitive experience at a high level.
"For us, eSports is something that's going to happen if our community decides that we're ready for it. We're going to provide all the tools, we're going to provide replay, observer mode, reconnect from replay, leagues and ladders and all that stuff which enables the higher end of competitive play and enables the eSports folks if they want to make an eSport out of Heroes of the Storm. But it's really up to them, at the end of the day."
Browder has also expressed his desire for Heroes of the Storm to follow in the footsteps of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, the studio's recently released trading card game that has already drawn in a lot of people and quite a few big tournaments.
"Hearthstone also made a lot of changes to what people expected of a genre," he added. "They came out and said, 'We know that a lot of you guys out there are going to look at that and say, you're just dumbing it down, you're not making it really deep or interesting and it's just for noobs' - which, to be fair, happened with World of Warcraft as well."
"It's certainly given us the courage to make some of the changes that we felt would be important to this game. We watched them go through that and come out the other side, where players see: 'Oh, I see, the complexity's here, it's just in different locations to what I'm used to, but there is a very competitive game here.' We want to have the same kind of experience."
Heroes of the Storm has quite a big roster already and Blizzard is committed to improving the whole experience ahead of a potential beta release later this year, so expect to hear much more soon enough.