How Blizzard’s upcoming MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) turns out will be dependent on its future players.
Heroes of the Storm was originally envisioned as a Starcraft 2 mod, but as Blizzard continued to work on the game, they realized that it had to be a stand-alone product.
“As we were building this mod, we thought, ‘This needs to be a game,’” Dustin Browder told Joystiq.
“And the fact is, we do games when we do games.”
And just like all Blizzard video games, Heroes has spent, and likely will spend, a long time in development in order to “get it right.”
Like the original Dota, Heroes started out as mod, “Blizzard DOTA.” Back then, Blizzard was more interested in showing the Warcraft 3 modding community what they could do with Starcraft 2 so they would check out the game.
Four years and one legal case with Valve later, “Blizzard DOTA“ morphed into Heroes of the Storm.
Although the MOBA scene is quite saturated at present, with Dota 2 and League of Legends being the only standouts, Browder is confident that Heroes could stand out, if they community favor it.
“You know, we never had a plan for StarCraft to turn out the way it did,” said Browder.
The original Starcraft remained popular for a decade and a half after its release largely because of the eSports scene and fan support.
Similar, whether Heroes goes the distance is very much “up to the community.”
Heroes of the Storm is in Technical Alpha now, and interested players can still sign up for the Beta.
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