Heroes of the Storm To eSports Level
Blizzard seems very serious about taking Heroes of the Storm to eSports level. What started as a casual game for people to gather around and have a good laugh is now turning into serious eSports business. And the entire deal might have just occurred because Blizzard is simply Blizzard. With a reliable company name and a continuously polished game, they might just make it to the top.
The MOBA genre has been quite stale in the last two years, competitively speaking, of course. There are many developers who are trying to bring a good game to the table, but they just can’t seem to make it. Some examples are Strife and DeadBreed, games which basically popped up, were deemed too casual and basically died before they even got properly launched.
The market is simply dominated by League of Legends and DotA 2, MOBA titans which simply cannot be brought down because of their accessibility and historical advancement. But Heroes of the Storm, this is a rather special case, mostly because of the fact that Warcraft III is where MOBAs began. The company is coming back to reclaim what is theirs.
Heroes of the Storm does not exactly bring anything new to the MOBA genre. We can say that it brought many maps and a lot of diversity into play styles and it also created the team leveling system, which basically means that you play as a team or you lose the game. We can also give credit for the Specialist class, which cannot be seen in other MOBA games, but this is it mostly, the rest is all the same.
League and DotA have a way of establishing which players are the best players: through carrying. It is widely known that an effective player can carry a team to victory, but only because in these two games you can gain gold, gain extra items over your opponents and get extra single level. But Heroes offers none of that. There are no items to buy and no extra single level. If you try to do anything alone, you will die.
So going with Heroes into eSports is a tricky thing because, while it does promote team play and sportsmanship, how are players going to be able to find who is the best? A player might be way better than his team alone, but the fact that he is matched with them can draw him down significantly. It is all a major gamble, based on luck, which players can have or cannot have.
Photo Credits flickr.com
