HotS Alpha

I watched a bit on twitch tonight. Looks like fights last a while vs Dota. Lots of casting of spells so big mana pools. Not a lot of stuns. Vs Dota. Does look fun though. Looks like they made it using their starcraft2 engine (correct me if I'm wrong here)

The mounts seemed cool and the added layer of getting tributes was nice. Looking forward to playing it.

I'm honestly a little disappointed in the type of company Blizzard is becoming. They're catering to extremely casual players across many of their IPs, and HoTS is a prime example of this.

I'm not a hardcore LoL/Dota player, and was hoping HoTS would be a game that could get me into the genre. After watching the streams last night, though, I'm a bit turned off from what I've seen. Player movement in the game is exceptionally slow. There are no items and no individual character levels. No last hits. You can't see how many kills you've registered at the end of the game. You can't communicate with your opponents (just like in Hearthstone). It's all an effort to "protect" bad players and normalize any skill gap.

So, I don't look at this game individually, but more as a referendum on the evolution of Blizzard as a company, and assess it in the context of their other games. They introduced purchasable level 90 characters in WoW, effectively destroying class equilibrium and removing one more RPG element from the game (the actual process of leveling). Their other new IP, Hearthstone, can be played on tablets and phones.

The company that brought us Starcraft and Diablo ~15 years ago is now developing games to appeal to an entirely different audience. It shouldn't be difficult to determine why Titan was cancelled or "rebooted". It was likely a relatively intensive RPG, which Blizzard simply felt wouldn't be viable in today's market.

quote:

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When I level a new character in WoW, I sit in a city and queue for dungeons. That's boring.

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Of course it's boring. Back in 2005, you actually had to play the game like a standard RPG - which involved communicating with others to build a viable group to actually travel to the dungeon itself. The dilution of WoW has been taking place for years, and the removal of any requirement to level a character is just the apex of this process.

I'm disappointed with the game WoW has become, and even though I've never spent more than 30 minutes with existent MOBAs, I'm already quite put off from what I've seen from HoTS. Not in terms of where it is technically, as it's only an alpha, but in its design philosophy.

This is discouraging to me to read C's

-In my brief stint of watching the streams I saw them leveling up and could hear audible queues for the player to choose a talent and saw skills at the bottom of the screen too. So I sort of assumed the rest of the features that the other two moba's featured were also in HotS.

Although it can be seen as a huge nod to the casual market, I think it may be supply and demand pushing the game to more of a casual audience. LOL has plenty of players and Dota as well..Maybe all that is LEFT for the genre is the Casual Market..So that what the game was tailored to.

Reading that Diablo was $7.49 is pretty crazy though..as a mainly dota player, I am spoiled to every single character being free the day it is released.

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Valve could make Dota 2 completely free and they would still profit monetarily from the game, as it brings hundreds of thousands of players to Steam on a daily basis.

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Dota2 is pretty much all free as it is.

Three things that I think lead to this:

1. Their IPs grew to unprecedented levels ($$).
2. They were purchased by Activision
3. PC Gaming has grown since those days and now the casual PC gamers far outnumber the hardcore.