Our PAX announcements from Blizzard Entertainment have come and gone and there were some things we saw coming, some things we didn't, and some things we didn't see at all. Before I dive in, I just want to clear up a little bit about how this blog is going to run. I am going to work under the assumption that if you managed so search hard enough to stumble across my lowly writings that you have learned all you can from sites like Blizzardwatch, Curse, and ZAM and their family of sites. They do an awesome job of breaking everything down and give you all the information you could ask for. It would be silly for me to come here and do a sloppy job of recapping things they have already written. Instead, my focus will be to give my opinions and expectations in my own way and hopefully that will be interesting enough for people to check in once in a while.
Ok, now that that's done, we can get into the goodies Blizzard gave us with PAX. Let's see if I managed to get anything right that wasn't spoon fed to me.
Heroes of the Storm:
Well I was right in saying that Heroes was going to bring us the least new information. I suppose that depends on your level of play in that game but we can get into that a little more later. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Heroes wasn't playable on the show floor so there hasn't been a hands on with the previewed hero or battleground. We saw more detail on Sylvanas' abilities and a full idea of what her kit looks like. She seems like she will play as more of high damage Specialist. Dustin Browder said as much, noting that the team had gone back and forth on whether to make her an Assassin or Specialist. She has some escapability and dome burst and, most importantly to me she has the capability to stun towers and NPCs with her attacks. I am drawn to heroes who can stand on their own in a lane and push while the enemy team's focus is elsewhere. Sgt. Hammer, Zagara, Azmodan are all some of my favorites. I will say, I am not a very competitive Heroes player. I haven't ventured into Hero League yet as I like to stick to low risk gameplay at least right now until I get a team of 5 friends together.
The other "new" feature showed was the Tomb of the Spider Queen battleground. As I predicted they had a bit more detail, since the version shown at Blizzcon was basically just early art. Browder went into some detail on the map objectives of killing spiders in lane to collect gems, and turn those gems in to hire the spider queen to help you push (Or something along those lines). It was described as a knife fight in a closet based on map size and player proximity to each other. Charming! That does bring up a reason I really enjoy Heroes over League of Legends and other traditional MOBAs (Other than my obvious Blizzard bias and LoLs cancer community. Though sometimes Heroes shows signs of the same). The varied maps really bring something new and can really change gameplay from game to game, even with the same heroes. And being able to ignore a lane to go and collect coins on Blackhearts bay, or grab skulls in Haunted Mines, really helps to kill the monotony when playing for extended sessions.
Dustin Browder also announced some changes to the progression system. Characters can now level to 20 to stop players from feeling unrewarded for playing a character after earning they're master skin. He also quickly went through addition rewards earned for leveling your personal account level to 40. At this point you stop earning rewards after level 15 I believe so the grind from 15-40 was there only really to unlock Hero League for those inclined and to unlock Team League in the future. There were some other things like the option to mute your team, clan support, and things like that, but theres no point in speculating on any of that until its implemented.
Then there are the things they didn't talk about. We didn't get any word on a hero on deck for after Sylvanas is released. As best I can recall this is the first time we haven't at least had in game footage of a hero in progress. We saw Jaina casting blizzard in the Anub'arak video if I remember right. At this point we don't know who to expect next and frankly I am a little annoyed! Heroes has been getting some justified criticism for selling beta access. The best way for them to silence those criticisms is to steadily release and test heroes to get us to a point where we are ready for a true launch. At this point server stability shouldn't be a concern since anyone who wants in can get in. Especially when they have such a wealth of characters at the ready, most of which have abilities already from whatever game they are associated with. End rant. NEXT!
PS: Possibly most importantly of all, Dustin Browder broke out into dance at on point when the presentation computer crashed. It was amazing.
Hearthstone:
As every Blizzard news site predicted, Blackrock Mountain was announced for Hearthstone. The presentation was cut short due to the computer crash during the Heroes segment, so we probably missed out on a little bit of information that we would have gotten given a full session. 17 bosses, 5 wings. and the first wing is Blackrock Depths. The bosses in the first wing are the Grim Guzzler, the Arena, and Dark Iron Emperor. Blizzard is obviously going to select the most memorable boss encounters, and the ones that best translate to hearthstone game mechanics rather than use all 61 bosses I joked about last time. I know I have probably killed 5 or 6 bosses in Blackrock Depths in WoW that I didn't even know were bosses. They went into a little detail about the plan to incorporate both the dragon theme of Blackwing Lair and Descent, and the Dark Iron Dwarf residents of Blackrock Depths and Molten Core. The expansion launches next month with 31 new cards (5 of which were previewed already).
Overwatch:
Finally, Overwatch basically stole the show. The hype surrounding this game is huge. People are itching for any news they can get and PAX did not disappoint. We saw a the new battleground that was hinted on @PlayOverwatch, Watchpoint: Gibraltar. This is a full blown payload map, unlike Kings Row, which is a combination point capture, payload. Jeff Kaplan (my hero), Game Director of Overwatch gave us a bit of the backstory to the location of that map. It is basically a secret base of operations for Winston the moon monkey's attempts to get Overwatch back together. I like what they are doing with the story of this world, and how they are delivering it to us in drips over time. I have some ideas about how we are going to get our Overwatch story, but I'll save that for another post.
Well also got information on two more heroes. Jesse McCree, the outlaw gunslinger, and Aleksandra Zaryanova, the Russian weightlifter. McCree is an offensive hero who was described as a blend of a long range sniper and a close range burst hero due to his ability to unload his sixshooter's entire clip using his alternate fire. Zarya is a female tank who seems to blur the line between tank and support. Her particle cannon has a short and long range attack, she has a shield she can place on herself or an ally which also buffs her attack damage based on how much damage it absorbs, and she has a gravity bomb which can set up awesome plays with some coordination from her team.
Jeff Kaplan mentioned, as part of his Zarya introduction, that Blizzard is listening to the community in regards to heroes in Overwatch having varied body types and ethnicities. I think this is a really important thing for them to focus on, especially since the world they are creating is a future earth. Ignoring the robot uprising, it would do some damage to the stories credibility if all the heroes also happened to be tiny waisted women, and tall sculpted men. It has become a hot topic on all kinds of forums, and some people still aren't happy because Zarya has pink hair and nail polish. Come on people, it's a step in the right direction. Think about it, less than a year ago Ubisoft was getting crushed in the media because they "didn't have time" to include ANY playable female characters. We went from that to having a bulky strong female character previewed for a game that is 6 months from seeing a beta. Wow, I just got sad thinking that we are still at least 6 months away from being able to play this game. Blizz soon TM. I will be doing some Overwatch posts about how I see Blizzard building up the lore and some other things. If you are looking for some well done Overwatch content, I urge you to check out OneAmongstMany on Youtube. He has a character breakdown for all the playable characters announced so far, as well as some gameplay commentary. His videos are really well done and he goes into some detail on strategies and character combinations.
Well, that's all for now. Until next time,
Chris
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