Interview: Kaeo Milker on polishing Heroes of the Storm

With the closed beta for Heroes of the Storm kicking off a few weeks back, Stevivor sat down with Kaeo Milker, Lead Game Producer over at Blizzard Entertainment, to talk about how things are shaping up.

Luke Lawrie, Stevivor: Heroes of the Storm is in this genre that is known for having a huge scope of characters to choose from. Just that alone can be quite challenging with making sure all the heroes are balanced out, but you’re doing something a bit different by offering battlegrounds with these team based objectives.

Are you finding that certain heroes are working better on specific maps, and if so how, do you go about tweaking those heroes to make sure they aren’t over powered or nerfed too much? Or is it that you are seeing the heroes are performing the same across the board and that the maps don’t factor into their performance?

Kaeo Milker: We’re fairly conscious of that as we move through battleground development. For example, when we’re looking at battlegrounds like Blackheart’s Bay or Cursed Hallow – having really high mobility heroes like Brightwing or Falstad and being able to jump around the battlegrounds allows teams to provide instantaneous support for people. So we look at that and those advantages and disadvantages as cool varieties when you’re playing the game. We like that at certain situations you might prefer to have Brightwing or Falstad around because of what they can provide for your team, and now that we have ranked mode in which we just added in our last patch; where you get to see the battleground that you’re playing on and you’re going to draft pick based on knowing what battleground you’re on and what your enemy teams composition is shaping up to be.

We like the variety that comes in and I think as far as balance goes it’s something that we do pay attention to and I think we have been doing a really good job with it so far. Our team has come from various experienced people who’ve made games like StarCraft 2 and WarCraft 3, so we’ve been balancing some of the most competitive strategy games in the world for 15 years plus. I think they bring a lot of perspective and experience to Heroes of the Storm that helps us along that way. But it’s something we are watching and I think part of what’s cool about being in a public beta is that we get to test a lot of those things out very early on to start seeing how our assumptions are actually working out in reality with this many players.

Stevivor: What about over in the tournament scene are you finding that organisers are using the full range of battlegrounds or are they just sticking to specific ones? Do you see any changes in the near future to the way the tournament maps are selected?

Milker: We’ve been watching it — it’s all very much in its infancy now because the game is still in early testing, but we’ve been watching what some of the community driven tournaments have had happen. We had our own kind of exhibition that we did at BlizzCon, I think generally teams seem to prefer the variety of playing across all the Battlegrounds. I fully expect that as we add more battlegrounds and as we get deeper into testing and then the eventual release that there may be very different ideas of what is more or less compelling in that scene. So we’re going to keep an eye on stuff and make sure that we’re making a game that supports what’s needed on those ends.

Stevivor: You mentioned before that you’ve just put in the capability for ranked games, are there more plans for expanding that further into maybe ladder systems or localised tournaments?

Milker:We definitely have a lot more planned for it so it’s the very beginning now; we’ve released what we call Heroes League, which is the solo queue for up to a 5 person team. But it’s really tracking the individual performance of each player rather than the entire team. In an upcoming patch we’re going to have Team League where it’s prearranged teams of 5 – you can actually assemble a team of 9 players so at any given time 5 of them can participate. On top of that we’re going to be adding additional ways to track what the progress is across those leagues – we are definitely talking about things like what we can do for tournaments within the game. These are all things that are on the horizon but we don’t have specific plans for them right now.

The Hero League version we are in right now does have a ranking system in it where you start off with rank 50 and you work your way up to rank 1 by getting matched against evenly skilled teams, and when you win or lose you’re gaining or losing points that build your way through the ranks. So that is in there now but like everything in the game we are going to test it, the things that work we are going to keep, the things that don’t work we are going to change to try and make a better game overall.

Stevivor: Just expanding off that a little, Artifacts were something which was introduced during the technical alpha but that quickly disappeared. Is that still something you’re working on getting back into the game?

Milker: We don’t have any plans for resurrecting Artifacts right now, and I think that is a pretty good example of something that shows that along the way during development we try lots of different things.

Historically we’ve done that behind closed doors, and so when something doesn’t work only we know that it doesn’t work. Artifacts were something that we brought out for public testing, our only experiences with it – as well as the feedback we got from the players is that it wasn’t the right feature at the right time, so we disabled that fairly quickly after we started. I think we are still happy with that decision and we’ve moved on with the game shaping up very nicely. You can probably expect to see other things like Artifacts along the way in terms of something that we try and for various reasons doesn’t work out, and that’s ok because this is a game that’s going to be in production that we are always going to try and make better.

Stevivor: This might be a strange question but back when I was playing the technical alpha I always found it weird that Sgt. Hammer had a talent which allowed the hero to steal life from other enemies. I’d look at that and think “Well that doesn’t make much sense, it’s a siege tank how does it steal life?” Do you get much up cry from fans when they are looking at the lore from the other games and some of the abilities of the heroes and what they are able to do in this particular game?

Milker: Well one fun thing is that with the whole premise of the game, this idea of the nexus – this trans-dimensional storm that is colliding all of these characters and worlds together in ways they would never ever imagine would occur. We’ve given ourselves a licence to do those things just because of the very nature of the nexus. We see that in our heroes, we see that in our skins, in our mounts, even in the worlds themselves. We’re going to embrace and relish the fact that we have a licence to play around with things like that. At the same time we’re going to be careful about things like, “Well you know who Arthas is, wouldn’t it be really cool in Heroes of the Storm if we took Arthas as a character and just make him somewhat different.” We follow some rules, but we’re also happy bending them at the same time. I think you can look for us to continue finding opportunities to do that with ways that make sense for this game and that you’re having fun.

Stevivor: Just to wrap things up do you have a desired time plan of how long Heroes of the Storm might be in beta for, or is the plan just to roll with it and see how things eventually pan out?

Milker:There are a lot of things that we want to test along the way, like we just moved out of technical alpha, and technical alpha was really about getting our core server infrastructure, the core gameplay, making sure that it worked, and that we had something that we could play to scale the population on. Now we are going to be dramatically increasing the player base, we’re going to be inviting more people than we ever had before, and we are going to be testing it in a much large scale. The results of those tests along the way are largely going to dictate what kind of progress we can make, but there still are a lot of features that we are adding into the game and also content that we are adding. There’s no hard date for us internally, so we are going to keep trying to make the game better and we are asking for players help to do that, and so far they have been really, really, valuable in their feedback which has helped us tremendously along the way. We are so excited to keep building this game with them right along there with us helping to make it better.

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To register your interest for the Heroes of the Storm closed beta, head over to the game’s beta sign-up page.