Once I had survived finals (with all A's, no less! ^.^), I got the download going. Gotta say one thing: getting set up for Blizzard alpha/beta games is super-easy with their unified launcher. I literally just clicked 'Install', selected a location, and was done save for the download itself.

As I'm going through wot I think of the game so far, keep in mind that it's still in Technical Alpha. Also, I've only played somewhere between 20 and 30 games so far: enough for a 'First Impressions' but not a full-on review.

Presentation

One of Blizzard's strong points has always been their excellent presentation. Due to artwork that relies heavily on stylization over poly counts, their games tend to look surprisingly good even on low-end hardware.

Performance

The system I'm playing on is getting a bit dated. The important specs are:

• Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66 GHz
• 4GB DDR3 RAM
• nVidia 560 GTX

Passable, but not particularly powerful. I have been playing the game on Medium or High settings depending on the match. Performance has varied from match to match, but overall has been very good – most of the time. Some champions heroes hurt my framerate more than others; the difference makes sense, as some (ex: Diablo) are much more particle-heavy than others (ex: Nova). Considering that this is an alpha, I was pleasantly surprised at the generally consistent framerates.

Graphics & Style

Blizzard has continued in their path of very stylized graphics. While some models seem more-or-less ripped from their respective games on the surface, the ones I've seen appear to have been tweaked to better fit the style of the game. That said, it will always look funny to see Diablo riding a horse. Poor horse.

Sound

Gameplay

While on the surface Heart of the Storm is quite similar to other contemporary MOBAs, the similarities are only at the mechanical level. The game is played in 5v5 competitive matches from an isometric perspective with RTS-style click-to-move controls. The core gameplay is roughly the same as League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients. However, several systems changes have dramatically altered the dynamic.

Prepare to be Broke

The first of these is removal of gold as a resource. This has the effect of reducing the snowball effect. While snowballing still occurs for reasons I'll discuss in a moment, it is not nearly as severe as in LoL or DotA. The removal of this system entirely has not been without controversy. However, it has received a suitable replacement for customization in the Talent system.

Talented, Aren't We?

Every few levels (starting at 1), players are given the option of 2-4 talents. These range from passives like Path of the Wizard, which grants increased mana and mana regeneration, to the choice of Ultimate Heroic abilities at level 6. Players are not able to change talents during a match – only choose them – but they are reset after every match, in classic MOBA style.

I should make it clear that the talents are chosen in a style similar to WoW's current system: you are given 2-4 choices and must take one (and only one). You can't take 2 from tier 1 and none from tier 2 or any of that chicanery. Come to think, I should test and see what happens if I don't take any talents when more are offered.

With this system, experience has effectively replaced gold as the currency du jour. Talents offer raw stat buffs as well as interesting active effects (such as Malfurion t2 offering an OP as fuck shield spell). However, this means that we won't ever see crazy builds like AP Rengar. Then again, I would be much happier if I'd never had to deal with the BS that was AP Yi. Win some, lose some.

Overall, I'm pretty excited about the talent system. I don't feel like it restricts my options much during play, while it eases the introductory learning curve significantly and has potential to reduce the frequency of significant balance issues.

Team-wide Experience

Another important change is Blizzard's move from per-hero experience to per-team experience. No hero (even those AFK) is left behind in this system. However, it does make it so that a bad player can impact your performance much more quickly. Both player and minion kills give experience – but only if someone on your team is in range. Therefore, if another lane is feeding then not only is their lane gaining an advantage, but yours is as well. Additionally, because the feeding lane is going to spend more time dead (and thus away from the creeps) your entire team will fall behind in experience.

This isn't as disastrous as it sounds. The most significant difference I've ever seen in levels is 4. I've heard that there are catch-up mechanics in place, but I've not done the research to confirm or deny this hearsay. Regardless, being 4 levels behind is about as bad as being 4 levels behind in LoL: painful, but not insurmountable. It's nowhere near "our bot lane went 0-20 in 10 minutes" bad, as the occasional LoL game will be.

Maps

The map design and implementation is also considerably different from classic MOBAs. Where LoL and DotA effectively have only one map with only one mode, HotS has 4 as of this writing – each with its own secondary objectives. This is similar to how Guild Wars 2 has several different maps with the same primary objective (king-of-the-kill; win at 500 points) but disparate secondary objectives (kill boss mobs for extra points, invade enemy base for lots of points, control catapults).

The primary objective is the same as in LoL / DotA: destroy the enemy ancient nexus core. The method of attaining this objective is, again, similar: farm and push. However, there is a significant twist common to all maps: mercenaries.

This Ain't Your Daddy's Jungle

Where LoL / DotA (henceforth abbreviated as LotA) have neutral camps scattered in the 'jungle' between the lanes, HotS has Mercenary camps. These camps are significantly more difficult than their counterparts in LotA, but they do not scale in level as the game progresses like they do in LoL. When a camp is killed, a capture point becomes available. Obtaining control of this point will spawn a band of mercenaries that will push on your team's behalf and put the camp on a ~3 minute cooldown.

What results is a pretty clever solution to the game length problem: pushing becomes considerably easier as the game progresses without snowballing causing one team to dominate the other in team-fights. Adding in secondary objectives is really just icing on the cake – I'd be happy to play a mode lacking them.

The secondary objectives in HotS are varied enough that – provided the RNGods favor you – the game stays fresh even when playing the same hero over and over again. One map features two shrines that, when controlled by your team, allow one team-member to transform into a powerful dragon. Another has players traveling under the map in a mine full of undead, collecting skulls to summon powerful golems. Yet another asks us to fight mercenary camps and bust open treasure chests to pay a greedy pirate captain to bombard the enemy base with his cannons. While some still need tuning (it is very difficult to come back from being hit with a team-wide curse that reduces all of your creeps' HP to 1, reduces structure HP by half, prevents turrets from firing, and prevents natural HP regeneration), they certainly provide interesting gameplay.

Notably lacking right now is a Starcraft-themed map. The others are fantasy-themed – not even really Warcraft- or Diablo-themed, which is kind of disappointing. This is one area that I feel Heart of the Storm is really lacking in right now. While the characters belong to well-defined universes, the maps don't really belong anywhere. I'd like to see the existing maps changed to fit better into one of the existing Blizzard universes. This would make the game as a whole feel more cohesive.

Balance

MOBA games tend towards a certain balance level at early stages of development. Heroes of Newerth, as an example, was more-or-less balanced with the exception of a handful of heroes that were completely over the top. In my experience, this is pretty common. The underlying mechanics are well-understood, but it is still quite easy to over-tune a hero and turn it into a walking murder machine.

Heart of the Storm does not have this in my experience. Certain map mechanics need re-balancing right now (Undead Mines and Curse of the Raven Lord), but I've never seen a hero that just made me shout "that is bullshit!" – except for Nova.

The Stealth Problem

Nova has a lot of things going for her: decoys, stealth, high damage, high range. Meanwhile, she is super-squishy to help balance things out. This would normally work fine, except for stealth. In HotS, stealth works like its Starcraft II incarnation: predator-style shimmer around you, not true invisibility. Stealth automatically activates after 2 seconds of not taking damage.

2 seconds

This is only a problem because there is not a good way to stick on her for many heroes. One bad choice by the pathing algorithm pretty much means that she's gone unless you're ranged or have a low-cooldown gap closer (because you probably blew it to reach her the first time). Even this wouldn't be a problem if the stealth worked entirely as advertised.

This kind of stealth is really cool in concept, except that it suffers from a very odd problem: what to do on low-power machines. The predator-style effects are expensive. Thus, there are three choices Blizzard could make about this:

1. Leave them on for all machines, potentially causing significant FPS loss on low-power machines.
2. Turn them off on low-power machines, turning stealth into true invisibility.
3. Swap them for a cheaper but less subtle effect on low-power machines, making stealth less reliable against people playing on the lowest setting.

I am honestly not sure which one Blizzard is using right now.

Conclusion