English transcription - HoS : Interview de Kaeo Milker

[M] neX : Ok in Europe it feel like HoS doesn't get that great of a publicity and I wonder how do you guys feel Heroes is working in the US atm ? I mean the feedbacks you've got, the general feedback.

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : Oh sure, we've been in tech alpha now, in technical alpha, for a couple months and you know the player pool has been pretty limited because the all purpose of our testing is really to stand up our server infrastructure and test a lot of the new technologies and backing things that we have added but we have also been letting people play games and we have had tons of game played, we are getting a ton of great feedback from people, we are also getting a lot of data from the games that they are playing and I think that so far feedbacks have been overwhelmingly positive. You know we have really intentionnaly made a lot of changes to the genre with this game. You know things like getting rid of last hit, team leveling instead of player leveling, adding really crazy characters like abathur and murky, heroes that just play completely differently from everything you have ever seen before in the genre.

[M] neX : Yes.

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : You know we have gone from the traditionnal one map standard and we have introduced multiple battlegrounds that have really unique objectives on them. I think people are really excited and kind of energized by the differences that we have introduced to the game and I think, while we are getting a lot of great feedbacks in terms of the features that they like and the features that they would like to see we are also getting feedbacks on the gameplay itself and on what's working and what is not working. And what's cool about that ["about that" remplace un mot inaudible dans l'interview, le gars a un micro de merde je comprends pas ce qu'il dit a ce moment la. Il dit peu etre "for instance" ou "for our players", je sais pas. Ca impacte pas vraiment le sens de sa phrase de toute facon] is that we are able to directly react to that feedback. You know we are taking it anywhere, we are constantly just iterating on the game in real time and turning around patches that introduce stuff that directly reacts to the feedbacks we are getting from the community. This has been a really fun experience for us, the development team, because we are used to go off in a corner and work on a game for years and then release all at once as a box game and this a totally different process where we are really involving the gamers and the community in how we developp the game.

[M] neX : Ok great. Actually you talked about community. In europe we don't have that much of an access to the alpha. Sadly when we do we have quite a lot of lag. When do you guys hope to open an european server ? Will it be only for the beta ? If so, when do you hope to release a beta.

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : Sure, so, you know we announced last week that we are getting ready to start bringing in people from europe, south america, south-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand into the tech alpha and so that stuff will start pretty soon here and once we start bringing these people in we will start testing HoS [encore un mot inaudible] with them and see what their experience is like. We will in the futur be exploring how we set up the servers for the regions although right now we are in tech alpha so the server is in california but you know we will have more informations on what happens with the servers in the regions as we are getting deeper into testing. But our intention in the long term is that we are going to have servers in places globally so that people can play the game in their regions and not be connecting to california like they are currently doing in the alpha.

[M] neX : Ok good. So you have no idea at all if a beta is going to be available throughout, IDK, the summer, the end of the year ...

[Blizzard] Shivanne : ... Yep, I'm sorry this is Shivanne (???). Right now we don't have any date for this year but I'm sure as soon as we get that information we will do an announcement and definatly spread that outright. But you are right, right now we don't have any date.

[M] neX : ... Ok, ok, ok, I was just wondering because as a player I kind of wait for that to happen since ...

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : ...Yeah, we are right there with you, that's definatly something that we want to adress for you soon.

[M] neX : Ok, as for the game itself do you wish for it to be competitive in a way or just purely casual or both, maybe ?

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : We are pushing this game much like we've pushed every other game Blizzard has pretty much ever made where we have this mentra of "easy to learn difficult to master" and actually speaking to the approchability of the game I wouldn't call it casual, I would call it approachable, this is a game that pretty much anyone can pick up and jump into and start learning the basic mechanics of, but beyound that, beyound just being able to play it, there are layers of depth and strategy that go really deep that I think only really,you know more high end players are going to discover and they are going to discover that in time as they are playing it. So, you know, HoS is being built that exact same way, we have a game that is really fun and fast paced and everyone can get in and enjoy the action but there is so much depth and strategy to things like the battlegrounds, you know like I mentionned, we have 4 unique battleground right now, they really change the way you play, they change the way your heroes interact with each other on your team, what you team composition does and means to the game, it changes the way your team fights and the intraction with the opposing team on each of these battlegrounds and there's so much strategies on each of these battleground in terms of what can you do as a team or as an individual to be viableand to assist in your victory on that particular battleground. So, I think we are intentionnaly making these layers of depth and they are there for people to discover and as we get deeper into developpement we will continue to add things that I think, players who are unfamiliar with the genre, who are not very competitive can find and then we will continue to add things that competitive people will get to dig more and more into and really find a lot of excitement and strategies.

[M] neX : Ok that's great, cool. I have an other question, I need to find it though. You talk about strategies, I feel that since there is no ladder or rank system, we don't see a clear meta, do you have any intentions to implement a ladder system on the alpha ?

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : Yeah, we are really early in developpement, so, tech alpha is more about technology than it is about you know, big gameplay features but we will continue to layer those and we absolutely intend to have ranked play and ladder and all these things that will be much more of the gage of competitive play that you are thinking about there. Today our focus is just core gameplay and technology, get those things stood up and make that really really good and then we will continue to layer those others things on as we get deeper into our testing phases.

[M] neX : Ok great. Just a couple more questions. You recently changed the UI, are you statisfied with the overall feedbacks you've got or should we see more changes in the futur.

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : I think it fair to say that everything in the game is subject to changes at this stage of developpment and so, we will continualy add things in and iterrate on things and polish things and as we get feedbacks and have our own clear gameplay experience dictated we will be opened to make further changes. The UI overall that came in was really only our first big kind of polish path to try to, you know, improve the visuals and we got a lot of feedbacks, we've had our own notes on it once we started it extensively in alpha as well. So already, actually since that update came in we just did a patch this week, just two days ago actually were we came in in reaction to a lot of the feedbacks we have got we did things like rescale a whole bunch of UI elements that were, you know, getting a little too obstructive into the gameplay space, we scaled down the minimap, people were reporting that they were having issues when they were accidently clicking the minimap...

[M] neX : ... Yeah it happened to me...

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : We will keep watching the things and reacting to them. I think that's kind of the cool part about this type of testing, is that we are right there in real time with the players, we are playing it ourselves, we are looking at their feedbacks and we are reacting to it very quickly, you know, it was less than a month between when we released that patch and when we released the patch that delt with the first round of feedbacks on it. So, i'm excited as a developper to have the opportunity to iterrate in real time with the players like that.It's pretty cool.

[M] neX : That's great, that's great actually. I have one more question, I used to be an old school W3 player and i'm dying to see the BM back into business. I there any plan to bring, i don't know, either Hellscream or Thrall to the game.

[Blizzard] Kaeo Milker : You know we are pulling from twenty plus years of blizzard IP (Intellectual Property) for this game which is so awesome for us, like we have all these beloved characters and when we look at the list of potential heroes, it's literally hundreds and hundreds of heroes. Grommash Hellscream and Thrall are absolutely on that list, when they are coming, I can't tell you but you know,you know, our hope is that in time we will be able to reveal as many of these really cool iconic characters as soon as we can and so I don't know, stay tuned for that but I with you, I love those guys. [Laughter].

[M] neX : [Laughter] Yeah, ok !