Blizzard developers have publicly released their roadmap for the near future. Heroes of the Storm received a huge setback very recently. Blizzard’s decision to cancel HOTS Esports events definitely sent a ripple through the community. The decision affected not only HOTS, but also had an effect on other Blizzard games communities.
Heroes Production Director Kaéo Milker confirmed on the official blog that the roadmap for the future will remain the same. This includes new features being added to the game, new heroes amongst others.
What we want to do beyond those releases is currently under discussion across the Heroes of the Storm team. The plans moving forward are going to be focused on the things that the Heroes team and all of you in our community are excited for. Our team has always thrived when we’re working on things we’re passionate about. While our team is smaller, we’re a fully functional group of developers who can create the features and content we all want, in time. I know everyone is eager to hear more, but we’re still in the early stages of these conversations, so we’ll share updates once the team has made some decisions.
And while I can’t give you all the details just yet, I will also say that we’re actively discussing not only the right cadence for our patches and content – we’re also reconsidering some very core areas of the game to identify more ways we can make Heroes even better for players.
Decisions pending on important topics.
However, there are still decisions pending on multiple important topics. Some of them revolve around the monetisation in HOTS. These topics include regular demands by the community. Hopefully, if Blizzard makes the right decision, we can see HOTS esports scene resuming.
- Finalizing the Hero Role overhaul.
- Timing for rolling out the Ranked Play consolidation and improvements we discussed at BlizzCon.
- Bringing back the ability to directly purchase individual skins with Gems.
- Adding the ability to get more content like skins and mounts with Gold.
More immediately, we just had a balance patch on Wednesday which will be followed closely by additional matchmaking changes to both Quick Match’s queue times and to the division spread used for matching high-level players in Ranked modes. Please check out the patch notes for all the details on the balance changes and be on the lookout for our matchmaking forum post as those improvements roll out.
There are other multiple changes coming to the game, including a board game for the players. The developers do seem excited to share their vision of the game with the community. With a negative aura surrounding the future of the game post the cancellation of HGC, this definitely comes an as welcome surprise. It was also essential for the developers to show that they are not abandoning the game anytime soon. There are at least two heroes that will be released over the course of the next year.
