Who Of The Storm?

For the past few weeks my Sundays have been consumed by the effort-intensive labour of turning the DLC Podcast‘s raw audio record into a coherent show. As we’ve become better at the show, we’ve been better at managing our time, and so this time, it was mostly a matter of silencing out some things, clipping out other things for other shows, and smacking in the sound effects, meaning that I was able to knock over the whole thing last night, very quickly by my standards.

So now instead of complaining about that, I played some Heroes of the Storm, and ruminated for a little bit on MOBA characterisation.

Character is important to me. I like feeling like I have some empathy for the entity I’m controlling. In games like League of Legends I never engaged because there weren’t a lot of characters I could connect to, just characters I liked looking at. Ultimately I felt like I watched League as someone whose primary interest was Boobs, and that made me feel gross and like I should leave. Anyway, Heroes of the Storm is a game where I already know most of the characters and how they relate, and there are two problems I’m having with it right now.

First, the characters I like playing are characters I don’t like as people. I mean, I can imagine if you gave me Arthas or Diablo and said ‘okay, come up with an advancement of his story’ I’d have fun going a bit nuts with that because, hey, me and Noble Monsters, right? But the characters who I feel deserve attention and are good people are characters like Sgt Hammer and Sylvanas, not jackwads like Raynor and Diablo and Arthas.

Second… holy crap lag ruins this game. I mean, stands to reason, right? But you can’t really play support with heavy lag, you need something forgiving, like, say, an enormous ball of hit points that heals automatically, or something whose abilities care about the next melee hit rather than specific windows of time and space.

I’m enjoying the beta, but I am embarassed at how bad I am at this game, and worry that the infrastructural problems I face are really going to last.