How did the team decide which parts of the original Heroes of Newerth experience needed to be preserved exactly, and which areas needed to evolve?
When reviving a game such as Heroes of Newerth that had great success and a passionate community, there were many topics discussed internally about what we should improve upon to help modernize the game while still keeping as much of its strong roots as possible. Some easier decisions came to a conclusion much more quickly than others, including improved visuals and how the matchmaking experience would look; however, gameplay-impactful changes certainly brought more debate.
When it came to game design, we had a strong vision of what to change for improvements; however, the understanding that the community through our beta would be the ultimate judge of what works and what doesn’t. For example, the gold economy in the game and the pace to acquire “farm” and relevant items for the match, we went with a more friendly and easily attainable pace to allow all players in the match, no matter their role, to feel impactful.
However, it became evident pretty quickly in our beta that many who were playing preferred more towards the “hardcore” experience of it being more difficult to attain such gold, so we made adjustments, and through feedback mixed with our own philosophy, we have come to a great middle ground that the majority of players enjoy now.
HoN has always had a reputation as a highly competitive and mechanically demanding MOBA. How are you approaching onboarding and UX improvements without diluting that identity?
We appreciate the fact that Heroes of Newerth has such a reputation and wanted to respect that when it came to creating HoN Reborn. When it comes to the UX, we kept similar “darker” colors and themes and even kept iconic sounds and music, including the banjo that plays when you close the game! But we also wanted to make it clear that HoN Reborn is a new game, not just a remake of HoN from the past, and so we did create new elements that fit the theme of Reborn appropriately.
When it comes to onboarding players we have really three groups of players that we have had to consider… the first being players who played HoN previously, the second group being new to HoN but avid players in Dota 2 and/or League of Legends, and the third group being completely new to the genre. We created an initial tutorial with this in mind, with information presented depending on which category you selected to provide the most reasonable experience possible considering the players past.
With that all in mind though, our mentality on new players wanting to play HoN is like it has always been, and that is it won’t be for everyone and we can’t show and teach you everything up front. There will be an expected learning curve, even for veteran players of the past and that is ok.
