The Butcher(ing) of Heroes of the Storm

So I discovered today via my Battle.net launched news that it had been announced a while ago that Heroes of the Storm will be receiving a new map (which people seem legitimately excited about) and a new character (who has been met with kind of the opposite reaction), a demonic villain from the first Diablo game who was re-vamped for the third called The Butcher.

And in browsing through the comments on the release notice, it seems like a lot of other players have the same basic reaction as I did, which was “ugh.”

Obviously as someone who never played Diablo I’m sitting at a disadvantage to those who have, in that I don’t even know this character that I don’t find particularly enticing, but from what I’ve been able to gather from people who do, there’s a lot of muttering about leaving characters from the second Diablo game (which many of said people consider to be the best of the trilogy) out of Heroes of the Storm, seemingly as a marketing move, to directly promote Diablo 3 and the current versions of the Blizzard games that can be downloaded right now, if you would like, they’re right there in your launcher!

The forum comments have thrown around names like Baal and Mephisto (who, I will add, are references to actual demons I’ve actually heard of outside of Diablo and are much less nebulous than simply ‘The Butcher,’ which would probably be more appealing to other people who haven’t played the Diablo games), and even jokingly Deckard Cain, who even I know is a frail old man who talks a lot, as Diablo characters they’d prefer to see over The Butcher.

Which brings me to the major problem I have with The Butcher, which is that it’s frankly undeniable that he looks a lot like Stitches, a WoW character who is basically an abomination made of stitched together parts of corpses. Hell – The Butcher even has stitches on his chest like Stitches. Despite being red-skinned, The Butcher bears a very close resemblance to another character in a game that’s specifically designed to allow you through levelling to unlock different skin colours, and which – up until this point – has done a brilliant job of keeping all of its characters visually distinct.

There’s a clear visual divide even between skins designed to alternate-universe-switch characters into each other’s plotlines, like Malfurion and Illidan, one of whom betrayed his race and took up with demons, and the other of whom stayed behind and became a leader and a genuine tree-hugger. Both of these characters are visually distinct because a lot of focus was put on their GIGANTIC weapons, a staff on one hand and two giant daggers as tall as the character on the other, and this allows players even in the thick of a clump of players to be able to tell who they’re facing so they can react accordingly.

In what pictures I’ve seen of The Butcher, he has literally the same style of weapon – a giant cleaver in one hand and a hook-type implement in the other – as Stitches uses. Oh, but, the hook and cleaver have marginally different designs! You know, kind of like they probably would have if Blizzard had just made a cosmetic “Butcher” skin of Stitches!

Which is another complaint I’ve seen often on the forums. Not only does their similar visual style make them confusing to tell apart on the battlefield, a lot of people are convinced they could have released a product re-skinning Stitches to look like The Butcher for roughly the same amount of effectiveness.

The logic goes: players who liked The Butcher will buy the “Butcher” skin of Stitches. What’s that you say? Nobody liked The Butcher? Then why the fuck are we being asked to play him?

The amount of “awwww yis get hyped for The Butcher!!!!!” PR I’ve been seeing from Blizzard is an amazingly clear proof to me that they actually don’t listen to a thing their audiences say. There could almost not be less hype for The Butcher. The kindest thing I’ve seen said is that The Butcher character model has been tied to Heroes of the Storm since alpha development and that they badly-timed their release of him. Yeah, that’s the kindest one.

The overwhelming cry of “for the love of god release a Starcraft Warrior” has apparently gone largely ignored, which I find sad, because I seriously want to see Dehaka, the primal Zerg from Starcraft 2, make an appearance, and he would fit that character build perfectly.

I would also love to see Blizzard try and come up with a ranged Warrior character. I believe it would work most effectively with probably one of the dragon aspects from WoW, in dragon form, with a ranged basic attack of fire breath or similar depending on dragon breed, and some kind of trait that pulls aggro (or absorbs damage done to other characters) in order to be an effective tank from a distance. And I would probably give them my money/gold for that.

For The Butcher? No.

Even though his play-style is distinctly different to Stitches, there is nothing about The Butcher that entices me.

Where’s Vol’jin? Where’s Crowley? Where’s Dehaka? Where’s Stukov? Where’s Baine? Where’s… that one evil Forsaken guy with the cool voice who shouted “death to the living!” at the Wrath Gate? Where are the dragons? Where’s Aggra? Where are the Draenei? Where’s Tosh? Where’s any character anyone has asked for? Hell, I would be at least vaguely interested in Mephisto and Baal or one of the other angels from Diablo!

Really? The Butcher? Really?

Well at least our expectations are suitably lowered for the next new character reveal.

The Torment of the Nexus

“Damn it, Sarah, it didn’t have to be like this!”

For those of you who don’t know, Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA (massive online battle arena) game published by Blizzard, purveyors of several other games, most notably World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. Heroes of the Storm itself creates some kind of canon-bending-Nexus-thingy that brings together characters from all three of these game series, to fight alongside one another and (more frequently) murder each other brutally.

It’s a game that’s quite willing to admit that it’s messing with the games’ various canons, with the tutorial telling one of the characters (James Raynor, from Starcraft) “don’t think about it too much” as he wonders how exactly he came to be there. The majority of the characters, however, are borrowed from World of Warcraft, with a fair number of the villains being present as well as the heroes.

On the one hand, this can lead to some great interactions between the characters when a game opens (of which each player will hear a different one), especially between characters who actually hate each other in their own individual games. The WoW Night Elf Stormrage-Whisperwind love triangle gets a lot of attention, as does the enmity between Sylvanas and Arthas, and the various Diablo characters and their unmitigated hatred of, well, the character of Diablo.

We get a giant undead scarab-bug-person king (Anub’arak, from WoW) hitting on a Zerg broodmother (Zagara, from SC), Illidan Stormrage full-on professing his former love for Tyrande Whisperwind in front of the three other yobs who make up their team without batting an eye, and a fairy dragon from WoW (Brightwing) saying she’s looking forward to murdering people in a cutesy little girl voice that comes off as excessively creepy.

I will not deny that I giggle evilly in satisfaction every time I hear Illidan tell his brother Malfurion “oh, get over yourself,” something I’ve wanted literally anybody to say to Malfurion for a very long time.

But it’s the characters’ interactions with characters on the opposing team that interest me the most. You might think, given that Tyrande and Malfuron are… sort of married? De facto? Officially a couple at least? That when one of them kills the other as they appear on an enemy team, there might be some kind of emotion displayed. However, the most I’ve heard Tyrande say is a fairly bland “Forgive me, my love,” in her usual deadpan voice, before she moves on to shooting his friends.

Raynor, whose romance with Sarah Kerrigan in SC is basically confirmed not to be a thing, and almost certainly won’t be resolved in the upcoming Legacy of the Void campaign unless the Protoss get really nosy, on the other hand, sounds genuinely distressed when Kerrigan dies at his hand, lacking only the animation ability to kneel beside her body and shake his fists at the sky, since the emotion is clearly there.

But the words “damn it, Sarah, it didn’t have to be like this!” make me wonder. To what is he referring? Their failed romance in the games that contain their own canon? Or the entire business of Heroes of the Storm? It’s a brilliant money-making scheme for Blizzard, encouraging people who play some of their games to investigate the others, but from the point of view of characters who we’re supposed to follow through story arcs and sympathise with, being thrown into a MOBA is a pretty traumatic character development – dying constantly, over and over, and continually being forced back to the Nexus to wait for the next match, where you’ll be pitted against some of your friends and teamed with some of your enemies with complete randomness, chaos and confusion for all eternity.

Maybe Uther tells Raynor not to think too hard about what they’re doing because thinking about their actual situation would be really fucking depressing.

It seems to me, that out of all of the characters from all of the games Blizzard has pulled together, Raynor would be the most likely to try and convince everyone to work together and escape from the Nexus. The WoW Alliance and Horde (neither of which can really be classified as the “good” side) characters are too busy having grudge-matches with each other and their villains to be the voice of leadership, and Raynor has a long history of working together with his occasional enemies the Protoss and the Zerg to make things right in the SC campaigns.

Every time I hear his grief for Kerrigan yet again, it makes me think that he’s not only lamenting that someone he cares about deeply has been killed (even though she will be back shortly), but that he’s rueing the fact that all of the characters that have been brought together were so contentious and fractious that they could have escaped the hell of the constant cycle of unending death that is Heroes of the Storm if only they could have been convinced to work together with him. Fanciful to imagine, perhaps, but when you take a character from a game with an elaborate story campaign like SC and throw them into something utterly story-less, one can’t help but wonder how they would feel and react.

It makes me miss the cutscenes from SC, particularly the second game; I would love to see, perhaps as a counter to the opening cinematic (depicting Raynor and Kerrigan on opposite teams fighting each other), some kind of cutscene of Raynor’s team murdering Kerrigan, and him stopping while the others take their whirlwind of destruction onwards, to close her eyes and make the whole thing seem less grotesque. Raynor’s (albeit scripted) ability to care about one death of Kerrigan’s in what is undoubtedly millions by now is probably one of the most endearing things about this game, emotionally speaking.

It would also please me greatly, if, one day, if Blizzard ever gets around to closing Heroes of the Storm down, they could end the game with one big cutscene of the heroes escaping from the everlasting torment of the Nexus – one last big adventure.

I doubt it will happen, of course, but one can only ever hold out hope.