*First off, can we stop stop whining about Qhira not being hero A, B, C, D, X, Y, Z… from other Blizzard games and take a moment to appreciate Qhira (a hero that was made with a lot of love, blood, sweat and tears just like other heroes by the devs)? And i think they release her for a good reason: I think the hero for Blizzcon this year will be Deathwing. The next hero (Qhira) is related to the Nexus so that they can expand the Nexus lore. Do you remember the reason why the Raven Lord released the Dark Nexus and wanted to conquer the realms? It’s because he saw a “Cataclysm” coming to consume the whole Nexus, so he wanted to become stronger to “protect” it. Even with the Caldeum Complex event, the Chromie skin hinted that she also saw a “Cataclysm” coming. And i think that Cataclysm is Deathwing!
*Now, I will answer 2 questions that A LOT of people asked about Qhira, and the comments of the devs about her are below:
*The questions:
Why did the devs “waste” their time/resources on making a hero that “nobody wants/knows of” even after all the bad things that happened to the game/now that the time between hero releases are longer?
Short answer: They were working on Qhira before all the bad things happened.
Full answer: To me, Qhira is even more important than Orphea. Because she is the last hero that some former HotS devs worked on before they were moved to other projects (or even worse) and the first hero that some new HotS devs worked on (so the devs team do have new devs to replace some of the old ones. Yay!). So yeah, she was under development before all the bad things happened. So if you think that the devs wasted their time/resources on making Qhira instead of highly-anticipated heroes then you’re wrong. It would have been much more wasteful if they decided to scrap the idea of making Qhira, delete her model and all the animations that had already been worked on.
Why Qhira? Her kit is fun to play, but there are already-known Blizzard characters that fit her kit well (like Kargath), so why didn’t the devs choose to make them instead?
Short answer: The reason is partly like the answer above. But the main reason is her unique design that no other Blizzard characters have.
Full answer: I will let the devs answer it for me. At the end of 2018 the Heroes of the Storm team revealed their first Nexus-original hero, Orphea. In July 2019 Qhira was revealed. Hero Designer Kyle Dates explained her creation: “Even before Orphea had launched, we were excited to explore the idea of other Nexus-born heroes and what that might mean for the game. We started off with a kit design for a hero who wielded a whip-like chainblade that could extend and retract on demand. One of the first ability designs was to extend the blade and attach to enemies, swinging around them in an acrobatic fashion. The idea of this hero moving about the battlefield so dramatically really excited us! There weren’t any Blizzard characters who matched this identity the way we liked so it made a lot of sense to us to deliver this in the form of a new Nexus hero.”
Lead Live Designer, Brett Crawford, talked with InvenGlobal about how Qhira came to be and why she was revealed: “We had this really cool idea for a hero with a chainblade who swings around the battlefield, a really flashy hero. We wanted to just bring her in alongside Orphea, but they are not necessarily related, so [her design] was really more focused on the kit and just being a really cool hero rather than having any ties to Orphea.” The design team didn’t mince words when it came to how Qhira was created. It all starts and ends with the chainblade. As there were no existing characters in the Blizzard universe that rocked the deadly weapon of choice, they decided to create a kit and hero around that. Orphea, on the other hand, was designed first then had a kit built around the concept.
*Now, let’s move on to the devs’ comments about Qhira:
Lana Bachynski: “Qhira is the result of a resilient amazing team and a ton of effort. Delighted to have worked with nearly the entire animation team on this one! @CareenaKingdom was the vision holder/main animator, with additional work by @BrittanyGleiter , @shumface and me! WELCOME TO THE NEXUS!”: https://twitter.com/Latienie/status/1155897434586980352
Felipe Pereira: “Qhira was my final audio contribution to @BlizzHeroes and holds a very special place in my heart! I used the tried and true Ben Burtt lightsaber recording technique + Serum for her sword and also referenced Guardians of the Galaxy for inspiration. What a fun hero to work on!”: https://twitter.com/hay_felipay/status/1155902223295143936
Andrew Kinabrew: “She’s super fun. Go play her on ptr!”: https://twitter.com/akaTheBrew/status/1155894551292178432
Her story is “Not as deep as Orphea this time around but she’s our nexus hunter. There wasn’t a lot of explanation on boba fett the first time we saw him. She’s got that type of mystery attached to her. You get a hint from the trailer on her origins.”
Thomas Horwath: “Sending this out again because I want to mention that @MBruzzeseFX was the primary #fx artist bringing Qhira to life. The end result was a team wide #gamedev collaboration, but Marcus carried the torch! Great job on your first, amazing hero!”: https://twitter.com/ThomasHorwath/status/1155901317547798529
*What has happened has happened. What is done cannot be undone. There is no point in looking back and ruminating over the past. I am a forward-looking human, and you should be one, too! So if you don’t like Qhira (even though her animations, visual effects and especially sound effects are just so satisfying and she’s super fun to play), now, the best thing to do is giving them suggestions to improve the game! I will start first. I’m surprised that i haven’t seen a suggestion to improve future Hero Spotlight videos. My suggestion: Without a narrator, the Hero Spotlights videos should have on-screen texts that describe what the abilities do.
*As usual, thank you for reading my post! Hope you have a great day! <3
*Edit: And did i just post links without having to edit them with the “Preformatted Text” tool? What happened?
No. Because it wasn’t explained in game and I have zero interest in reading a comic to find out what they should be showing in game. As a matter of fact, I don’t really have any interest in the “lore” of the Nexus period. This game went years with the understanding that this was just a bunch of characters from blizzard games fighting each other because that is a fun idea. We didn’t need an explanation and in fact the tutorial used to have Uther point out to Raynor “Not to think too hard about these things”.
If they were going to try and make a deeper explanation for why blizzard characters are fighting, it should have been done long ago and it should have been fleshed out well within the game. Preferably with some kind of story/campaign mode.
This is faulty reasoning. Much of the kit and animations could have been repurposed on any number of existing blizzard characters. It could have been Reno Jackson with a whip or a Warcraft troll or a Southsea Pirate/Outlaw rogue or some kind of Diablo demon.
During the development process, they should have had someone in charge that pointed out that this game is about iconic blizzard characters and they should have kept the team on that track. Instead, they started off with the idea of a character with a whip sword and were too married to that concept to translate that to an existing character. They allowed the initial concept art to drive the character design instead of starting with a character and developing a kit for them.
i don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. it’s just a different design philosophy than blizzard usually uses
many great games & characters do start with a single concept. splatoon, for example, was entirely born from the idea of ink-based territory control; the characters and world came later
It’d be fine if this game wasn’t a crossover moba of their franchises. If Blizzard were making a moba from scratch that had nothing to do with their previous franchises (like OW), then there’d be no issue.
Not to sound like That Guy but my notion behind Orphea was that Li Li was not enough of a ‘little girl’ archetype for them to settle for, and so they needed an Annie/Scylla/Whomever else you please.
Bonus points: Orphea comes with Big Ominous Helper Pet, just like the two aforementioned…
I’m neither here nor there, I guess, other than disappointed we’re sinking into OCs but it does beg some questions… Is this really going to help HotS?
Wow reading those dev comments is pretty sad… those guys are knee deep in their own corporate bs now.
Like I said in the other thread, all the ones who resisted acti left or were made to leave. I am more than certain the animators, modelers, coders etc are a top notch team but unfortunately their work is encased in a company that is trying to turn blizzard into a CoD-like revenue stream.
Notice also the dev team focuses on the improvements to their internal teams and their teamwork, very few comments about her lore, their love of blizz or even mention of their excitement for newly being developed nexus lore.
Whenever you see decision makers talking about and fixating on “teamwork” while dancing around and avoiding the elephant in the room (turning blizz into purely an unoriginal revenue stream machine) that usually means they are pushing a team to adopt a form of “teamwork” they want. Teamwork is corporate speak for it does what its told, it puts the lotion on the skin.
This means all the devs left are yes men or people who have internally given up on the old blizzard and are compliant employees and that makes me sad. Wc3 remaster may be the only good blizz product for a loooong time… or it may be the last.
It’s also a psychological defense mechanism, their team is becoming insulated and inwardly focused due to the flak blizz in general has been getting the last year from fans (similar to how george lucas reacted after harsh ep1 criticism… by the time ep2 came around that entire team was living in a bubble).
They are fortifying the barrier between fans/devs and it shows in their happy go lucky comments “hey so and so you did great!” These comments seem so obliviously detached from reality.
You don’t have to care about it. But all of these lore have always been there since the game’s birth. The devs leak the lore a litle by litle through Nexus battlegrounds, skins, wiki,… Yes, the game is still a love letter to other Blizzard games, but please don’t forget that it is a game itself. And every game need lore. Nexus-born characters even have more lore and better design than many heroes in game. Adding more lore and Nexus-born heroes to the game is necessary as it says that HotS isn’t just a game about other Blizz games. Adding lore is not a waste of time. Because without lore, the Nexus battlegrounds that have existed since HotS’ birth, Orphea, Alterac Pass and ALL the cool events wouldn’t have existed. And the lore was actually represented in-game with the UI change of Dark Nexus Event and Echoes of Alterac Event. Also, all MOBAs have their own lore. While lore is not “too important to ignore” for MOBAs, it still plays a large role. You may don’t care about it, but many others do. Adding lore can actually attract new players and keep old players interested. But then again, i respect your opinion.
For now, i also want them to focus on the reason why the game was popular and add highly-anticipated heroes like Imperius, Anduin.
(Actually, i’m not happy with Qhira, even though she’s fun to play, the release time and almost everything about her just seems “wrong”, if she was handled differently, everything could have been better. But “What has happened has happened. What is done cannot be undone. There is no point in looking back and ruminating over the past.”)
No. It is my right to complain about things I don’t like.
I know it won’t change anything about Qhira, but my hope is that if was complain enough there won’t be any more OCs added to the game… Yeah, I know, I would have thought we made our feelings know about Orphea, but apparently not. But if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
Blah blah.
She looks amazing.
Who cares if she isn’t from a current Blizz title.
She looks great.
I am AS interested in how to counter her as I am in actually playing with her kit
I think I should have mentioned it by now, but will do again.
Probably should make a thread for frequently asked “How to use forum” questions.
Anyways…
Links aren’t exactly blacklisted entirely, as a matter of fact everyone is allowed to post links to as long these on the white list.
The list goes the following:
YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook (? Cannot confirm this one but it definitely should too), all Blizzard websites.
Reddit is a weird one but lemme put it this way, new reddit apparently passes but links to old reddit does not.
In other words www.reddit.com is whitelisted, old.reddit.com is not despite using a whole different CSS and assets and they are basically the same.
Imagine a big event where within a Brawl Heroes are fighting Deathwing down and that’s how you can acquire him for a limited time period.
It’d be a raid basically.
So do you actually have a problem with original characters? Or are you just insistent that they masquerade as representatives. You didn’t even name half the characters you wanted to give her kit to.
They’ve ALWAYS been married to the initial design of a hero, this is just one of the first times that they’re openly speaking about it on a forum, and it happens to be about a character people are less than happy about because it’s “not Grom.”
The HoTS team doesn’t even have the resources to run an AMA on two sites simultaneously and you think that there are unironic paid shills infiltrating?
Be sure the check Qhira out!”: https://twitter.com/MBruzzeseFX/status/1155905299573874688