Before the fallout of OC heroes, HotS had a very aggressive release for heroes, every couple of weeks. There had to have been so many more heroes planned for development that are half baked. Introducing new heroes may cause some excitement and bring back more players into the Nexus.
IMO OC heroes were not a good path to take. Stick to heroes that are known and loved, those are the characters we want to play. I understand wanting to be creative and original but that’s not what the players want and it showed with the massive backlash to Qhira and Orphea. That was the beginning of the downfall of this game. We wanted iconic names of legendary heroes and villains and got something no one wanted.
eh they did a relatively meh job at doing this there were better ways to implement Heroes with nexus lore. look at dark nexus that was popular to the max
but they could also do what they did with the fall of dragon court… or was it raven crest… the halloween event with witch whitemane and mecha skins where they made “new” nexus origin characters without actually making new heroes
The original character idea I did not care for, but that is because it had been long established that HotS did not have a story and was a place where heroes from other universes were dropped in to do nothing more than throw hands with one another for the amusement of the Nexus Lords and Nexus civilians.
About the time that they were working on the original Nexus characters, as well as the story, was around the time that Blizzard’s writing was going downhill across the board with their IPs. So it was probably a good thing that the plug was pulled on HotS as otherwise we would have had to deal with similar writing to that of Battle for Azeroth and/or Shadowlands.
As Undondory mentioned they did a better job with the Nexus skins for the heroes such as the Warchrome Wastes and whatnot than they did with trying to implement a story as well as new characters.
As for an actual new character though? Unfortunately, it seems extremely unlikely to ever happen. Many of us were hoping that Microsoft would give HotS some love but that turned out–besides the updates–to be untrue.
They could pull a fast one on the tenth anniversery, but I would not hold my breath.
Game is already a finished product so i would not count on they make more. Tho its abit annoying to look at the last empty hero icons on main menu that could have been replaced by actual heroes.
the dev pipeline on hero releases was ~ 9 months. For HotS to have released new heroes every 4, or so, weeks required them to have large teams working on multi phases of the hero production. While I don’t think any figure has been given on how many people it took to realize that (one topic indicated what one person could do with existing assets)
Part of the development time was drawn out with wanting unique silhouettes, distinct gameplay, lip syncing and voicelines (especially if considering future heroes) getting the right stylezation to ‘fit’ into HotS and proportions to suit the camera angle.
If HotS were to get a resurgence, it would need to change the hero development, and those would for tl;dr look/feel/play very differently. At the point, the game may as well be overhaul into a different release so a similar process could be applied to the existing pool of heroes.
Kinda like how Overwatch 2 overwrote Overwatch in hero, style, monetization, content, etc etc, HotS would arguably need something like that to to justify more work on it than number tweaks we see on the semi-seasonal updates. That sort of workload would need to justify the staff and budget and time tables for that, which might be possibly, but it’d probably have to be in consideration for cross-platform play to get consoles and/or mobile platforms involved, especially for the benefit of a microsoft pass in bringing in more people, or rather, more investment appeal in their gaming platforms.
Probably never. Last hero was Hogger who was released back in December of 2020 (aka almost 4 years ago). Unless they somehow decide to put resources back into development of HoTS again (beyond unlikely), nothing new will be added aside from balance patches (which I’m both surprised and relieved to see it’s happening in the first place). Also:
Original heroes had nothing to do with the cease of hero development. The downsizing (and eventually the cease of development) happened because of lack of profits made from the game. There are definitely more reasons which many people have already talked about on YouTube.
If we take the ‘future’ into a superposition akin to Schrödinger’s cat, then we could say there is an uncertainty of another hero at some uncertain point, eventually. However, if we were to actually check, then that would change things from the superposition away from the quantum positioning.
Or as Futurama references go:
“no fair, you changed the results by [observing] it.”
In the end, it’s up to Blizzard whether they support the game again. But that would take work and I don’t think they will. The loss of money is too high for them
If Blizzard wasn’t so erratic as well as prone to retconning (even HotS got what little it has retconned with the removal of the tutorial) lore, I wouldn’t be so zealous towards HotS receiving no lore or having what there is removed. The HotS universe is pretty much built on the concept of alternative universes with the skins, maps, and whatnot. Why they thought the game needed a serious storyline I have a hard time figuring out.
Unfortunately, they’re all over the place like a major comic writer in how they write/rewrite the lore, if not worse, and it gives lore goblins such as myself a migraine whenever we think of just how big of a mess the lore of just one IP is.
It is unfortunately something that is hard if not impossible to avoid what with writers coming and going of various quality, though I think a lot of it could be avoided if anyone wishing to touch the lore was forced to sit down and read previous work before adding onto it. Then having someone supervise them, read the stuff, and then give it a stamp of approval.
