In 2015, Blizzard developer James Yen, who got his start helping players as a World of Warcraft game master, joined the Heroes of the Storm team as his “first foray” into true game development. Blizzard had finally launched something to take on Dota 2 and League of Legends, games that spawned from a mode created during the heyday of Warcraft 3 custom games, and James Yen wanted to contribute. Unfortunately, Blizzard was late to the MOBA trend, and Heroes of the Storm didn’t become a genre-defining game like World of Warcraft and Overwatch.
Come 2017, Yen left the Heroes of the Storm team to work on Hearthstone and remasters of Blizzard’s back catalog. Meanwhile, Blizzard announced a drastic scaling back of development and esports support for Heroes of the Storm in 2018. After December 2020, Blizzard stopped adding new heroes altogether. In the years since, Heroes of the Storm has stayed online, but mostly in a holding pattern with no new content.
By 2022, Yen had returned to working on the game he remembered so fondly. This time, he was the lead game producer, tasked with revitalizing a game Blizzard had seemingly left behind. After a few years of building a team and adding new tweaks to the MOBA, Heroes of the Storm’s return kicked off BlizzCon 2026’s opening ceremony, and a new hero was unveiled: World of Warcraft’s Xal’atath.
Beyond 2026, the future for the MOBA is looking bright too, as Yen told Polygon at BlizzCon that “we have plans and we have dates in our minds,” and that his team is “focused on making sure that we can continue to do content and development.” This comeback is the result of years of quiet work meant to revitalize an ill-fated MOBA while not ambitiously overpromising. If successful, it could mark the start of a new era for the game.
Reigniting the core of Heroes of the Storm
“In 2022, when we came back, we felt how the community felt about all the ups and downs and things that have happened,” Yen admitted to Polygon. “It’s our mission to make sure that Heroes of the Storm is a sustainable product. That’s how we approached it.”
The current Heroes of the Storm Blizzard team, which Yen described as a “small, passionate group” of developers, started with things that weren’t player-facing, like game infrastructure and development tools. If they truly wanted Heroes of the Storm to come back, the experience of making content for the game would need to be better. As a result, Blizzard announced it wouldn’t add new content for a while, and updates went quiet for over a year.
Eventually, Blizzard laid the groundwork to substantially tweak the game, and patches resumed in September 2023. Since then, the game has gotten a new patch every month or so. At first, they just focused on bug fixes. Eventually, the HotS team made balance adjustments. No new heroes have come to Heroes of the Storm for several years, but Yen believes his team’s focus on bug fixes first was “the best way to familiarize with the game.” When the updates started actually impacting in-game content, the community took notice.
“We started doing that, and then at that point we saw player reactions to it,” he said. “I remember seeing videos on YouTube saying, ‘Do you see this button? It changed with the update.’ There was some buzz there, and that really helped charge the team to be like, let’s do this, and we got there, and we’re like, ‘OK, we’re good. Let’s make a hero.’”
The 2020s haven’t been particularly fruitful for Heroes of the Storm until now, but Yen argued Blizzard never actually discouraged work on the game. “I think the onus is more on the team,” he explained. “We need to show something that makes sense, right? That was always our goal coming back…The idea is that we have done these things and we have this plan, and now we can say to the company, “Hey, I think we have something great here.”
Creating Xal’atath
About a year ago, the Heroes of the Storm team finally felt ready to make a new hero for the game. While Yen said the team looked at games like Overwatch and Diablo 4 for potential characters, it ultimately settled on Xal’atath, a major enemy character from World of Warcraft: Midnight. Yen loved her “dark, evil vibe” and wanted to make her “even more snarky in Heroes.” Her orb-based attacks also offered plenty of inspiration for a set of abilities, with some World of Warcraft team members giving helpful feedback on how to implement them.
Making the first new character in several years came with some growing pains, though. Originally, the plan was for Xal’atath to be a support character, but the team found during playtesting that version of the hero just simply wasn’t fun. As a result, they pivoted to making her a ranged assassin-type character with lane-controlling area-of-effect abilities, and found that it worked much better.
Having gone hands-on with Xal’atath at BlizzCon, I was surprised to find that she was not the easiest character to pick up and play. This isn’t a new hero meant to enable easy onboarding for potential new players. Yen outright called Xal’atath a “medium-to-complex character” with “very deep combos and synergies” during our interviews.
While that choice may seem odd, Yen says Blizzard wants to appeal to those already playing the game, not potential new players.
“We are catering to the people that have been with us for a long time,” he said. “If we create an easy character, it might not necessarily be for them. Fun is such an important pillar of ours, to make sure that people that have been with us feel fun on this character. In turn, some of the best people to help promote your game are the people that love your game.”
While she might not be the most accessible character, Blizzard still put the reveal of Xal’atath front and center at BlizzCon’s opening ceremony, with a direct introduction from president Johanna Faries. Xal’atath is already playable on Heroes of the Storm’s PTR (public test realm), and will roll out to everyone on Sept. 28.
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What’s next for Heroes of the Storm?
After revealing Xal’atath at the opening ceremony, Faries teased, “We might even have a new hero on the way in the near future, so stay tuned and we will see you in the Nexus.” Despite that, Yen was still pretty cagey about what Faries was referencing, never outright affirming that another new hero is imminent in group and one-on-one interviews I did with him at BlizzCon.
Instead, Yen simply took the stance that “focusing on the [player] base,” with the updates following the launch of Xal’atath. That said, it would certainly feel like a waste for Blizzard to rebuild Heroes of the Storm like this, only for it all to be for a one-and-done hero release. Thankfully, when asked about possible synergy with future Blizzard games or expansions, Yen did let it slip that he has dates in mind for what’s next for Heroes of the Storm.
“Game development is hard – and we have plans and we have dates in our minds – and sometimes that doesn’t necessarily hit. What’s really important for us is which hero we think is fun, and which hero the community thinks is fun. I’m sure, like, marketing-wise and everything, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, this would be great. I think I went at this time’…but ultimately, it’s just kind of hard to look at that.”
Although we don’t have an ambitious roadmap for Heroes of the Storm’s return, it seems Blizzard is continuing the slow-and-steady approach it took before this 2026 revitalization. “The focus is on the sustainability and the player feedback and the player reaction,” Yen said. “We’re really focused on making sure that we can continue to do content and development, according to the amount of excitement that is in the community.”
Yen repeatedly referred to a focus on the “now’ in our interviews, and that mentality played a big part in Heroes of the Storm’s return. This new team started small with specific bug updates, then moved on to balance patches, and finally added a complex new hero. Yen might not be ready to dish out details on the next hero or potential console ports when prodded about them, but he certainly seems ready to deliver on what the community wants. That’s something that couldn’t be said about Heroes of the Storm for several years.
“We’re really looking at it as a sustainable model, and we’ll adjust as we go forth,” Yen said of Heroes of the Storm’s revival. “A lot of what has happened, for people, they think that Heroes is not there anymore. Now that we’ve made the statement, hopefully they can come back and enjoy it, and we’ll continue to experience it with them.”