Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Tonight, we are welcome back once again, our friend, game designer David Heron of the Game Design Roundtable podcast. David, welcome back.

Oh, great. Thanks.

And we also welcome back our friend and semi-regular freelance writer, Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

So the three of us have been playing a game together from time to time.

We've been spending quite a bit of time playing Heroes of the Storm, the Moba from Blizzard,

that actually breaks with a lot of Moba convention as we've come to know it through games like League of Legends and Dota 2.

But the real impetus for this conversation, I think, is a discussion that David and I had a few weeks ago at Pax East, as David began to hold forth, as he has wont to do, about why here's of the storm is not quite the casual moba for everyone that it sort of presents itself as, and certainly that I've begun

treating it as. When I look at it, I think it's the fun, casual light moba for people who don't

want to play a game like it's their job. But David, you didn't quite, you feel that there's a

veneer of casualness over this game

that the design itself perhaps belies, and I'm curious to hear a little bit about that.

Oh, I mean, you put a couple of cocktails into me, and I'll talk about anything for a couple of

hours, and we sat down at a hotel and and I said I'm playing

Heroes of the Storm and you and you looked at me you said oh great let's sit down and listen

to Dave tell us why the games we love are terrible and I said no no no no no no I've put like

500 games into this thing.

I'm really enjoying it.

And I do.

I really like it.

Moba's to me, I started back in when they were mods.

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