Heroes Of The Storm Is Back: Here's How It Happened

Published Sep 13, 2026, 10:21 PM EDT

Chris is a Gaming Editor at ScreenRant. He has been a professional writer since 2009, and has written for top TV, comics, movie, and video game outlets like Engadget, Polygon, Destructoid, and more. He brings with him an expertise in every game genre, no matter how niche or mainstream.

You may know him as the former Managing/Reviews Editor of Destructoid, where he published hundreds of game reviews across every genre, including MMOs, sports games, and Metroidvanias.

Find Chris on Twitter @_SRChris.

Heroes of the Storm has a massive following, even though it hasn't received major updates in years. While Blizzard put the game in maintenance mode, you'd never know it thanks to the passion of the community, who held their own informal competitions for years and kept the game alive by logging in week after week.

Now, thanks to BlizzCon, we have an announcement that Heroes is back in a big way, and it's getting a new hero in the process. We sat down with James Yen, Lead Game Producer of Heroes of the Storm, to talk about HotS for the first time in a long time.

How Heroes Of The Storm Was Resurrected

During a lengthy discussion on the new rise of Heroes of the Storm, we learned a lot of fascinating things from Yen. As it turns out, the team was prepping for a new hero. Here's how it all happened, and why it took so long:

So I'll take you on a little journey. You know, when I started, it was a passionate group; our goal was to improve the sustainability of the game and you know, we had to do a couple of things initially. First, we had to focus on how, when you run a game for so long, to keep it going. There are a lot of processes, knowledge, and software used at the time that might not need to be used now. So we really focused on trying to figure out how we can optimize and improve the player experience, and that was what we focused on first.

We didn't really have any plan on [the next step]. It just so happened that those creative solutions came around. So we focused on the sustainability part. And then once we got to a place where we felt really creative about the game, the next thing we wanted to do was do our best to serve the game. Like how do we figure out how to do that?

From there, the team moved to balance patches. There's a lot of unfinished business in Heroes of the Storm, and after a time, fans started noticing that the update button was lit up in Battle.net, and that the game was starting to get more traction. Then came the Xbox Game Pass hero benefit, then the free skin given out for BlizzCon, and of course, all that work culminated in a hero.

It's been slowly building itself back up, but we haven't seen a new hero for HotS in roughly six years, so adding World of Warcraft big bad Xal'atath into the mix was a huge deal.

Xal'atath Enters The Fray

After the stewards of the game had done their work on balance, it was time to start production on a new hero. Xal'atath originally started as a support hero, but moved to DPS after internal feedback. Now, she's a powerhouse of a caster, able to throw down some zone control while dishing out tons of direct damage and utilizing a tricky triangle-shaped teleportation ability.

As Yen puts it, it was a really fun and rewarding process, but it also took a lot of work:

So we said, let's make a hero. At that time we were looking at the [Blizzard] landscape, and saw so many wonderful characters. And Xal'atath at the time was in World of Warcraft, and she's got like this vibe that you know will really play well in in Heroes. She's dark and sassy.

For the abilities we looked at the WoW cinematics, and one of the things that I realized was she built up that orb and kind of destroyed Dalaran, like you know what that that would be really cool. Yeah, that's kind of like the ethos of Heroes. This would be cool!

Yen explains that nailing down a playstyle for her was tough, but they ended up figuring it out:

You know, she's kind of like manipulative, kind of like an area-control kind of hero, so that's what we wanted initially. We thought we needed support fields and debuffs and mind control and stuff like that. But, you know, during the initial playtesting effort, like, we couldn't really translate that. It's like the idea sounds great, but then you get into the game. It didn't work, but then you kind of took the parts you really liked about the hero.

Xal'atath Isn't Ushering In Heroes 3.0

So why wasn't there a big 3.0 announcement? Well, it's complicated, but ultimately it makes a lot of sense, as Yen tells it:

Right. You know, Heroes 3.0. I think a lot of people probably want it, and you know we wanted respectful to Heroes 1.0 and Heroes 2.0. think it would be at least for me like disrespectful yeah so from us it's more like you know this is like a love letter because Heroes is a love letter for Blizzard, and we're just happy for that. We're going to continue to focus on player satisfaction, and that's why we don't need to think about that.

As far as the future goes, we couldn't confirm additional heroes outright, but the team did say that their work wasn't done: "You know, we're always looking for feedback, and recently we put the original Garden of Terror back into custom games, and we'll see how the players feel, what their reaction is, and continue to work on it."

We asked about potential updates for ARAM (all-random-all-middle) for ARAM fans, and it seems like there are other focuses at the moment: "We can't confirm anything at this time. We know we have a passionate ARAM database, and a lot of people love different modes."

I had the opportunity to sit in during the Legacy Cup for Heroes of the Storm directly after the Opening Ceremony and saw the crowd react with the same passion as during previous BlizzCon finals. I asked Yen how it felt: "It's just an incredible moment for me for the team. We're just really happy. We're glad that the community is happy. It's been really fun."

Systems