We’re always looking to improve on all the things that we do, including the games that we make. Self-admittedly, we looked at that and we didn’t do a good job of it. You know, it is our responsibility as developers to make the transition for somebody who doesn’t really know much about the game to becoming somebody who can be great at the game. Especially when you’re new and trying to learn what a MOBA is.ĭeForest: Yeah, and it’s an incredibly stressful time, and if you encounter the wrong type of players that exist you’re going to get punished, you’re not going to enjoy yourself, and you’re going to blame it on the game. GamesBeat: The best thing with this is that one person can essentially play the game by himself and learn a new character or just learn the game in general. You’re doing real asinine things.” They’re actually intelligent. You don’t want to look at a bot and say, “I can tell you’re being controlled by a computer.
We’ve had a lot of people who are like, “I’d love to just be able and sit down with me and four bots against five bots, me and two buddies with two bots against five bots, or I can get in a match and queue up with four other people I may not know and play against bots. So, you know, we’ve taken the time to take feedback from the community, to look at the things that we think we can do better, put those together, sit down, come up with a plan, execute on making the UI (user interface) better, making some of the art better, adding some new features, putting in bots. We’ve redone the buddy list and notifications. We’ve redone the in-game chat to make it better and streamlined it. I think people are going to be impressed. The buildings, the towers, the wells, and the textures throughout the entire map are going to be changed, and it looks fantastic. And the map is getting a complete overhaul. Of course, we just call them HD versions of the models, but they look significantly better.
30 of the original (character) models, this being a three-year-old game, are getting refreshed artwork to a higher quality. It’s not boring, but it is a good new-player walkthrough that will help transition someone, whether they’ve not played a game like this at all or they’ve been a long time LoL player and they’d like to try and play HoN.īut we knew we couldn’t just cater to all of those new players. We have a thing in the office where if anyone calls it a tutorial then they have to get their hand slapped with a ruler, because it is not a tutorial. Also, we’re focusing on easing players into playing their first bot game and teaching them the mechanics of the game in an easier fashion. We’ve spent a lot of time making sure our bots feel like real players and not be so challenging that it is exactly the same as playing real players. One of the things we’re going to focus on is putting bots in the game.
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We’ve invested a seven-figure budget just into this update alone. Early next year we’re going to launch HoN 3.0. One of the things we have not spent enough time focusing on is the capability of learning how to play the game better before you play it online. I think that’s a testament to not just how good of a game HoN is as it is to the stickiness of this genre. We’re almost three years old now and still extremely popular and still growing.
We’ve got some other tricks up our sleeve, and we’ve got some other things we’ve been working on, which is pretty exciting. We’re going to continue to invest in the company. We’re going to continue to operate it as a service. We’re not stopping with what we’re doing with HoN. I just signed a lease on a new office this year which over doubles our current square footage to make room for additional growth. The size of our company has doubled this year in terms of personnel. Our partner in southeast Asia, we just signed a deal with them to launch HoN in Taiwan and China as well. I think our partners there said we’re the number one online game played in Thailand, which is a pretty exciting stat to have. We’ve had solid growth in North America, but we’re actually seeing most of our growth come from southeast Asia. I know that just in this year alone we’ve seen about 50% increase in our player base. Marc DeForest: We’ve been pretty successful ourselves. GamesBeat: MOBAs have seen a lot of growth. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.