Posts with tag heroes-of-the-storm-news

The Heroes of the Storm official site has released a new interview with Senior Technical Designer Meng Song all about the game's new battleground map: the Garden of Terror. The Garden is a three-lane map that cycles between daytime and nighttime, with corresponding changes to both lighting and map features. During the day, there are the usual mercenary camps for players to capture, but they disappear when night falls, and instead night horrors will appear in the garden sections of the map. The night sequence ends when all night horrors are killed.

In addition, players can gather seeds by killing certain mobs scattered around the map. Once 100 seeds have been collected, players can summon a Garden Terror in their base. Much like the Dragon Shire map, the player that summons the Garden Terror becomes it, granting you two powerful abilities: Plant Horror Overgrowth, which disables and damages enemy buildings, and Spore Queen's Curse, which turns your enemies into piddling little Plant Zombies.

It's great to see a new map being added to Heroes for some extra variety. I'm really interested to see how the day/night cycle works out in gameplay, particularly because the transition is player-controlled. I'm sure there will be a variety of strategies for when and why to try and shift the map into night, and for how long to leave it there. Mostly, it will just be nice to have another possible option on the battleground roulette wheel.

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Briefly, I considered using today's Last Week in WoW as the delivery mechanism for an April Fools' Joke. Rather than recapping the last week on the site, I was going to recap WoW Insider's entire existence, presenting links to everything we've ever posted in our history. This idea lasted no more than a few minutes, when the reality of the task settled in. Instead, I'll give you a few stats, which aren't jokes whatsoever. They're just interesting.

WoW Insider launched in November of 2005. Since then, we've published nearly 40,000 articles. Let's assume the average word count per article is 500 words -- it's likely more than that, given how many features we've run over the years and how much we like to talk, but let's say 500 anyway. That's 20,000,000 words. Twenty million. The average length of an adult fiction novel (not an erotic novel, but adult as opposed to young adult) is 100,000 words. Since November 2005, we've written 200 novels about World of Warcraft and Blizzard games in general.

So scrap the gag of linking you everything, because that's a Herculean task and I am no Hercules. Instead, let's stick with what happened this past week.

Most popular posts of the week

• Flying in Draenor must be destroyed
• WoW Archivist: Warlords of Draenor hates The Burning Crusade
• Dragon Soul LFR changes possible in patch 6.0
• Female draenei model reveal coming this week
• I'm so bored with the Horde