This BlizzCon 2011 video of “Blizzard DOTA” (Heroes of the Storm) is a trip down memory lane

destructoid.com:

The Blizzard of today is insanely different from the Blizzard of 11 years ago, and this old video of the Blizzard DOTA concept shared on the Heroes of the Storm reddit from the Arkentass YouTube channel proves it.

Embedded below, you can watch footage from BlizzCon 2011, where the team showcased a build of Blizzard DOTA: the MOBA that would eventually be released as Heroes of the Storm four years later. Keep in mind this was back in 2011, when the MOBA genre was still very fresh and League of Legends had barely been out (it was just two years old and Riot wasn’t quite the empire it is now); and there was some actual MOBA competition going on. By the time Blizzard actually shipped what became Heroes of the Storm out of the door (mid-2015), it was a little late.

As any Heroes player can attest to, it’s a pretty wildly different game in many respects. The thing that intrigues me the most is the “cyber world” concept, and how different that could have been from the in-game universe of the “Nexus,” which never really caught on the way some other Blizzard worlds did. The idea of a Blizzard “Mojoverse” is not only delightfully silly, but it’s a blank canvas to bounce creative ideas off of. At this point, I think I would have preferred it, as the team could have gotten a lot weirder and further differentiated themselves from the mostly fantasy-heavy MOBA fare.

At the risk of preventing anxiety out there, I’ll refrain from calling 2011 “retro.” It made you shudder to think about, right?