The new map plays perfectly into the resurgent theme for Warcraft this year, which is Horde versus Alliance.
Stuff we don't have in Heroes of the Storm, so that became the starting point last year.” Alterac Valley was an obvious one because it's such an iconic Warcraft moment where you have the Horde and Alliance fighting against this visual backdrop of snow, mountains, and everything else. The question then became which Battleground? What look and feel do we want. “Around the time the team was wrapping up our two Overwatch Battlegrounds we were already starting to talk about it - we had to do Warcraft. “We knew we wanted to bring Warcraft into the Nexus with a Battleground,” Matthew Cooper, Lead Content Designer on the Heroes of the Storm team, tells me. For World of Warcraft players, you’ll know the name Alterac Valley as an iconic battleground where 40-player teams battled it out against the backdrop of snowy mountains. For those that may not be all that up to date on their Warcraft lore, Alterac is one of the seven human nations and is situated near the Alterac Mountains. The Echoes of Alterac event, coming soon to Heroes of the Storm, introduces a new Horde versus Alliance arena to the Nexus in the form of Alterac Pass. With Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch Battlegrounds all present and richly detailed with lore and nods to those respective franchises, to celebrate its third anniversary and no doubt the upcoming release of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth – comes the arrival of a new Battleground. Which might make it come as a bit of a surprise to find out that in terms of Battlegrounds and playable arenas - Warcraft has yet to make its full debut in the Nexus.
One look at the current line-up of playable heroes found in Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm, no doubt you’d notice that there’s quite a few iconic characters from the Warcraft universe. The answer to that of course is finally bringing Warcraft into the Nexus. “Such a cool new space, such a cool new visual aesthetic and some fun new Battleground mechanics.” Which as Kaeo reminds me, is still being worked on today. “That kind of led us into last year where the most recent addition to the Nexus universe, which also was the most recent addition to Blizzard in general, Overwatch,” Kaeo adds. Being StarCraft, that was something very near and dear to our heart because our team worked on StarCraft 2 right up until splintering off to work on Heroes of the Storm." “It was our first real exploration of a Blizzard universe in the Nexus, and it kind of set the stage for the next one, the Machines of War event. “Looking at all the universes, we had a ton of fun with our Eternal Conflict where we brought the world of Sanctuary into the Nexus and the Diablo universe for the very first time,” Production Director for Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm, Kaeo Milker, sets the scene.
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