On October 17, Heroes of the Storm’s Arena Mode will be replaced by Weekly Brawls, bringing Blizzard’s MOBA in line with Overwatch and Hearthstone.
Related: check out the best Hearthstone decks for beginners.
Weekly Brawls will change from week-to-week, with Blizzard promising some “surreal twists” and “custom rulesets” along with weekly rewards.
‘Hammer Time’ is one of the brawls that’s been revealed so far. As the name suggests, everyone plays as Sgt. Hammers, but with thrusters permanently engaged.
Some Brawls will take place in a new arena, Lost Cavern, where players will fight over a single lane. There are two more new arenas that are to be announced, as well as some gameplay modifiers.
Blizzard told Gamespot that the ‘Arena’ to ‘Brawl’ switch was made because Arena was built to cater for the smaller scale stuff. “With Heroes Arena we added some original design constraints,” explained lead battleground designer John DeShazer. “They had to be very small experiences. The experience had to fit into a three-round structure. Players weren’t allowed to level. We had a lot of simple rules.
“And while we think that created a very tight and awesome experience in Heroes Arena, we wanted to allow ourselves to create crazy, very unique fun experiences for Heroes Brawl. And so we brought all the Heroes Arena content that we had created and fell in love with and we’re still going to put that into Heroes Brawl, but we’re now going to put even more content on top of that.
“Instead of being objective-based and pushing the core, it’s all about slaughter.”
The PTR will launch on October 10. On October 17, it’s available to everyone.
Here’s the trailer: