MOBAs as a genre aren’t generally known for their deep and immersive storylines, and Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm is even less lore-centric than say, League of Legends or Dota 2.
There’s a tiny bit of worldbuilding in the game’s tutorial, but after that, it’s all about that sweet MOBA gameplay. So in the absence of any official explanation as to why Jim Raynor is throwing down with Murky and Diablo, one fan has written up a pretty compelling backstory for the game.
Rwandrall posted this HotS mythos to Reddit. It begins with a mysterious race of beings known as the “Creators,” cleverly tied into the existing lore of Blizzard’s Big Three (StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo):
The Creators have many names. The Xel’naga. The Titans. The Makers. Capable of making and re-making worlds, they wander through the Cosmos, creating order on multiple planets.
Some of them grew mad with their power, however. Warped and twisted, the Destroyers used their great powers to undo the Creators’ work. Amongst them, the greatest of the fallen were Sargeras, Amon, and Tathamet. Each spawned a force to serve them and to destroy all that stood against them – each in their own part of the Cosmos.
War raged between the forces of creation and destruction. On one side, Demonkind, the Zerg and the Burning Legion, and beings such as the Protoss, the Naaru, and the Angels on the other.
The Creators watched from afar, unable to comprehend why their ranks were time and time again marred by failure and betrayal, but unwilling to intervene directly. Over time, they identified three anomalies in the constant cycle of creation and destruction between the Creators and their corrupted brethren: Azeroth, a planet full of beings standing strong over and over again despite Sargeras’ best efforts, Sanctuary, a realm defended against intrusion from either forces by the uniquely powerful Nephalem, and the Overmind, one of their own creations which has broken free from their will to protect its spawn, the Zerg, from Amon’s plans. Every time, there existed an element independant from the influence of any of the Creators.
They convened a council, and decided to conduct a grand experiment. They would take a sample of individuals associated with each of these anomalies, plucking them out of time and space, and observe them, observe what would happened if they were thrown in battle against each other. They hoped that the conflict would reveal this “spark”, this element existing outside of them and their conception that was the only think able to hold back the Destroyers.
The time draws near. Amon has returned, Sargeras is stirring, and a Prime Evil is reborn and released by Malthael’s death. If they unite their forces, not even the Creators can stop them. The only hope of the Cosmos is finding the “spark”. But the Destroyers are sending their own agents to undo the experiment.
The Storm is coming.
PS: Obviously this is fanfic, and it’s been confirmed multiple times they are completely separate universes.
Fanfic it might be, but reading it really does make those 5v5 matches feel just a little more epic.
