garden-of-terror
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Heroes of the Storm's Garden of Terror swaps between night and day
It's the gimmick, the hook that makes a well-designed MOBA battleground truly memorable, and Heroes of the Storm's Garden of Terror thinks it has its hook: a night-and-day sequence. Unlike the mostly cosmetic lighting filters in MMO day/night cycles, Garden of Terror's transition between the two will change the fundamental rules of the match. While during the daytime players can check out mercenary camps, the nighttime is a whole different story. The camps go away when the sun goes down, and out pops nighttime horrors as players' visibility decreases. The daytime only comes back when all of the horrors are killed, giving players control over how long the dark lasts. One of the Garden of Terror's objectives is gathering up seeds to plant so that a huge player-controlled mob can be summoned. Learning when and how to use the summon will be a key to dominating the match.
Heroes of the Storm: New battleground revealed
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.
