Nexus Anomalies were periodic changes meant to improve the game and/or to make it more interesting to play. When a Season started in 2020, Blizzard released a new Nexus Anomaly that directly affected all game modes in Heroes of the Storm. These Anomalies lasted the entire season (typically three months), allowing the developers time to receive feedback on them. Depending on this evaluation, some of them became permanent additions to the game, while others were just a limited time event.
List of Nexus anomalies[ | ]
- Experience Globes (introduced December 2019)
- A Call For Help (introduced April 2020)
- Climate Phenomena (introduced June 2020)
- Gladiator's Medallion (introduced September 2020)
Removal[ | ]
"After reading through your feedback and deliberating amongst ourselves, we have decided to remove the Climate Phenomena anomaly from the Nexus. While this was not an easy decision to make, we feel it is the right thing to do for the game. We also wanted to take this time to more clearly define the purpose of our Nexus Anomalies, and our plans for them going forward.
Nexus Anomalies were intended to serve two functions:
#We wanted to distribute our annual gameplay updates throughout the year, giving us the freedom to try exploratory changes that we weren’t committed to if they ended up not working out. Previously, we introduced all our gameplay updates each year around BlizzCon. These updates were usually fairly impactful, and many players had trouble adjusting to the large amount of sudden change. #We wanted Heroes to have an exciting, fun change for players to look forward to every season.
As far as what exactly each Anomaly would entail, we did not have too many set rules, largely to ensure that we had the creative freedom to try bold ideas. So far, we believe our Anomalies have largely been successful, particularly after we had some time to iterate on them.
With Climate Phenomena, we wanted to play with two ideas. The first was introducing a new Hero to the Nexus with an accompanying theme, and the second was the prospect of changing game states throughout a match, with a minor impact on gameplay. Unfortunately, we’ve found that these changes were too disruptive to the normal flow of the game, and they didn’t add enough fun factor to account for how much they impacted the player experience. Some players also reported frame-per-second (FPS) issues due to the Anomaly, which we found to be unacceptable.
Moving forward, we intend to finish the year with one more Anomaly, released alongside the final season of 2020. After that, we have decided that we will not be pursuing Anomalies at a set cadence like we did this year. We still plan on regular gameplay updates, and will continue to experiment with ways to make Heroes a better game, so you can count on that still happening. In the future, we want to take a bit more time and release updates only when we feel they are in a more polished state, and we want to give the members of the Development Team the freedom to explore certain longstanding issues that we think are important to the community. For example, we’re considering large updates to maps that we feel could use some design improvements.
As always, thank you for taking the time to read through our thoughts, and for the years playing this game, which we love so much, alongside us. We’ll see you… in the Nexus!"[1]
Notes[ | ]
- The developers had a list of about 20 Nexus Anomalies that they wanted to bring to the game.
- One of the Anomalies developers had tested internally revolves around bringing back Tower Ammunition, but even after speeding things up, it took too much time for Towers to reload, which felt generally bad for the game, so they decided to scrap it.
- Another Nexus Anomaly they tried was turning wizard minions into sappers, which was something the community had asked for.[2]
- Another Nexus Anomaly they tried was decreasing the Heroes' Death Timers and making it unaffected by the game time. However, each time that Hero was killed the Death Timer increased.[3]