For years, Heroes of the Storm looked like a game Blizzard had left to idle. It stayed online, but no new heroes arrived after December 2020, and the studio had already cut back development and esports support in 2018. At BlizzCon 2026 the MOBA opened the show: its return kicked off the opening ceremony, and Blizzard president Johanna Faries introduced a new hero, Xal’atath, the villain from World of Warcraft. In an interview with Polygon, lead game producer James Yen explained how a small team spent four years getting there.
Plumbing before heroes
Yen worked on Heroes of the Storm in 2015, left in 2017 to work on Hearthstone and remasters of older Blizzard games, and came back in 2022 as lead game producer. His brief was to revive the game, and the team he calls a “small, passionate group” started with work players never see: game infrastructure and development tools. Blizzard said it would not add new content for a while, and updates went quiet for over a year.
Patches came back in September 2023 and have arrived roughly monthly since. The order was deliberate:
- Bug fixes first, which Yen called “the best way to familiarize with the game”;
- balance adjustments next;
- and finally a new hero, once community buzz (YouTube videos pointing out a single changed button, for example) convinced the team it was ready.
“It’s our mission to make sure that Heroes of the Storm is a sustainable product,” Yen told Polygon. He also said the push had to come from the team itself: it needed to show the company a plan that made sense.
Xal’atath, a hero for the veterans
Work on the hero began about a year before BlizzCon. The team looked at characters from Overwatch and Diablo 4 but chose Xal’atath, a major enemy in World of Warcraft: Midnight, and made her “even more snarky in Heroes.” World of Warcraft developers gave feedback on her orb-based attacks. She was first designed as a support, but playtesters found that version just wasn’t fun, so she became a ranged assassin with area-of-effect abilities for controlling lanes.
She isn’t meant for newcomers. Yen calls her a “medium-to-complex character” with “very deep combos and synergies,” and says she was built for “the people that have been with us for a long time.” Xal’atath is already playable on the game’s public test realm (PTR). She reaches all players on September 28, 2026, and GosuGamers notes she is the first new character since Hogger in December 2020.
What comes next
On stage, Faries hinted that “we might even have a new hero on the way in the near future.” Yen was more careful and wouldn’t confirm that another hero is close, though he admitted that “we have plans and we have dates in our minds.” He didn’t commit to a big roadmap, and he wouldn’t discuss possible console ports. Instead, he described a steady pace tied to player interest: the team wants to keep producing content “according to the amount of excitement that is in the community.” Since the new team spent four years rebuilding the game, a single hero seems an unlikely end point.
