In a post late last night, Blizzard has addressed the elephant in the room - the disappointingly low-effort cosmetic heroes that have recently been added to the game.
- Scholar Jaina and Horseman Uther will both receive new voicelines in the future.
- There are future heroes that will similarly not have custom voicelines. These will also be addressed in a future patch.
- The reason for the delay is due to how long it can take to record voiceovers.
This has been a very hot topic in the Hearthstone community since we reported on Scholar Jaina's lack of custom voicelines a few weeks ago. Blizzard says they wanted to release skins at a faster pace than usual to give everyone more visual customizations in the game but missed the mark.
Thoughts & Analysis
The only problem I see here is they have not addressed whether or not Scholar Jaina is going to make a return to the shop after she gets new voicelines. There are likely many players out there who would have enjoyed having Scholar Jaina at their sides provided she actually released with new voicelines but opted to skip over the purchase when news broke that it wasn't what they thought it would be.
This is also a problem with Horseman Uther, who currently doesn't have custom voicelines but rather a filter placed over the default Uther ones. Although you can still purchase Horseman Uther, and will be able to for the next couple of weeks, buying a product without knowing what the voicelines will be or what they will sound like is problematic.
Blizzard should bring all these heroes back into the shop when they are completed and everyone can judge for themselves if they want to make the purchase. Making these products time-limited one-time-deals to sell more of them due to creating a fear of missing out is am incredibly lame tactic. Hopefully, this is something they have already planned, but if so, why not announce it? Yes, they'll remove some of the FOMO with their current and upcoming hero offerings, but at least it will allow everyone to know they will be able to make an educated decision.
I also have concerns that a very large portion of the Hearthstone player base is not going to ever see this news since it was locked away in a forum post with minimal visibility. At the very least, this should have been blog announcement content, like a lot of the other stuff that only makes it to their forums. In a more ideal setting, Blizzard would add some form of a news tracker to the game client so players on mobile that don't look at community sites that are covering the news have a chance to know too. We're talking about money here which really changes the conversation.
What are your thoughts on the whole deal?
Blizzard's Original Response
Quote From Kerfluffle We wanted to update everyone regarding our new hero skins, particularly Scholar Jaina and Horseman Uther. We are planning to add unique voice lines, start of game voice lines, and a couple other special voice lines to both Scholar Jaina and Horseman Uther in a future patch. We’ve taken feedback on board regarding emotes for those and upcoming hero skins. The next skin, which will be released shortly, has new emotes for all 6 regular board interactions and a few other commonly played lines as well. There will be hero skins in the next expansions associated with their corresponding Book of Heroes chapters that will not have unique lines at launch, but we plan to add them as soon as VO recording allows. Stay tuned for updates here.
Adding context as to how we got here: We started out with the idea of adding skins for our classic heroes that allowed us to get more options for visual customization into the hands of our players at a much quicker than normal pace. We’re confident in the idea behind these skins and they’re already seeing a lot of use within the game. However, we missed here on painting a clear picture of the difference between these skins and the alternate heroes we’ve done in the past, that include all sorts of unique audio and visual effects. That’s something we should have gotten across better and want to ensure that we address in the future.
Comments
But will they give Scholar Jaina Frostblast?
My wife does voice acting jobs occasionally. She records some professional stuff from our closet in a few hours. If there are notes or corrections they can be sent back for re-recording. With high end software like Blizzard has they can clean up any distortion we can't detect. I have no clue why Blizzard is claiming voice-overs take a huge amount of time to come up with.
Because they have to get voice overs for every single language. That's a lot harder to do.
Makes more sense. I didn't think about the other languages. Still seems that a global games maker would have a pool of actors or at the very least an agency ready to bust these out.
Well, as you said, your wife is doing these jobs occasionally. But the actors working with Blizzard games, or the agency, have full schedules. I'm also in touch with voice actors and some of them you have to book months in advance, because they have a lot to do and are not always pure voice actors and may be doing other acting too. And as said before, then you also need to consider all other actors doing those voices in other languages. This is a huge process.
Yeah, but since they were planning on releasing a 10$ .jpeg they didn't use the actors when they had them in studio for the adventures. As many pointed out they literally had a young jaina actor available.
Good, now if they would add Jaina /Arthas Specific interactions like other Hero pairings have, all will be right with the World. How this been overlooked for soooooooo long is beyond me.
I just wonder why they thought not including new Voicelines would be a good Idea.
I can see why they didn't record new ones for the 1000-Wins-Portraits, since these are supposed to be Upgrades that you'll eventually unlock by just playing the Game, but not giving new Voicelines to a Skin that you can only get if you pay for it is just stupid.
I just noticed you complained about not being able to get new voiceline skins without paying?
Wholeheartedly agreed but, didn’t you just agree with their decision to not reward the additional voicelines from 1k portraits, you know, the ONLY achievement-based skin reward in the game right now?
Well, what I meant was that I can understand the Decision to not give the 1k-Wins-Portraits new Voicelines, since these are supposed to be Upgrades to your Standard Hero Portrait, like the golden Hero Power + Animation that you get from 500 Wins.
I mean, it would be really cool if they had unique Voiceslines. I'd support that.
My main Point was that it's stupid to sell Skins that offer effectively as much as these free Upgrades.
Couldn’t disagree more. A lot of people don’t even play ranked mode let alone winning games in it, So no you don’t just get 1k portraits by just playing the game.
So I don’t know. If they don’t reward 1k win players with new voiceline skins nothing would surprise me at all
If you are not playing in ranked then you probably don't really care about the 1k portraits anyway. You will always win games, even if lose a lot your MMR will drop until you face players more your skill level.
Well, I didn't say that it won't take some Time.
I'm concerned about the line -
Is Blizzard saying all the Book of Heroes portraits will have to wait for custom voicelines, or is this going to affect other new heroes, too? Especially since one of the rewards for the proposed game pass was earning a new hero a season
100% going to be the Book of Heroes gang for the near future. If that extends to the battle pass too, it's going to make for some serious disappointment.
Give us a modernized UI too. Where's the Leaderboards and Personalization?
I don't really need voice lines, but something for my own unique play style.
I wanna personalize my own avatar and battletag. Have fancy borders/frame.
(EDIT. Throw in Achievements and Medal in there too!. Simple things like this can make the players happy)
Who's sitting at the top of ranked? What's my Ranked MMR? Why must you hide everything? Scores and Data is Important too.
Lazy all over.
Sorry for all that. I just can't imagine 6 years of HS, and we still play with a rusty old template.
(I can already see the negative votes for this, but sometimes, player need to give critics too.)
Will have to wait until we actually see those new voice lines first, and the entrances. Obviously good that they're actually doing something like this, but the real question is why they'd need an angry mob to stick a pitchfork down their arse when a backlash from such a lazy product should have been predictable.
You can call me a cynic but I am not buying their explanation. I am convinced that at least part of the reason here was to test if they can get away with this sort of cuts. Without a significant response they would not have backtracked. They had the time to do voicelines for the solo adventure but were not able to throw in some lines for the hero skin in advance? This is either not true or bad organization. Secondly for a company like Blizzard recording some short voicelines in advance should not be a problem at all. Great that they adressed this issue but I am not convinced.
In fairness they did say "we missed here on painting a clear picture of the difference between these skins and the alternate heroes we’ve done in the past, that include all sorts of unique audio and visual effects. That’s something we should have gotten across better and want to ensure that we address in the future."
I.e. they are openly saying they were not intending on giving them new voicelines until the backlash came, and not pretending there is some excuse for the delay. They have only put fault on themselves for lack of communication and/or poor judgement.
While cynicism has a useful purpose, I think its excessive to cling to it when they both admit mistakes and make the changes people were asking for.
I think this would have gone better for Blizzard if they explained it better to begin with. I’ve been assuming the plan was something like this:
The new explanation that they always intended to make new voice lines but hadn’t gotten around to it yet is just weird. It’s an obvious lie - Are they afraid to say “We heard your feedback and are making a change? Edit: As pointed out below, I misread Blizzard’s comments. They were more or less thinking what I said in my fake quote, but didn’t communicate it clearly.