Lining up with the whole big Alliance-themed expansion announcement, PC Gamer sat down with two of the Hearthstone developers you've most likely seen around the inn by this point - Liv Breeden (Senior Game Designer, Initial Design) and Cora Georgiou (Associate Game Designer) - to talk through several points of interest; and not just only about United in Stormwind.
The interview was conducted by Brand Director Tim Clark, who has been following and covering the card-slinging scene for a long time; with assistance from Ben "Ridiculous Hat" Goodman, whose podcasting efforts have no equal on this mortal plane. You can read the entire flavorful take here; we will focus on some of the more relevant excerpts below, as there has been a fair deal of worthwhile information to highlight.
New Expansion and Mechanics
- Tradeable cards fit the fantasy of a bustling city with many people to haggle with, even though technically we can only "exchange goods" within our own deck.
- There might be some initial head-scratching among players given the naming convention here (nope, Hearthstone is not actually turning into a Trading Card Game), but they should be able to adjust quickly.
- A versatile take on the Choose One keyword from Druid, offering a different form of card draw to allow players utilize more cards from their deck.
- Tradeable actually started at 0 mana for balance purposes, but that proved to be "really good". 1 mana cost adds a little more weight to the decisions.
- We can expect to see some other cards that closely interact with this mechanic.
Quote From Cora Georgiou It definitely adds that little bit of extra consistency. If you're playing a deck with situational cards, you can afford to include them or tech pieces since if you're in a circumstance where they aren't super relevant you can just toss them back. And it gave us cool opportunities to make cards that interact with Tradeable cards or improve upon the mechanic as we go forward. It's nice extra reliability in deckbuilding.
- As expected, Questline cards start in your opening hand once the game begins, just like all previous Quests.
- Not all final effects will "last throughout the rest of the game"; there are some powerful one-off resolutions as well.
- They are meant to be something you build your deck around, taking a good while to complete for a game-changing outcome.
- Unlike old Quests that were all or nothing, each Questline having three steps ensures players can at least earn small boosts to help them along the way.
- It's fun to complete quests and have a built-in narrative to follow. Playing the final reward card should be a special moment that changes the stakes.
Quote From Liv Breeden You play them like normal quests but they're broken up into three parts—after you complete the first step, it transforms into the second step so you don't need to play it again and you just continue on the journey. Once you've completed all three steps you get a really powerful Legendary minion in your hand that provides big benefits. Some of them are long-term and some of them are one-offs but they're all definitely worth it.
Quote From Liv Breeden We actually started with the concept of Questlines ending with a passive effect so things like [Varden's] permanent Spell Damage +3 for the rest of the game, but there wasn't enough impact to them. You wanted to play those cards and feel like you did the thing, rather than just have the quest turn over and go "yup, we did it". Going from Uldum where quest completion made your hero power change… that's a cool moment, but there's something really special about the original quests where I played the [reward] card and now we're in the second half of the game. The stakes are different now.
- All mount cards operate in a similar way: first providing a spell buff to any minion of choice, and upon its death spawning a separate mount minion with the matching stats and ability to that of the initial effect.
- The terror of Arena that was Spikeridged Steed in its heyday is the most relevant example of old.
- Warlock and Paladin will also get their own mount effects - which is most thematically fitting. Anyone who played vanilla World of Warcaft might recall sprawing questlines these two classes had to complete in order to earn their special free mounts. It was a pretty big deal back then.
Quote From Cora Georgiou Yeah, they all operate the same way whereby you give a buff and a slight bonus to a minion. The mount that drops off has the exact same stats and same effect.
Quote From Liv Breeden One thing about World of Warcraft is that everyone remembers getting their mount. It's a big story moment for the mercenaries—this is their mount and this is what makes their mount special. We'll see Warlock and Paladin get their special mounts as well.
- Profession Tools are all weapons with 0 Attack value, instead using up one point of Durability each time their effect goes off.
- We have already seen a similar mechanic in play with Sphere of Sapience.
- Not all of them will affect cards in our hand - there's a board-based ability and other takes as well.
Quote From Liv Breeden We wanted to get the fantasy of what it was like to do the professions without having to do something like shuffle in crafting materials to your deck or something like that. They're not all hand-based—there's one that's board-based, there's one that's cost-based, and there are other things out there as well.
The Issue with Priest
- Priest can be notoriously difficult to balance as it has often dealt in extremes - and as we all know, the class just has that innate ability to infuriate opponents.
- They will likely continue moving away from the "endless generation Priest", by further toning down or capping the number of spells that can be created over a single game of Hearthstone.
- Even though the class might be slightly off the mark right now, Cora thinks that the gameplay at the core of Priest is actually fun. Be careful when sharpening your pitchforks!
- They believe it should be possible to find that sweet spot for the class again.
- The goal with Shadow Priest is to provide some of that forward momentum, directly doing stuff to the opponents and going face a little more than we are used to.
- Historically, Priest usually played a more defensive role in Hearthstone due to the nature of their Lesser Heal Hero Power (we did have a small detour with Death Knights and Shadowreaper Anduin). But this year's introduction of spell schools allows to more closely recapture that duality known from World of Warcaft - Shadow and Holy specializations.
- Certain Start of Game effects proved very divisive in the past, to put it mildly - mainly thanks to Genn Greymane and Baku the Mooneater - but Darkbishop Benedictus should provide the right amount of excitement and a different way to play from the get go.
Quote From Liv Breeden It's interesting for sure. If we look back at Rez Priest, that deck is really fun… for the person playing it. It's important that we have decks that are for those sorts of players, but we want to make sure that the people playing against them aren't tearing their hair out.[….]
But Shadow Priest is super different—there are cards like Insight for Shadow, but generally they're pretty forward moving, looking to directly do stuff to the opponent, and that's the goal in this expansion for Priest.
Quote From Cora Georgiou It can be somewhat difficult to find that sweet spot. We've found it in the past and we're maybe slightly over right now, but I think the gameplay at the core of Priest—and I'm gonna get called a sadist for this—is fun! I don't hate Priest!
Battlegrounds
- What will it take for the game mode to finally lose its Beta tag? They've had internal conversations about it, and there's still a lot more they would love to be able to do. It should happen eventually!
- The Battlegrounds team is hiring and continues to expand (aiming for between 4 and 6 people); there are further plans in place.
- The long-awaited cosmetics are just the tip of the iceberg for the art potential and ways for players to customize their own games.
- New bartenders in town (Ragnaros and Ve'nari) are fully voiced just like everyone's favorite Bartender Bob, allowing him to finally be able to take that day off. Their attitudes are going to be just slightly different... Keep trying harder, INSECTS!
- The team has to be careful while developing Battlegrounds further, as they struck gold by finding that enjoyable core gameplay and wouldn't want to mess it up.
- The big minion shakeup that's on the horizon (but won't happen before the expansion release) will significantly influence how gameplay styles change between various minion types and heroes. The idea is "what would a Standard rotation look like for Battlegrounds?".
- Alas, no current plans for our good pal Tirion Fordring to re-enter the fray.
Quote From Cora Georgiou For it to come out of beta… that's an internal conversation and something that we've been discussing what exactly constitutes taking the tag off. We feel that BGs currently is very enjoyable and something that our players really, really love. There's a lot that we would love to be able to do with it.
Quote From Liv Breeden Yeah, one of the challenges for Battlegrounds is that we found this core thing that's super fun and different every game, and there's so much randomness going on. We don't really want to mess with the core gameplay, and making it more similar to constructed Hearthstone feels wrong so we definitely don't want to do that—leaning into the cosmetics is really important.
Other Topics
- Cora has gone from Final Design to Battlegrounds to Initial Design, which is quite a journey.
- The exact card design with its creative and balance work might not be something people fully realize the intricacies of; it can be surprising how long it takes a single card to actually reach the public eye.
- Liv joined the team back in Knights of the Frozen Throne, with the idea of a 10 mana Mage spell filling the board on both sides. It wasn't good at the time (providing the opposing player with more initiative), but we've seen a similar concept eventually come to life with Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate.
- You might already know that Cora was directly responsible for Sword of the Fallen, although she swears she didn't think that Final Design would ever keep it as 1/3.
- When in doubt, just blame BoarControl. Even if he wasn't on the team at the time.
- Which classes we should look forward to in United in Stormwind? Liv points to Mage and Rogue as being cool, while Cora very much enjoyed the new Warrior Questline.
- Deathrattle Demon Hunter was a novelty that even some people on the team were initially quite skeptical about. Liv believes they could do a better job coming up with other new archetypes rather than just leaning on the existing ones - not that it's necessarily a bad thing since players have their favorite designs.
Quote From Liv Breeden I really like Mage this set. Mage is super cool, Rogue's got some new decks that we haven't seen so I'd look out for those too.
Quote From Cora Georgiou I think internally I've been playing a lot of Warrior when we're testing future sets and I've been including the Questline in that quite a bit. That's probably my favorite Questline of the bunch. It's very fun.
Quote From Liv Breeden We launched DH with two pretty good decks but we didn't really have a great stable of cards so when we wanted to build up a new archetype we had to give it a whole bunch of new stuff like when Deathrattle came around. Even Final Design was skeptical and said that Deathrattle DH wasn't a thing… but we needed to make it a thing. It's building from the ground up a lot unless you're leaning on one of the older designs—which isn't a bad thing, but I think we could do a better job of that going forward in the future.
Bonus Content
This isn't the only time in recent weeks when Cora and Liv teamed up to share various insights (and not only about the game): their appearance on the Hearth and Home Podcast #9 might not've been on many people's radars, but it's well worth a watch/listen if you've got about 20 minutes to spare.
The topics involve the game design process at large, typical working days at Blizzard, behind-the-scenes recollections, dedicated pet love, and more. We also found out that Liv Breeden will be the lead for the upcoming couple of sets, which brough to light the information of United in Stormwind being Alec Dawson's last set on the Initial Design team. He has now moved on to Final Design Lead on all that's to come. Plus that nerf of First Day of School might have some implications on the future expansions.
Have you found any of the takeaways above especially appealing? Anything in particular to look forward to that has fully captured your attention? We would be curious to hear all your thoughts.
Comments
Its always interesting to hear of a truly new deck, and doubly so when it's pluralised to imply multiple new decks. I'm looking forward to a lot of janky stuff in rogue then, which is good because rogue feels a bit too 'Classic' to me in Standard. We have the card Shenanigans, but the last year or so has been disappointingly light on actual shenanigans for the class.
As for speculation, I wonder if there will be a coin-based deck to tie in with the tradeable/market theme and make use of Tomb Pillager since he was added to the Core set. Presumably SI:7 drives a spy-based mechanic too. Perhaps some cards will be able to see the opponent's hand while others will make use of that somehow?
If they're looking at building a rogue deck that doesnt rely on the miracles of Field Contact, it'll likely be either stealth or deathrattles. If team5 are real brave with their design choices it'll be spell rogue, now wouldn't that be a sight?
The quest would be like, play 5 spells in a row, up to three times and you'll get scabbs: until the end of the game, discover a random spell from other classes at the start of your turn.
But more likely it'll be something to do with stealth, there's just so many stealth related cards right now it just makes sense.
Isn't the problem with stealth here that stealth rogue already exists, and therefore wouldn't really count as a 'new deck'? Sure it's not the go-to archetype right now but rogue has been very stealth-heavy over the year (which is about time honestly. The fact it took 6 years for the class to seriously care about stealth is strange.)
As for deathrattle, I almost hope DH is just taking over from rogue there. I liked 'rattle rogue in the past, but deathrattles don't really play well with the other tools rogue has: deathrattles are slow; you want them to die (so they care less about stealth); and they don't want to be bounced. So maybe it's best it was dropped from the class, at least as a recurring core mechanic.
I don't think rogue has been built as a spell-based class in a long time, and I don't see the appeal of spell-only decks. If you're going to generate minions, how is it really any different from a normal deck? In the end a minion is essentially just a spell with a body attached, and a spell that summons minions is no different from a minion under almost every circumstance. In the more extreme case where a spell deck can't even generate minions, isn't that just really boring? Evidently I'm not rooting for rogue to go down the spell road...
So I'm hoping they utilise something else, e.g. shuffling things into decks. Bomb warrior and soul fragment DH/warlock definitely counted as 'new decks', and rogue has precedent for doing something rather more elaborate with the mechanic.
Inb4 it's just Miracle Rogue again but with a random tribal theme instead
While I'm not as optimistic as I may have sounded previously, I doubt it would be too close to miracle rogue given that was central to rogue's Barrens stuff. That said, a hypothetical coin deck would be asking to revive the more traditional spell-based miracle deck using Gadgetzan Auctioneer (who's still around) albeit with extra synergies sprinkled in.
A tribal theme would be very odd when SI:7 doesn't have a tribe to offer. For the sake of entertaining the idea though, Scabbs is a gnome and is seen on a mechanostrider in the UiS cinematic, which might mean a mech mount card, which in turn leaves the door open for mech rogue. Add in the fact mechs are in a weird spot where their only real tribal identity (magnetic) was also a set mechanic - meaning they would be looking for something new to do - and maybe there's some way to satisfy both "new decks we haven't seen" and "just Miracle Rogue again but with a random tribal theme instead".
All unlikely I'm sure, but I'm keen for anything to help me enjoy Standard again.
When I first saw Spice Bread Baker, my thought was "some sort of Control Rogue could be a possibility"? Or at least slower and not as tempo based. They have this potential to end up with a full hand of cards quite often.
We know that Questlines revolve around Mercenaries, although the current examples show it won't have to be necessarily about Combo and discounts. Varden was freezing the board in Barrens, and now provides spell damage. I'm most curious what other playstyles they might come up with.
wtf? this is so wrong.
I don't think they mean a code bound limit. I think it more means design generation cards in a way where you can't go near infinite. Avoid situations where classes are generating enough cards that they generate more generate cards and go off.
I mean they literally said "capping the nummber of spells that can be created" which very clearly indicates a hard limit which shouldn't be a thing
dude there is literally 0 chance they mean a hard coded cap,
why is that? The wording indicates it and it's not the first time they put a cap on something to stop it from going infinite (remember when Shudderwock was "nerfed" to 20 battlecries only. What's stopping them from going "you can only generate x amount of cards each turn/game and anything above that will fizzle?
I don't want that either, but there's absolutely precedent for this.
While Liv directly talked in the interview about "putting a number on the upper limit of spells they're going to be able to generate over the course of a game", I also didn't read it as a hard fixed cap. That would be quite weird. Nothing is ever impossible, but assuming more (ahem) standard solutions, I'd imagine just being a lot more careful with printing cards that do something good while leading to more card generation. And not being able to find all answers on the fly. Just so Priests ending up with near full hands are not as common of a sight.
yeah that literally sounds like "we fucked up and don't know how to actually fix this so we'll resort to insane bandaid fixes".
Literally the only problem with Priest right now is how small the random pool is so they almost always get good cards. I'm pretty sure by the time the mini set arrives the problem will have resolved itself and with the next rotation half of the randomly generating nonsenese is rotating anyways
Lotsa stuff