The Hearthstone Team has announced that Mercenaries, the new game mode that launched October 21, 2021, is no longer going to receive content updates.
The news comes after a post showcasing new updates coming to the mode which include dual-types, factions, and six new mercenaries to collect. These updates in Patch 25.4 are going to be the final content updates the mode receives, with Blizzard instead focusing their efforts towards the normal game and Battlegrounds.
Mercenaries was a mode that was met with poor monetization, low replayability with a dull grind, and unbalanced pvp. It should come as no surprised that more efforts won't be pushed to the mode.
Quote From Blizzard After these updates, we will be focusing on making the Hearthstone and Battlegrounds modes the best they can be. At the same time, Mercenaries will continue to get support for bug fixes and periodic balance changes as needed, but no further regular content updates. With the new additions in this patch, we hope that Mercenaries will be a fun, fulfilling mode for players.
To everybody who has ever chased a Bounty or gathered around the Campfire, we thank you for making this chapter in Hearthstone’s history special, and we hope you’ll enjoy everything Mercenaries has to offer in 25.4. See you in the Tavern!
Comments
The fact that I no longer needed to play for hours every day to accumulate enough experience points for gold and the next expansion was the single greatest source of happiness I've ever known. And particularly considering that mercenaries were never as popular as battlegrounds. No luck making money there, either. When they essentially done away with the grind, I knew interest in the game would wane, but I didn't expect it to go so quickly.
dordle
I will miss Mercenaries, especially the events.
Would love to know what Lessons Learned that Blizz thinks they gained from the mishandled, over hyped launch.
It's not going away. You can still complete daily quests, & soon there will be weekly quests with the new Boss Rush. I do these everyday before I play any Standard, & I intend to keep doing them.
I enjoy this mode & am looking forward to working with the new additions, even if they will be the last.
Hey, now I can finally max out my entire collection and never have to come back ever. Neat.
Yeah, I'll finally open my pre-order packs up and see if I can get the whole cast.
I mean, at least they're being honest and axing it (though way too late already IMO) instead of pretending like they're working on improving the mode when it's obvious the mode is dead and was pretty much dead a month after release.
They got no part of it right. The PvE was a tedious, unrewarding, repetitive grind. On Normal it was laughable, you could just queue up the same line-up over and over regardless of the location or boss and just beat up everything, particularly with heal-based comps like Nature or Holy Humans. On Heroic you were force to queue blind into a boss fight the first time cause there was no way to know what you're building against at the end, so it just wasted your time, and the climb up to the boss was, guess what, also wasted time, completely unrewarding. And that's what you had to do to even enter PvP to get your stuff to a competitive level, and you better hope what you thought was competitive is actually competitive and not utter trash (would be real sad if someone worked on levelling their Murloc or Demon lineup, wouldn't it?). There was no universal currency so that if you got stuff for Y you didn't want you could turn it to X you wanted, so that was further wasted time. So all modes wasted your time and effort and prety much none of it was actually any fun. It was more fun to tinker with comps and lineups in your head and in the menu than to play any part of the game.
It was a failure from start to finish, good riddance.
As someone who has actually played a lot of Mercenaries and mostly enjoyed it, I have mixed feelings about this. I recently maxed out every single Merc, so with my saved packs and coins, I'm sure to collect and max out the final 6 Mercs. I will be very satisfied to have this collection completed. I am also feeling really glad I never spent any real money on this mode. I imagine a lot of people who bought those pre-order bundles are steamed right now. If the boss rush mode is fun, I'll still play it now and then. I will miss having new bounties to explore.
I'm a little torn between laughing and annoyance from this news. The laughing part is that we all knew this would happen some day, I just didn't expect it to be so soon. The annoyance is that if Team 5 didn't invest so many ppl in this mode, Constructed and other modes would have been better off, especially in a time where United in Stormwind was ruining Constructed. My assumption is that Mercs was bringing in probably 1% or less revenue so the Execs just killed it.
Now lets hope with Mercs out of the way, Team 5 can focus more on creating better constructed/bgs content AND FIXING THOSE DAMN BUGS!
They trying to milk this mode as hard as they can even before it can be a popular mode. What a joke.
I hope this turns their sight to make another mode, maybe tournament mode, as players have asked for this in a long time.
Father, is it over?
Mercs failed but at least Mercs will be removed from the main menu soon.
I would love to remove them for the client and thus save space on my device
There was never a real good-faith effort here, but I don't think that this is necessarily the fault of the devs (though I'm not in the room with them so I can't tell). It's not merely that the launch was a blatant insult -- not half-assed but an actual grim joke with incompleteness, bugs, and some terrible pro-monetization design choices dominating the experience. It was the fact that the devs had a muted response to the lack of enthusiasm from a lot of the fans -- and streamers. Tolerating that kind of negative feedback suggests that the monetezation model, the thing that had to be killed for the mode to work, was the very thing that management wanted the most.
At this point, the most reasonable thing for the team to do is to make everything in the game as accessible as possible and use the mode as a sweetner for HS content. (Actually, the most reasonable thing for them to do is to refund people's purchases, but since this was a low-key scam from the beginning, that's not happening.) The mode still has potential as a sandbox that can help showcase new characters and themes the main game wants to explore.
But its most likely future is to be quietly discontinued and pulled from the client over time.
Traditionally Blizzard games stood out in terms of polish, but that was missing from Mercenaries. As you said, the launch was very incomplete, with many tasks not working as stated in their descriptions. Some little annoyances were never fixed, such as bounties that require you to visit healers or buff nodes not showing a completion notice until after the next fight, even though they can be completed if you navigate to them manually.
The recently extended areas seem to lack any original design, just putting dragons in all of them. There is no storytelling going on there, it's just filler. Even if they didn't have a budget for designing entirely new enemies, they could have remixed existing ones in more interesting ways.
I don't know if the devs were severely understaffed and therefore only able to focus on the bare essentials, or if they were assigned to a project they didn't really care about, but it is clear that they didn't give it the attention to detail that players expected. I think it could be the latter (maybe not for all devs, but for some of them) because the entire mode's existence feels like it was motivated by monetization rather than by a creative drive.
And that monetization was done terribly. Everything was way overpriced, even relative to other Hearthstone modes. The algorithm for pack contents was too complicated for the average player to grasp: it is completely counter-intuitive that you can get a portrait of a certain rarity instead of a merc card, just because only one slot per pack has duplicate protection. The issue of useless coins was addressed way too late and the solution was much too stingy. Even though I put quite a few hours into Mercenaries, I never felt like spending money on it after the first few days, because everything they were selling felt like a terrible deal.
I think it's a pity, since its core mechanics are enjoyable. The main problem is not there, but in its poor execution.
Regarding a lack of enthusiasm from streamers though, the mode just isn't great streaming material, so I think that was always going to happen. You can't really grasp what is going on in PvP unless you know the abilities of every merc by heart; this was a problem even for players and it would be worse for a viewing audience. Streaming PvE would be easier to follow, but not varied enough to keep viewer attention for long.
Let me put on my tinfoil hat and say that Blizzard was like Japanese industry of the 70's and 80's, taking existing material and improving it -- not creative or imaginative in a broad sense, but giving cliches and tropes that high-sheen polish that outshined the competition . . .
. . . and that changed after the buyout.
Blizzard was some combination of a) the management and b) the employees and both of those groups have changed lineups. It would have been surprising if things hadn't changed, tbh. But the old-school Blizzard that had so much good time management that their high-polished games had the time for the most random-ass easter eggs imaginable is way out of our rearview mirror.
Emphasis added. This is the ultra-mega version of that lack of polish: feedback.
Just like Hearthstone's "history bar," Mercenaries didn't tell you shit. It explained nothing, forcing you to scurry about online to grasp basic game mechanics, with your only recourse to sometimes be experimentation in a game that already taxed your time to nauseating heights. It was too slow to tolerate and too fast with issues that mattered with no respect for the information the players needed or wanted. Ignoring how many extra steps and issues the interface had in and of itself, the buffs/debuffs output format dragged over from HS was worse than inadequate and even when it "worked," useful information could flow right off the screen.
This wasn't a game that respected the game assets it presented to you, so why should you respect it?
Much like how Hasbro hates the idea of any sort of "community" being a part of its sales of Magic or D&D, video games producers, to a lesser extent hate any dependence on influencers or goodwill to sell their product. This is less fatal for a video game than for physical or social hobby games, but the rub is that Mercenaries was so egregiously bad for players that its awfulness poured over to the streaming experience and actually turned a positive resource into a negative. In fact, streamers that were interested in or liked the mode were more damning of it than those who hated it imo because their enthusiasm to understand it drove home the paucity of the content. Over and over again, people were claiming that they learned Mercenaries from Trump, which is a building-sized red flag for people who don't know anything about Trump.
And the only reason such a colossal fail makes sense was if Mercenaries was meant to be an addictive, abusive, unscrupulous appeal to the most vulnerable players possible such that the money gained from abusing the former would easily make up for the poor buzz of the half-assed "effort."
Mercenaries needed to fail. It could have failed in ways better for HS players, but it did need to fail asap.
Im not so sure we can pin that label on blizz's early years (prior to buyout).
The gaming sphere back in the 90s was mostly 2d side scrollers. If Im not mistaken warcraft 1 was the first really popular RTS made, and diablo 1 was pretty much the best, if not the first, game of that genre in the west. Blizz tends to innovate more often than copy.
The real reason for their success is because management wanted quality instead of quantity. They would've continued it too, if it weren't for a sudden shortsightedness on their management's part, and merged with activision. In hindsight any blizz fan would have call it bs, but back then when WoW was running high its likely they gambled that blizz would be the more successful of the two and eventually turn the tables.
Too bad. It could have been blizz-activision, managed by people that loves games, not its finance department. And now its gobbled up by an even more money-eyed taskmaster, its only a matter of time before blizz ceases to be.
I think Dune II was the game that put RTS on the map, certainly for PC players. While Warcraft does innovate upon that formula, it is clearly using that game's design as a starting point.
The first mistake is arguably deciding to build this within hearthstone's limited infrastructure, taking advantage of an already existing playerbase. The result is something that looks too flat, too ugly, and completely lacking in identity and design.
Compare this to arclight rumble. I think arclight is pretty much a response to mercs' failure as a mobile game. Its night and day between the two, even if both have the same monetization model.
Perhaps, even if cruelly, we can conclude that dying now is better than being a hollowed up shell waiting for its next update. If arclight turns out a success, it might even foreshadow hearthstone's own demise, or the inevitable hearthstone 2 within 5 years time.
While I agree with Mercenaries looking flat and barren, I'm not sure the engine is to blame for that. More is possible within the engine: classic Hearthstone boards are more lively than the Mercenaries board and diamond cards show that 3D character art is technically possible.
There were also advantages to putting Mercenaries in the same client, like lowering the barrier for people to try it out. And I think the character cross-promotion with the Barrens expansion was executed well.
It is good that they provide clarity about the future instead of letting it die silently. Also the final update looks pretty nice, so in that regard they're ending it on a high note.
What would Hearthstone 2 even be? If it's a graphical refresh with the same mechanics and cards, I'd welcome it. But if they restart from scratch, whether I'd make the jump would depend on how easy it is to build a new collection: I'm not eager to invest a lot of time and/or money in a new collection when there are so many other good games out there.
I only played mercenaries to get rid of the annoying quest when it was launched. There just wasnt any money to invest in another game mode.