Blizzard has announced that Duels is being removed from Hearthstone. Goodbye Beta tag...
The removal of the mode will take place during a client update in April 2024, which should align with the release of the next expansion. They will be trying out some Duels treasures in Arena in an upcoming patch, which should be an interesting turn of events for the Arena mode.
Duels made its original debut during the Scholomance Academy era of Hearthstone with the mode launching on November 17, 2020. Featuring the beloved dungeon run-style mechanics where players build a deck and add new cards to it throughout their runs, and those oh-so-powerful heroes and hero powers, the mode gave Hearthstone players a different way to play with their cards. The largest issue Blizzard ran into the mode was a lack of ways to monetize it, which is likely a big reason behind development of the mode being previously halted.
This is Hearthstone's third mode to be discontinued, after Classic's recent removal following the addition of Twist, and the support for Mercenaries ending almost a year ago. Here's what Blizzard had to say about the sunsetting of Duels.
Quote From Blizzard As we think about the future of Hearthstone and where the team can best focus their efforts, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue support for the Duels Mode. We do not have plans for any further scheduled updates for Duels, and the Mode itself is scheduled to be removed from the Hearthstone client in April 2024.
This change will allow us to shift our resources to where we feel they will have the most impact, including Traditional Hearthstone, Battlegrounds, and more. To that end, Battlegrounds Duos is scheduled for an upcoming Battlegrounds patch, and we’re trying out some Duels Treasures in our next Arena season—more details soon.
We want to thank all our passionate Duels fans for every pile of loot, treasure, and hard-fought victory you’ve collected along the way. It’s been a heroic run, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Rest in peace, Duels. Your fate was undeserved. Allow us to mourn the death of the mode with the cinematic trailer that marked its release.
What About the Achievements?
Quote From Ridiculous Hat It might be an odd question @RidiculousHat but do you know what will happen to the duels achievements? I've been trying to get them all. Is it a case any I don't get will remain as not done in the client forever (so I should try and get the last 12-0 before apirl)
i don't know but will ask
Could Twist be Next?
Quote From Ridiculous Hat If twist doesn't perform better in the future is this something people are going to have to worry about there too? Seems super risky to even bother investing into those bundles and packs when the play rate is equally low.
tbh i have no idea what i could say in response to this that wouldn't be overanalyzed. there are some plans for twist, but also we definitely understand there's going to be a hit to player trust today. i don't think i can reasonably counteract that in a tweet or two
our goal with this move is to make sure we can give better support to the modes that are currently in the client. i hope we can accomplish that goal, but i wouldn't expect you to feel great about this answer today. does that make sense?
Comments
It might never happen, but I say bring back Solo Adventures!
Oh yeah, I could definitively say and almost be willing to commit to shoe eating if it does happen, that solo adventures are gone for good.
Blizzard always talked about how much work they took and how they have no replay value. Dungeon Run was a solution to that, and Duels was a way to improve upon Dungeon Run. RIP
Which is a damn shame. World of Warcraft has had a similar problem where every expansion the old expansion's stuff is all completely irrelevant which leads to the time in development being too high for the use of it all. With Dragonflight they changed that mantra and instead are creating systems that will be used for years to come which has put so much good into the game.
I think Hearthstone should revisit what a solo adventure is. Why do we need them to be completely voice acted? Why do we need special effects for key moments with a lore character? I can say without a doubt that players would be happy, maybe not all, and probably not Zeddy (<3), with just getting some new AI to play against that featured other characters. Then if you do want to put in the effort of voicelines and animations, sell the damn heroes as playable heroes! Hero Skins must still sell well for there to be so many options, so double up and use solo adventures as a way to showcase cool new hero skins (alongside fun ai to fight). We don't need an adventure to progress some unique Hearthstone story. Go take World of Warcraft's Zul'Aman and create a deck for each of the bosses - you probably already have rights to use the existing art for them. Done.
One of the few things keeping RegisKillbin connected to Hearthstone was his enjoyment of Duels; will this cause him to leave completely? He rarely has content for it beyond new-card reviews and the opening week...mostly been doing Marvel Snap stuff. I really enjoy watching him, even if I don't play Snap anymore, but we'll be one step further apart if he no longer plays Hearthstone *shrugs*
Regis has been openly antagonistic toward Blizzard (in his diplomatic, affable Regis way) for a very long time now. I don't think either party would consider it to be the end of the world if they just decide to go their separate ways.
It would be a huge loss to the community to have a positive force like Regis being completely gone from the game.
I hope Blizzard can figure something out. Dungeon Run PvP was a very cool mode and I genuinely had fun playing with it over the years. If they did something with it as a Twist format for a month (special heroes + hero powers), or if they do experiment more with Arena, I think that's time well spent and it consolidates the player base more which means better queues across the field.
What happened to Hearthstone being this platform for so many different ways to play with the game? The loss of Classic was tragic, though they should have accelerated the timeline of era releases instead of never touching it. Classic makes a good Tavern Brawl though, and works way better as a "this shows up as a 1 week thing" occasionally instead of being permanently available. Mercenaries was another huge loss, the mode had a lot of potential but failed to deliver in so many ways. Mercenaries would be removed from the client too if it wasn't for the simple fact they actually sold players content for the mode.
I wonder if Duels never received content for sale because they too weren't sure about the long-term viability of the mode. It's been quite some time since Blizzard has pushed a relevant update to it, so it's not like the writing hasn't been on the wall for a while now.
We used to get some great viewership on Duels content. The mode was clearly doing well at different points, but maybe it just wasn't doing good enough for Activision.
RIP
Regis is fantastic when he's having fun. But when he's not having fun, that also shows in his work and I just feel sorry for the guy, as he's such a likable character. So I hope that he's able to find fun in Hearthstone in the future, but doesn't stick with the game when he cannot.
Classic could also make a decent Twist for a month. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet.
Mercenaries is in kind of the opposite situation as Duels: because it shares almost nothing with other modes, it takes up a lot of space in download and installation, but it also doesn't require much maintenance because no changes to shared resources can break it.
My guess is that they already have a plan to drop Mercenaries from the client and are just waiting a while to announce it, to soften the blow to people who put a lot of time and/or money into it.
Live service games in general are having a hard time: a combination of the market being saturated, player preferences changing and rising costs. It reminds me of the time when every few months another "WoW killer" was announced and few lived beyond the initial hype. There is only so much space for games that require a lot of time investment; the fact that one game is successful doesn't mean that a similar game will bring similar success.
What I think happened is that they fired a number of developers last year to cut costs and now they have to make cuts in the stuff they can deliver because they're short-staffed.
I love it, lots of quotes! Let's dive in.
This would have been such an easy thing for them to do for the "off season" that is happening right now for January before they bring in some new goodies for February. They could have done Classic + Naxx and it would have been a great way to kick off the year.
Removing paid content like that from players, especially in a card game, would be a huge slap in the face. If they offered refunds to BattleNet balance or just an equivalent in other Hearthstone stuff, I could see them being able to do it with less friction, but they have to take a loss in order to do it. I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
Destiny 2 infamously removed content from the game because of "hard drive space" with no optional way to get it back. If Blizzard wanted to take the smarter approach here, and make some new tech, maybe they could make Mercenaries an optional download (it's a lot of data, images, code) which would slim down the mobile install of the game.
One reason I don't see them doing that though is the people who will ask the same for Battlegrounds, but Battlegrounds being an active mode needs to be baseline for the ease of access, and because there's that 1% chance someone who doesn't care about it goes and plays it once because it was easy to do so and they end up spending money on it.
In a way though, I'd like to be wrong about that. Mercenaries has so much stuff in the client, it would certainly make all our datamining processes quicker without it there. But I'd rather it stay because I know people that still like to play it and I think that's awesome.
Oh yeah, I feel bad for the new model of games. It used to be that you'd launch a game, provide some support for it, and then it was done and you were either a great game or a bad game. But now everything from AAA needs multiplayer, needs a battle pass, needs microtransctions (even in single player games), and it just all feels so predatory. It forces everyone to stick to regular content releases which in some cases can lead to lower quality updates in games (honestly a lot of early PUBG felt lower quality and updating for the sake of updating).
Then you add in how players change overtime? Oof.
I am so thrilled to have never sunk time into another MMO during the early "WoW killer" days. Played all the betas, always went back to the real crack dealer and it looks like I wasn't wrong for doing so. It's not even that all those games were bad, some of them had great stuff in them, but they all ended up lacking content at the end of the day.
And that's my problem with battle passes. I know I'm not the target audience for a lot of games, I don't have the time like I used to, but damn do I hate how battle passes feel so essential to the experience. I like having some cool stuff and games and it seems like the coolest always comes from the passes and they just take such a massive time commitment to finish. If I had a dollar for every battle pass I haven't finished, I'd be able to buy a few more battle passes.
Isn't it insane how you can fire a dozen people, screw over the game hard enough to require cuts, but when you look at the overall picture if they cost the company 1.5 million a year and the game profits 50 million (totally making up numbers here) that higher ups see that as a positive savings? Everything always comes down to penny pinching in AAA because of the investors. Investment in game studios was one of the worst things to happen to the industry. Investment as a whole has ruined a lot of businesses and the quality of service they deliver to customers, I remember when you could get someone who actually spoke English on the physical phone with Amazon, but that's a topic for another time.
Thanks for the reply!
I'll switch to e-mail style quoting as well, as the formatted quotes are a pain to edit.
> I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
I think in this case "maintenance pressure" doesn't mean it's too hard, just that it eats up developer hours, which cost money. If so, both your and their explanation are different ways to describe the same problem. Apparently Duels wasn't being played enough to make it worth investing those hours there instead of elsewhere in the game.
Removing content is never popular with players, both from a personal perspective and from a preservation perspective. Despite that, it happens very regularly. I think they'll just wait until players get detached enough from their Mercenaries collection that they won't be as upset when it goes poof.
At least with Mercenaries, the lore impact is low, as most of the lore building was done with the Book of Heroes mini-adventures, which can remain in the game even if the Mercenaries mode disappears. From what I understand of the Destiny 2 situation (never played it, but I watch SkillUp's videos sometimes), there is important lore in the removed content that is now completely inaccessible to new players.
An optional download would be a great solution, but I don't expect them to implement this unless they get the feature almost for free because they already have the infrastructure. Hearthstone has some live content download support, but it still requires frequent client upgrades, so the system probably has some limitations.
Note that for apps on Apple's mobile store, it is forbidden to download executable code, probably as a measure to avoid code bypassing review. Therefore they could only make the data an optional download. As data is generally much larger than code, that wouldn't impact the goal of having a smaller download/install footprint all that much though.
The same still applies to modern live service games: even the ones that are good at launch struggle to provide enough content to retain players. To wean players off a game they're already invested in, the new game has to provide a much better experience than the old game; there is a huge barrier to entry.
Players spend more money in games that they spend more time in, so it makes business sense for companies to try and make players spend as much time as possible in their live service game. The battle pass is a way to buy player loyalty that the player is paying for; it's no wonder companies like them. But by optimizing the monetization of each individual game in this way, the market for live service games as a whole becomes worse, because players have no time left to play multiple games.
The problem is that investors expect not just profits, but growing profits, which is not sustainable. This is a wider problem and I think it will take a lot of time and probably a few collapses before people will learn to be satisfied with just steady profits instead of expecting exponential growth in every market.
Yes and no. Without investments, good AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't be possible either.
I believe this has already happened. When I click the Modes button, I can enter Arena or Duels, but the buttons for Mercenaries and Solo Adventures say "Download" as of a couple months ago.
Maybe this change only impacts mobile players?
Yup, and they removed ways to get items that are still useful in the game. Luckily, there is an alternative way to obtain exotics from the past, but it requires a potentially larger time sink than had the content remained in the game. It's possible they've adjusted it since 2021 though when I was last looking into obtaining stuff I was missing, so maybe it isn't as bad.
Yup, that's the exact reason! And it's a reason why some bugs can't be fixed via small hearthstone-provided updates. Blizzard has done a good job over the years though improving what they can and can't hotfix into the client, so that's a plus.
Yeah =(
We're in for an incredibly rude awakening when this becomes a universal truth. Steady profits are so healthy, as is single digit growth, but of course, greed takes over on the side of everyone and is the reason we can't have nice things. If you aren't making returns that are beating the market, you're effectively losing money. Magic fairy money at that.