Hearthstone's Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig provided some insight onto the popular topic of the much desired Elusive keyword in Hearthstone.
For those not in the know, Elusive is an unofficial keyword that has been proposed since the early days of Hearthstone and is used as an unofficial keyword. Elusive is meant to replace the effect text "Can't be targeted by Spells or Hero Powers", which can be found on cards such as Faerie Dragon and Winged Guardian.
Back in a developer AMA in 2014, Ben Brode mentioned that Shroud (the same word used in Magic the Gathering for a similar effect), Untargetable, and Ethereal were all discussed as being potential "Elusive" keywords and it was a case of being on "the razor's edge" when they decided not to give the effect a unique word. Mike Donais was the next developer to go into detail on the keyword a little more than a year ago in the 2019 August AMA. With that being ancient history at this point though, Elusive always being a popular topic in the community, and there being some good content, here's the latest from the team and what Chadd had to say.
Quote From Chadd Nervig Let’s talk about why we do, and don’t turn some effects into keywords! It’s much more than just “do multiple cards use it”. The downsides of keywording are usually small. It’s not that it's “too confusing”; our players are smart. But it is something that players need to learn. That’s not a big downside, but it’s not zero.
The upsides vary dramatically between potential keywords.
- It saves card text space and reading space. Now, importantly, saving text space isn’t much of an upside on its own; to capitalize on that space, we need to have some designs that we want to do that make use of that space.
- It also lets us interact with it from other cards. We can make effects that draw cards with that keyword, or buff cards with that keyword, etc.
- There’s also a vague sort of “weight” that is implicitly given to a keyword, which can be good, if it’s fitting for the set.
Consider these upsides/downsides for Outcast. We’ll put it on a ton of cards. Lots of cards will have Outcast along with a bunch more text. We want to make cards that interact with it (“Draw an Outcast card.”). It also matches the expansion flavor (or class flavor in this case), and delivers on that in a meaty way. Small downside, huge upsides.
Compare that to something like Cleave. All of the fun designs involving Cleave that we’ve found are already doable in the card text space we have, and none interact with it from other cards. Same thing with Elusive. It’s only a small downside, but the upsides just aren’t there, at least not yet. We certainly might find those designs in the future, or feature them heavily in a fitting new expansion, and then it’ll be Cleave’s time (or Elusive’s). We’ll see!
Comments
You really couldn't find a way to make this point without using one of the most offensive words in the English language? Please be more considerate.
Okay okay, this is totally an explanation I can get behind: you know there are many cards, you know the community has been asking for it for a while, but his reason is clueless.
At this point, it is just a matter of time before it will happen, but for the meantime I satisfied with Celestalon's words.
This reminds me of the time when I was a new player and someone just straight up dropped Al’akir on me and I had the biggest “wtf” moment of my HS career.
I can totally understand how he feels about overcomplicating this whole keyword issue, and he actually gave a very legit answer that was not “players are too dumb to learn all the keywords”. Good on them.
Too much keyword is excaly the reason why I quitted Runeterra after several attempts.... Just can't get my heads around.
Runeterra has approximately 30 keywords that are non-trivial. I just looked up a list. And unlike Hearthstone, all you have to do is click on a card to get a full explanation of everything the card does, including seeing copies of cards it generates.
Hearthstone also has at least 30 non-trivial keywords (list here: https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Ability). And if we just go with raw number of keywords, including ones that are obvious from their name, Hearthstone has more than LoR. In addition, you cannot just click on a card in Hearthstone to find out what it does. A prime example of this is Elite Tauren Chieftains - "Give Both Players the Power to ROCK! (with a Power Chord card)." Wow, I'm so glad they included that parenthesis. That totally helps me know better what this card actually does.
If ETC were a Runeterra card, you'd be able to click on it, see explanations of everything it does, and also see copies of the Power Chord cards. Hearthstone gives zero explanation for what you're going to get.
I'll take LoR's way of handling things hands-down over Hearthstone's mysterious voodoo. Massively easier to understand overall than Hearthstone is. And if you're ever confused, all you have to do is click and read. If you're ever confused with Hearthstone, your only recourse is to go look it up on a fansite, because the game client offers no help whatsoever for explaining the card text. Literally zero.
This downside seems so negligible. A 10 second google search would fix this.
Even less, just hover over a card.
He did say it was a small downside, and I agree with him it is not zero. For experienced players who already know all the keywords and mechanics it takes negligible effort to learn 1 more, but new players are met with 10 keywords in the basic set alone, and that did not include other common keywords like deathrattle, stealth, discover, immune, outcast, overload, combo, choose one, secret; plus however many set-specific keywords there are at the time; plus mechanics like armour, transform and weapons that are all simple but still need learning what exactly they do.
Each individually is trivial, but when there's that many at once there is no hope they all stick in your head straight away, so while card space isn't an issue it might as well just be written out.
Hello, it's not a 10 second google search, it's a 3-second hovering over a card!
But otherwise that last paragraph makes a lot of sense. This is a much better explanation than ones given in the past and i'm a lot more willing to accept it, even though i would stil really like a keyword.
I don't disagree with you, but I do think having to Google how something works is bad game design. They could easily get everyone on board with the change, but I respect their design decision.
The point is the information will still be in the card, you will just need to hover over a card with the keyboard..
Idk why they don't keyword as much as possible, in computer science there's a principle that everything you do a lot needs to be a function/method/constant.
And they are not going by that logic.. They probably assign it as a keyword in the code but just don't write it, same for enrage.
I've been out of the Hearthstone loop for a long time. I was just in a game of Tavern Brawl where my opponent kept randomly getting Spellburst units. I hovered them, and I clicked them, and generally did every permutation of this I could come up with, and nowhere was I rewarded with an explanation of what Spellburst actually does. I did figure it out when he played a spell and BAM the effect happened. But the game client never explained the keyword at all, despite my efforts to make it do so.
Yes, but remember that this is a *game*, which means it has to remain accessible to a wide number of potential players. Do you think a large number of people would learn computer science terminology just for fun?
It's not a terminology I am talking about, it's the prencipe of encapsulation.
The hs team have programmers they are the ones that need to use those principles, not the players.
Well, as I said they probably do but the people responsible for the card text should as well, it's neater to have stuff categorized, cause like they said it let's them do interactions with it.. Surprised they didn't keyworded it back in unguru with the adapt keyword.
Also spell burst is not explained good in game? I will check it next time.