Blizzard talks crafting Hearthstone’s Karazhan, Purify anger, and Arena’s future

Blizzard’s party almost crashed before it started, but communication saved the day for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft’s latest adventure.

One Night in Karazhan is rolling out now. It’s a series of fights against computer-controlled opponents that come out weekly, with the final wing becoming available on September 2. Most important for fans, beating those bosses unlocks new cards. Not only do they give players something new to play with, but these adventures can introduce new strategies and techniques to the leader in the $1.2 billion digital card game market.

But the launch of Karazhan encountered the controversy surrounding a single card, Purify. Many fans were hoping that the Priest class, which currently struggles to compete in most formats, would get some help. Instead, it got one of the worst cards the game has seen. Blizzard actually responded to the complaints by apologizing and promising to remove Purify from rotation in the Arena format, which has players pick random cards to create decks. The response lightened tensions between Hearthstone’s creators and its community, but some still worry about the game’s direction for the future.

GamesBeat interviewed Hearthstone lead designer Ben Brode and art director Ben Thompson last week, shortly after the launch of the first wing of Karazhan. We discussed the Purify controversy, how Blizzard came up with the disco-Karzhan theme, and changes we might be seeing to the Arena format in the future.

Above: One Night in Karazhan is one happening party.

Image Credit: Blizzard

GamesBeat: The Purify situation was interesting. You guys had your response to it, and it seemed to go over well with the community. Did the initial anger catch you off guard?

Above: Purify.

Image Credit: HearthPwn

Ben Brode: Once it started happening, it made sense to me. In hindsight, we made some mistakes. It was the kind of thing where because we released Purify last, at the point players were most excited about seeing a Priest card they felt was obviously going to change Priest’s face a little bit — it was kind of the perfect storm of both releasing Purify at the wrong time, maybe, and revealing it in a way that amped up emotions about it. But once we saw people’s responses, I think we should have realized what was happening, what kind of environment we should have been ready for with the announcements. We learned a lot with this.

GamesBeat: What was the lesson? What would you do differently?

Brode: Specifically about the Karazhan cards — I do think some of the Karazhan cards are either neutral and potentially good for Priest, and some of the Priest cards are powerful. Priest of the Feast is a pretty powerful Priest card. But they aren’t obviously or splashily powerful. When looking at them, people don’t come away the impression that, oh crap, Priest is going to be insane after this.

In that environment, where things are kind of subtly maybe powerful, and the hole they’re digging out of — that’s what players believe they need. Showing off a card that’s trying to do something else for Priest ended up, in hindsight, engendering some unhappiness. That’s one thing we learned. If we’re going to do “purely fun” cards that are focused on a different audience than the competitive audience, make sure we have splashy, obviously powerful stuff in the set to go with it. That’s harder in an adventure where we have less cards.

Maybe we don’t do so much of that for the classes that feel like they’re at the bottom of the power level, for those decks. We had already identified that we needed to do some work with Arena balance, and we continue to work on that. That’s an important thing for the Hearthstone community and for us.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting that you bring up Arena balance. It seems like it’s becoming difficult to balance Arena and Standard at the same time. Do you have any idea what changes you might make?

Brode: We talked a bit about — right now there’s a bit of pressure from different sides. Rarity means a lot in our game. It determines how often a card shows up in the Arena, how you can craft a golden version of it. If it’s an expansion, it has to do with how often you see it in packs. For Arena, there’s also the number of cards we’re releasing into the card pool. Each individual card is making a smaller impact in the arena. For us to make radical balance changes there, we need more tools.

One tool we’re talking about right now is potentially giving ourselves the ability to raise or lower the drop rates of individual cards. Right now we only have the tools to turn it to 0 or 100. With Purify, we removed it entirely from the Arena. All the C’Thun cards, same thing. But giving us some slight tuning over that might let us keep up with cards in the Arena, but make sure that for the best classes, their best cards show up less often. For the worst classes in the Arena, the best cards show up more often.

GamesBeat: So the days of getting constantly destroyed by Flamestrike might be over for me?

Brode: Well, it’s actually also going to be — do we make Arena standard? Do we experiment with crazy formats? Maybe this weekend it’s all Goblins vs. Gnomes cards in the Arena. In general, we could be experimenting more with the Arena. This is a tool that gets us a bit closer to that.

Above: A rare sight for Mages in Arena.

Image Credit: Heather Newman

GamesBeat: The Karazhan theme is interesting. We’re used to seeing old raids from World of Warcraft get turned into these adventures, but well also have this whole party disco flair thrown in there. How did that take on the idea come around?

Ben Thompson: Karazhan has always been one of our favorites. Back when we started talking about the idea of adventures for Hearthstone, how they’re centrally located in the game as a hole and break down with a set to an adventure — the idea of using raids and dungeons from WoW speaks to our player base on a wide variety of levels. That was one of the first ones brought up. The fact that everyone has such strong emotional ties to that specific raid — we really want to get this right. Let’s look at this more and find out what the best way to go about it is.

As it turns out, the timing of this in conjunction with the movie and WoW and all these different things wasn’t set up or staged in any way. It just happened that this came out right after the movie, so we have a player base in WoW that knows it as a haunted ghost mansion. You have a movie-going crowd that sees it as this tower of a lone mage that’s not haunted – it’s a central focus for power and portals. And we’re introducing a third tier into that system, which is, let’s go all the way back. Let’s not go a little bit back, like the movie. Let’s go all the way back to where it justifies, in our minds at least, and as it turns out our players as well — what kind of tower has an opera house in it? What kind of tower has a ballroom with animated plates and silverware? Why do we need all this stuff in a tower where one guy lives, the most powerful mage in all the land? Except maybe there’s a time when he wasn’t the only one in the tower. Maybe this was meant to be a focus point for all the socialites and powerful individuals in Azeroth. Portals and magic and everything came later, but that magic was put to a different use in its youth. It was an exciting idea.

As we started talking more about the ways we could handle this in such a way that it would reverently refer to what, again, is one of our favorite raids and the players’ favorite raids, but do it in a way that was tongue in cheek, ultimately very Warcraft and very Hearthstone. The very irreverent way we tend to approach most of our topics. A party thrown in the ‘70s with all the vibe that comes from such a shindig really put a smile on our faces and got us excited. The concept meetings got longer and longer. The discussions about how we could fit this in got more and more fun. We knew there had to be something here, something we could build into what I feel is my favorite adventure.

GamesBeat: I remember when Karazhan, the raid, came out. Everybody loved it, but there was some talk from the lore people – why would there be a ballroom and an opera in here?

Thompson: Now they have their answer!