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

GamesBeat: You always have these great songs in the trailers for the expansions and the adventures. I have to say, I got that Karazhan song stuck in my head ever since it came out. Who does those songs?

Thompson: That’s a very fun process. Game development at the Hearthstone level is such a fun thing anyway, honestly, just by the nature of the game it is. But working with the cinematics group at Blizzard to develop those — that includes the songwriting and everything that goes with it – is some of the most fun. It’s a dedicated bunch of people who come from wide variety of talent bases.

You have people who were obviously the drama kids in school. You have the singers, the dancers, all this, and they found their way into cinematics or dev teams. This is a place where all those inner kids come out. There’s some fun stuff that comes from it. The original song for One Night in Karazhan was sung by a gentleman on the cinematics team named Roman Kenney, who is a very talented individual. He’s the west coast national karaoke champion, he will have you know. From the moment we heard it we were like, we already wrote the song, and it’s done? That sounds recorded and ready. We’re pretty excited about that.

It was written by James McCoy, the director of the cinematic initially, and performed by Roman Kenney the initial time. Both cinematics mainstays, guys who have been here a while, doing what they do best. You see the results. I can’t stop hearing it either. It’s my favorite soundtrack attached to a Hearthstone expansion or adventure.

GamesBeat: The chess event was a cool encounter. It tweaked Hearthstone into a different game. Will we see more content like that in adventures in the future?

Brode: Once upon a time, that was what we thought adventures might be. We prototyped some pretty crazy adventures that used the Hearthstone UI [user interface], but not its rule set. The first one of those I think was in League of Explorers, the mine cart mission, where your cards were move left or duck or blow up the mine shaft. We’re looking for ways to explode out what’s possible in adventures.

Chess is exciting, because we have Pat Nagle working on it, who designed the original encounter in World of Warcraft. It was fun for him and Peter Whalen, the lead designer on Karazhan, to get together and re-envision what that might look like for a card game.

Above: Checkmate.

Image Credit: GamesBeat

GamesBeat: The adventures have always had these staggered releases. It puts us this weird spot right now where we have some of the cards, but we don’t have a full picture of where the game is going to be. People are making decks that are fun but may not be viable when other cards come out. Do you plan to rethink this kind of release, or do you like the way it slowly introduces cards?

Brode: We rethink everything we’re doing constantly. There are pros and cons to a lot of stuff. One con, as you say, it’s going to be a while before the set is fully released. But one of the pros there is that some of these cards wouldn’t get any time in the spotlight. But since there’s a week to explore just these 11 or so cards, they’ll get a lot of time to be fully explored. There was a time in Blackrock Mountain, the first week, when there weren’t many cards released, but Gang Up was one of them. It was a field full of mill Rogues for one week. It was pretty fun. It was different.

This week we’re seeing people start to experiment with these decks. Some extra tools are coming on line over the next few weeks. But we’re already starting to see what those decks might end up looking like over time. It’s an exciting time where things are changing every week. What the game looks like this week is different from what it’ll look like next week and the week after that and the week after that. That’s a fun time in the game. Right now the pros are pretty exciting for this approach. But we’re certainly thinking about other approaches we could be taking.

Thompson: I jokingly, with a group of guys, referred to the adventure week as the speed round for the meta. The meta changes so often that you’re only building things in reaction to what you play against, in an attempt to inject your own voice into that meta and have some fun with it yourself.

GamesBeat: Talking about the meta, do you have a goal with Karazhan? Did you have a goal? Did you want to slow the game down? Do something with specific classes?

Brode: We think about tools. The goal is that the meta changes over time. As we saw with Whispers of the Old Gods, there were new decks popping up in even in the last month. We saw Yogg token Druid. We saw OTK [one turn kill] Warrior become popular. Dragon Warrior got a lot of play all of a sudden. That shift over time is very interesting. It happens organically when we put out new cards, but once the meta settles, now there’s an opportunity for players who understand the meta, understand what might be good against that particular meta, to come out way on top by developing brand new decks.

Our goal is to create a lot of tools and lay the groundwork for new deck archetypes, and then see what players do as far as whether they think it’s powerful. In general, the card game meta shifts in speed. When Whispers of the Old God came out we saw a lot of Paladin, some slower decks. It sped up after that. Over time things will slow down and speed up and slow down and speed up. It’s just the way the meta works. Depending on what’s good, other decks will end up being a little bit better or worse.