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.

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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.

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?

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.

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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?

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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.

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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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.

GamesBeat: It’s something you hear a lot, that people think sometimes that the meta is too fast and it’s been too fast for a while. Do your stats back up that perception?

Brode: It changes. There were times where Face Hunter was very good. Undertaker Hunter back in the day was very strong. Those kinds of decks were very fast. The game isn’t necessarily quite as fast as it has been. To me, the speed isn’t the most important metric. What’s important is how many archetypes people are playing. Is there a wide variety of styles of gameplay?

I was just watching the EU preliminaries this weekend. [Professional player] Dr. Hippie didn’t lose a match. He was playing a tempo Warlock deck, a zoo deck essentially. He was playing Renolock, I think? And Yogg token Druid. I think troll Warrior? It may have been a C’Tthun Warrior. I can’t remember. But he was playing a wide variety of styles of decks. Six-O is rated the number one player in the world right now on Gosu Gamers. He was playing Anything Can Happen Paladin, a very combo deck. Freeze Mage, I believe.

We’re seeing all kinds of decks, all kinds of styles. Even decks people think are kind of tempo-based or aggressive decks play very differently from one another. Warrior tempo decks play very differently from Mage tempo decks. That’s cool too. There’s a lot of variety right now. Over time things change. We aren’t seeing so much control from players who are doing incredibly well in tournaments. Maybe things are shifting in that direction.

GamesBeat: With The Grand Tournament and League of Explorers, we saw a lot of new mechanics introduced: Joust, Discover, and Inspire. Was there a conscious decision to slow down on introducing new mechanics?

Brode: Depends on how you define mechanics. A mechanic, the way most people think about it, is a shared thing that a lot of cards are doing. Discover, lots of cards use the Discover keyword. But for most of the development of League of Explorers, those cards just said “Look at three random spells and choose one to add to your hand.” If we shipped it like that, it wouldn’t have felt so much like we added a mechanic in that sense. Even though functionally it would have been the same. But we have been doing cycles of cards, like forbidden, where there’s five cards that all have the same type of effect.

The Cthun mechanic is brand new. The portal mechanic is a new mechanic with Karazhan. With Karazhan, there are 45 new cards, and really 45 new mechanics. A lot of great new stuff. The menagerie stuff going on with the curator is a new thing. We’ve never done the type of deck-building hook for burgle-focused decks like we’ve done with Ethereal Peddler. We’re definitely supporting lots of new deck archetypes, trying out lots of new card designs. When it makes sense for us to add a new keyword or a very obvious cycle of cards beyond 55 or so cards in a set, we’ll do that. We’re not afraid to do that. But it hasn’t been what the set has needed, to have such a bold keyword in that way.

GamesBeat: The only difference is that those keyword cards can have their own synergies as a group. We had all the Battlecry decks and the Deathrattle decks. We haven’t yet seen “give +1/+1 to a discover card,” but you could do it.

Brode: You’re right. When you categorize things you can play off of them. But also, there’s other benefits to keywords. Once you read one card with discover on it — maybe the first time it doesn’t make sense, but once you’ve played it, you understand that discover is “look at three cards and choose one for your hand.” Now every future time you look at one of those cards, it parses very simply. You know exactly what it does with way less words.

It allows us to do more complicated stuff like Ivory Knight in Karazhan, which now has Discover plus a lot of other text that changes the way you think about discover. There are other benefits to that as well. But I don’t think every set needs for us to do a bold keyword.

GamesBeat: How is the Wild format doing? Has it been attracting the player base you’ve hoped for?

Brode: Yeah, I think — it shows promise. As things rotate out, it’ll have such a huge card pool for deck builders. There will be tons of crazy things you can do there. But even with two sets’ difference, we’re still seeing a lot of people playing wild. I’ve seen comments from people saying they keep matching the same person. That’s actually very uncommon. There’s lots of people playing wild, lots of unique decks. You could easily queue up in wild and play new opponents all day.

GamesBeat: Going back to Karazhan, do you have a favorite card from the expansion?

Thompson: For nothing more than as a player, I’m very art- and vibe-driven, big surprise, my favorite is probably Kara Kazam. I like the vibe of summoning up this enchanted, in this case, plate or cookware or broom or candles or teapots and whatnot. That room, that whole part of the wing, is one of my favorites. As far as individual cards that’s my favorite. If it were just vibe-based anything about Karazhan, I’d have to say it’s the opera house. That brought me right back to that raid we all knew and loved. I was excited from both a developer and a player perspective about all the different cards and interactions we were able to pull off in that wing. It made me feel very much at home, and surprised and excited again, as if for the very first time.

Brode: I’m super-excited about Barnes.

GamesBeat: Barnes is the correct answer!

Brode: It’s super-exciting. There are tons of crazy stuff that comes to mind. I love building crazy decks. There’s the dream of building a deck with just Y’Shaarj and Barnes and a bunch of spells. Turn four, you get a 1/1 Y’Shaarj and close out your Y’Shaarj and get just a horrible army showing up on turn four. But also including it in deathrattle decks and getting a 1/1 Cairn Bloodhoof or Sylvanas Windrunner seems nutso to me. I’m excited about all these different ways it can be used.

I also just love — that moment when you’re playing in Karazhan and Barnes is announcing the next play. Your whole raid is waiting for the curtains to lift. That, to me, is what crystallized WoW raiding for me, because I had so much built up anxiety and excitement. When the spotlight comes down in Hearthstone and he goes, “Behold! Tonight, a tale of true terror!” It just gives me all those emotions back again. I love it.