Hearthstone’s designers on The Grand Tournament and the future danger of too many cards

Above: Blizzard’s Hearthstone will stick with the heros it has for the time being.

Image Credit: Blizzard

GamesBeat: Will there someday be a problem where there are so many cards that it becomes overwhelming? Is that something you think about now? Or is that a can you kick down the road?

Brode: It’s not a problem today with Grand Tournament, but I do think it’s a problem that is starting to form. It’s something we need to figure out a solution to in the shorter term. We’re actively discussing it. One of the biggest things we’re working on with the team is trying to solve problems like this. We have to solve it in the fairly short term.

GamesBeat: In my experience with the Pokémon card game as a kid, at first the expansions were exciting, but it eventually got to a point where, oh, this is just another expansion and I don’t know what’s happening anymore.

Brode: That’s the kind of problem we’re going to solve.

GamesBeat: It seems like you have a system here of going between expansions and Adventures. What are the different design challenges between those two productions?

Donais: For expansions, what we consider the normal way to release cards, you have to have a lot of different cards. You need to design cards that are for a lot of different types of players. We have different classes of players we identify. We try to make sure there’s stuff for players who like really big, exciting stuff, who like the combos. For new players we try to fit in simple stuff. With the Adventures, they’re a lot more complex to make. You still need to mix up the meta-game just as much as with a big expansion, which means with 30 cards you need to hit all the exciting points you previously hit with 120 or 130 cards. That’s a big challenge. Those 30 cards need to be fine-tuned right near the top of the curve, for most of them. In addition, you have to make all these exciting missions. In each one you have to think up the idea for why it’s cool or interesting, how it matches flavor-wise, how it’s going to scale to heroic, how it’s going to provide a big challenge at heroic but not too big a challenge. It’s a lot of extra tuning and design that goes into those dungeon adventures.

Above: The Blackrock Mountain Adventure.

Image Credit: GamesBeat

GamesBeat: Are you guys surprised at all by the rapid success of Hearthstone? Do you think it’s taken off faster than you anticipated?

Brode: Blizzard is notorious for taking experiences that are really fun, but maybe not accessible to the mass market, and bringing them to a huge new audience. When I was working on Hearthstone years ago, we knew we had something fun, and the goal was to make it accessible so that so many people could enjoy it. Once we got to that level of polish and felt like we had that, I felt like, yeah, this could be humongous. Throughout the company, though — before you play Hearthstone it’s hard to realize how it’s different, how it’s a really fun, accessible game, but still has all the depth that’s scared people off from the genre in the past. It wasn’t like the company knew for sure that this was going to be huge. But as soon as people got their hands on it and played it, they realized, oh, yeah, this is the super fun experience I wanted from card games. This could be a big thing. That’s probably why we went to so many new platforms. We wanted to try and give this game to as many people as possible, because we knew how fun it was.

GamesBeat: How did you come to the Grand Tournament theme? I liked it, because I played a lot of World of Warcraft in The Wrath of the Lich King era, and the Argent Tournament was one of my favorite patches. How did you come across this as a theme for the card game, though?

Brode: We knew at first that we wanted to do an expansion based around making your hero more powerful and interacting with your Hero Power in new and exciting ways. Given that lens, we talked about a lot of potential new directions for expansions. Somebody threw out the idea of the Argent Tournaments. Because that era of WoW focused so much on you as a champion and going up through the ranks and being a badass knight, that felt like it could map really well to the mechanical theme we wanted to pursue. Once we had those things lined up, we tried to figure out the right way to Hearthstone-ify the theme of the tournament. Really focusing on the knight tournament vibe, eschewing the horrible “Lich King is coming to destroy us all” last stand thing. We focused in on the fun parts of having a big festival and competing for glory without muddying the theme for what is basically just a set of cards. It sells a vibe, but doesn’t necessarily tell a story.

Above: Got $10? You can get a new hero skin in Hearthstone.

Image Credit: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat

GamesBeat: We’ve recently seen the idea of introducing alternate hero portraits. Are we going to get more of those in the future?

Brode: Right now we’re discussing the feedback we’ve gotten from the community about the new heroes. I would be surprised if we didn’t do more of those. They’re fun and we have some cool ideas. But we don’t have any announcements right now about those.

GamesBeat: What’s feedback been like on those?

Brode: People have enjoyed them, but I think we’re discussing right now whether we can find ways to make them more enjoyable to more people. I’m not involved in those conversations, so I can’t say for sure.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else about the future of Hearthstone you can tease us on?

Brode: Ah … right now the future of Hearthstone is mostly seeing what comes out of the madness of the ladder and the new Grand Tournament cards. People are trying so many different decks, so many cool new cards, that it’s impossible to tell how it’s all going to shake out. We’re excited to see how it all plays out.