Hearthstone is the latest success story for a studio that already had its share of them, but something about the free-to-play digital card game for PC and iPad (with iPhone and Android releases on the way) seems special.
Usually, Blizzard works on large, expensive, and epic games like World of Warcraft and Diablo III. But Hearthstone is making a huge impact of its own thanks to charm and engaging gameplay. It released its newest expansion, Goblins vs. Gnomes, earlier this month. It added 143 new cards, vastly changing the status quo.
To discuss the new expansion and the general success of Hearthstone, we talked to two of the game’s designers from Blizzard, Ben Brode and Mike Donais.
GamesBeat: How did the Goblins vs. Gnomes idea come about?
Ben Brode: Well, we love goblins and gnomes. Eric Dodds, the game director for Hearthstone, was actually the first designer on World of Warcraft. He ended up working on trade skills. He designed the engineering trade skill. He created goblin and gnome engineering and all those crazy items.
We were sitting around in the meeting room all writing ideas on the whiteboard, just pitching ideas back and forth, coming up with cool stuff, and somebody pitched goblins vs. gnomes. I wrote it on the whiteboard and looked over at Dodds, and I could just see his face light up. I said, we can stop now. We’re definitely making this expansion.
There was a lot of passion and excitement, both for being able to explore cards like the Goblin Shredder and other fun mechanical minions, and also just expanding the IP a bit. We got to make a bunch of new mechs, like the Snowchugger and the Annoy-o-Tron. We could explore deeper than we had with any previous content in Hearthstone.
GamesBeat: Considering the close proximity between this and the World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor launch, was there any pressure to do a Warlords-themed expansion?
Brode: In general, we feel pretty empowered. Blizzard is an awesome place to work, and one of the themes, I feel like, working on the Hearthstone team, is that we get to flex our creative muscles and try cool stuff. The whole company is excited about the team. I wouldn’t say that we get pressured into doing anything, really. We’re superexcited about Warlords, so we would be excited to explore the content and themes like that at some point, but I don’t feel pressure. Mostly I feel excitement from around the company.
Mike Donais: We just want to do what’s fun. We’re encouraged to do what’s fun. They trust us completely.
GamesBeat: Is it scary to release that many new cards at once, not knowing exactly what effect it might have once the masses get ahold of them?
Donais: I’d say more exciting than scary. Having all those new shifts to the meta is great. So many different new decks. You’re so excited. I wanna do this! I wanna do this! Lots of cool new stuff. Not too scary. Maybe early on, but as we progressed through the design, we got a handle on exactly how everything is going to go. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know exactly how players are going to use, but we hope that it’ll end up all right.
GamesBeat: Walk me through the life of a card. What comes first? Do you pick a character from the lore and try to think of a way that could be a card, or do you usually come up with a mechanic and then find a character for that?
Brode: We do it both ways, actually. We often will start with a list of things we definitely want to have in a set called Goblins Vs. Gnomes. We want a Goblin Shredder. We want some gnomish engineers and goblin engineers. We want a Madder Bomber. We think about how we could translate these ideas into cards.
But also we think about what are some cool mechanics for a set about goblins vs. gnomes? Let’s try making “mech” a thing. How do we design some cards that interact with mechanical minions? Spare Parts — that’s a cool idea. Let’s make some cards that interact with spare parts. How do we do that? So we come at it from both directions.
We also think about what tools we want to give players to be able to counter things, get things a bit under control. If Death Rattle becomes a huge thing, we want to have some answers to Death Rattle to put in your deck if you’re tired of getting your butt kicked by that particular thing.
GamesBeat: It does almost seem like a response to all the Death Rattles added in the Naxxramas expansion.
Brode: Really, we just want tools for every possible strategy. If you’re frustrated by secrets you could put in the Kezan Mystic. If you’re frustrated by beasts you can put in Hemet Nesingwary . Just adding a wide variety of tools is important.
GamesBeat: The nice thing about having a lot of cards now, there seems to be a counter to almost anything. It just comes down to what you’re going to make room for.
Brode: Right. Anticipating what kinds of decks are going to be popular at the rank you’re playing at is an important part of figuring out which card to put in your decks.
GamesBeat: It seems like for this expansion, you have things like the Spare Parts, cards that materialize depending on certain things. You have other cards that get buffed while they’re in your hand. It seems like you’re embracing the digital aspect of the game. You’re doing things that wouldn’t be possible in a regular card game.
Donais: We love doing stuff that isn’t possible in a regular card game. It lets us take advantage of our medium and get players excited about things they’ve never seen before. We tried it out first with Webspinner, one of the cards where you put a random beast in your hand. People seemed to love it, so we did a lot more of it in Goblins vs. Gnomes. This set naturally wants to have the random creature and minion mechanics. It was good for us to make sure that people love it and then just put a lot of it in. It’s been fun watching people and all their crazy videos and gameplays and playing with the cards. It’s worked out even better than we expected.
GamesBeat: It does seem like there’s a lot of new cards that have random elements. A lot of the ogres have 50/50 chances to do things. You have a card that’ll draw a card, and if it’s a minion it’ll turn it into a chicken. Do you think there could be a backlash against some of this added randomness, or does it still work with the meta?
Brode: We saw a bit of concern early on. Part of it is that it’s easy to think about randomness as a detractor from skill. Every time you lose and you perceive it to be from a random event, you feel like if there was less randomness, you would have won more often. That makes you think about randomness as a continuum with skill. It doesn’t actually quite work like that in practice. You can have games with low randomness and low skill, like tic-tac-toe, and you can have games with a high amount of randomness and also a very high amount of skill, like poker or Hearthstone. Those games, it’s not a continuum. You can have both. Games that have a lot of randomness, you have to think on your feet more.
I think in theory people were a little worried about the randomness in some of the cards, but now that they’re getting a chance to play with it, a lot of it is mitigatable. You play Bomb Lobber when they have one minion in play. It hits that one guy. It turned out not to be random at all. Playing around that randomness adds a lot of skill to the game. Now that people are out and playing with it, they’re really excited about it.
GamesBeat: Since the launch, not just of Goblins vs. Gnomes but the whole game, what card has proved the most controversial with the community, if there’s one that sticks out?
Brode: In general, whenever we have a really different, brand new mechanic, players don’t have anything to compare it to. Cards like Bolvar Fordragon, which is a really unique card design, where he gets stronger during the course of the game while he’s still in your hand, there’s nothing like that card. Players were very concerned that it wouldn’t be very powerful. Now that the game is out, people are seeing, okay, I understand why this card could be good. Just brand new card designs that explore brand new space, those have been fun to watch the community discuss whether they’re good or bad and then get a chance to play with them and see for themselves whether they think they can make those cards work.
GamesBeat: Do you guys look at your competition? Do you pay attention to any other digital card games?
Brode: We’re huge fans of card games. We play card games basically our whole lives here. It’s why we wanted to make Hearthstone. We’re always looking at things, enjoying mobile games, PC games, card games, all types.
GamesBeat: What do you think Blizzard has learned from Hearthstone’s success?
Donais: We learned a lot about going to other platforms. That’s something Blizzard hadn’t done before. We learned a lot about how you don’t have to have hundreds of people making a game, like World of Warcraft. Hearthstone started out with only 15 people, or even less. When it was launched into alpha we only had 15 people, anyway, which is amazing. It’s very successful, very rich, very fun.
GamesBeat: Would you say that the energy around Blizzard is maybe a bit renewed? It seems like you guys are riding high right now. You have Hearthstone becoming a hit. You’re announcing your first new IP in a while (Overwatch). You have the Warlords expansion, a bunch of other stuff. I’m sure it’s always busy there, but it seems like it’s a good time at Blizzard right now.
Brode: From my perspective it’s always been a good time at Blizzard. I’ve been here a while and it’s so exciting to be on the forefront of what I consider to be the best games, period. I’ve loved every single game we’ve released. I’ve played them all. Hearthstone is very exciting for me personally to be part of this current era of Blizzard gaming.
GamesBeat: Can you give me a favorite card of your from the expansion and why you think it’s useful?
Donais: One of my favorite cards — I like a lot of cards from the expansion, really love them. But one of my favorites is Recombobulator. He transforms a minion into another minion of the same cost. He’s really cool because you get all these crazy times when you feel really smart. I play this 5 cost guy, now he’s injured, I’m gonna transform him. You feel like, wow, now I got this awesome better guy, or I got a guy who’s even worse, but it’s always a surprise. I play him in the Priest deck sometimes, where you can Shadow Madness a guy and then transmogrify him to keep him. Lots of cool combos with him, lots of surprises. You always have to play around the new guy you get, which makes the game more skill-testing. It feels more clever.
Brode: One of my favorite cards is Quartermaster, actually. Paladins have this vibe of commanding an army. Luther is the commander of the Silver Hand. You have all these recruits, hoping they’ll be paladins one day. Now, with Muster for Battle and Quartermaster, it fulfills that fantasy even more. I love that feeling of putting a bunch of Silver Hand Recruits out and hoping they live to the next turn and then dropping Quartermaster. It’s so exciting.
GamesBeat: I made a list of the five cards that seem to be the worst in the expansion. Some of them, they have places where they’ll be useful, but I’d like to ask you guys if you could give me a scenario where the Target Dummy might be useful in a deck.
Brode: Oh, yeah. Imagine this. Target Dummy, Target Dummy, Mimiron’s Head, Conceal. Boom. Game.
Donais: Suddenly you’ve got enough damage. You play Cold Blood, boom, opponent’s dead.
GamesBeat: I thought I was gonna get you guys with that. Imagine you guys had to make another card game for something that wasn’t a Blizzard IP. What would be your dream collectible card game to design?
Brode: My friend, Hearthstone is the dream card game for me. Back in the genesis of Hearthstone, we tried, I don’t know, tens or hundreds of designs. We tried things that were evolving fortresses and locations from Warcraft. We tried games that were just hero versus hero, no minions involved. We tried so many designs. I really do feel like Hearthstone is the best that we tried. Part of the fun of announcing and releasing Hearthstone is that I actually get to go home and play it, because I love it. I don’t think that there’s any version we could make that would be different from Hearthstone.
GamesBeat: What do you think we should expect for the next content update? Are you thinking about solo adventures like Naxxramas with new cards, or are expansions the way you want to go, or a mix of the two?
Brode: One thing that we’re trying to do is to stay a little nimble. Both of these, the adventure and the expansion, were pretty different methods of delivering new content. We’re listening to a lot of feedback from the community. We still have a lot to learn about the pacing of releasing content, what the right pace is for Hearthstone. I don’t know for sure what the future looks like as far as adventures, expansions, the mix of them. Maybe trying new ways of releasing content. But so far the feedback we’ve gotten from Naxxramas has been awesome. It looks like the feedback from GvG is really exciting. I’m not 100 percent sure what the future looks like, but we’re very excited about all the possible opportunities.