Hearthstone's newest expansion, Kobolds and Catacombs, launches today. It includes a single-player "dungeon running" experience and 135 new cards.
We caught up with Hearthstone's production director at Blizzard Entertainment, Jason Chayes, and Steve Shimizu, technical director, to talk about how the new launch came about for the monster digital card game.
Kobolds and Catacombs adds the "Recruit" mechanic to the game, which pulls cards from your deck onto the playing board, and also gives players the options of dungeon runs, single player competitions where enemies get increasingly difficult and the deck of cards builds over time. Heroes get legendary weapons, and spellstones are spell cards that increase in power if you do certain things while you're holding them.
QUESTION: What made you decide that this was where you wanted to go for the next expansion?
Shimizu: Kobolds and Catacombs is definitely inspired by a lot of the team members’ love for the classic pen and paper RPG, dungeon crawl experience. A lot of us have, since our youth—for myself, I used to read the sourcebooks for all these different games. I didn’t have any friends that would play with me, but I used to ask my mom to buy me the modules as birthday presents and things like that. I would read through the modules and pretend I was going through the dungeon myself. That type of fantasy really hits home for a lot of the team members. This was an opportunity to bring that to the game.
Q: How do you decide on, for example, the final mechanics that made it into Kobolds and Catacombs?
Chayes: There’s two ways that usually happens. One is a very top-down approach, looking at the theme of the set and trying to think of things that really support that theme. A good example of that with regard to Kobolds and Catacombs is with all the various treasures and loot mechanics in there. If you’re going into catacombs, and there are a bunch of kobolds unearthing these ancient burial chambers and treasure rooms, you’re going to want to find some awesome stuff in there.
That’s where things like the legendary weapons, the spellstones, and the unidentified items come from. But there’s also sometimes a bottom-up approach that’s less tied to the theme, which is a mechanic the designers are thinking about anyway.
That’s thinking more like, “What are the deck types out there in the meta? What are the types of things we can do to help support different kinds of deck creation?” This also ties into theme a little bit, but the Recruit mechanic is an example of that coming out of this set, where it’s actually summoning minions directly out of your deck and straight into play. That works with a lot of deck archetypes we’ve been thinking about in the past. So it’s both those ways that we come up with these different approaches.
Q: What makes the Recruit mechanic here different or more exciting, something that attracted the team’s attention?
Chayes: It’s a bigger part of the overall theme than what we’ve done in the past. We’ve done some one-offs on particular cards, but here you’ll see—there’s Gather Your Party, that recruits neutral minions. It won’t necessarily be represented in all classes, but there are more opportunities here to do it than you might have seen in other cases in the past.
Q: What thought goes into the animations that are involved with new cards?
Shimizu: Certainly from a technical perspective, feel is very important to Hearthstone. We’ve had some cards that have not felt as fast to play, or things like that, that we’ve had to go back and develop new technology to make sure it still works under these conditions. The feel of playing—we have a bar that we always try to reach. If it doesn’t feel right, that’s something we’ll always go back to and look at.
Q: Can you give an example of something where initially, maybe it wasn’t where you wanted it to be?
Shimizu: I can’t remember the specific card lately, that I think [game designer Ben] Brode had a problem with…
Chayes: In terms of how it was playing?
Shimizu: Yeah. Was it coming out fast enough? We put some engineers on it to make sure.
Chayes: We have this term we use on the team a lot. It actually came from one of our engineers in years past. It’s “crispy.” We reference this term all the time.
What does crispy mean? Actually it’s very hard to describe what crispy means, because it’s almost more of a feel. If you think about the experience of taking an analog controller and having a character on a console—having it be very responsive, where it stops and jumps and moves forward. That was one of the inspiration points for us.
When we were first working on Hearthstone, making the experience of summoning a card, playing it from your hand and having it land on the game board, having little puffs of dust come up, having it bank left and right and have yaw and pitch as you drag it over the game space—all of that was our expression of crispiness for Hearthstone. You could have a very tactile feel.
This wasn’t an arbitrary decision for us to do. It really supports one of the primary goals for Hearthstone, which is that we want the cards to feel physical. Why do we want them to feel physical? Because these are things that players are spending a lot of time earning and building a collection they want to take pride in. The more physical they feel, the more they feel like things that are of value, that are worth your devotion, that are worth your attention.
Crispiness has become a mantra. We think about that with all the cards we’re doing. One example in the current set is Wrynn, the first disciple, the Warlock legendary we just announced. You have to go through this very long process when you put it into play, releasing all these various seals.
And at the very end you get to summon Azari, this super powerful demon character who basically destroys your opponent’s deck.
Just having that effect, that’s a lot of work, to be able to pull that off. You’ve had to spend 31 mana over multiple turns. Having this feel like it’s worthy of going through all that was a big priority for the design and the art team.
Seeing this immense bolt of shadow fire destroying your opponent’s deck and seeing the torn-up remains of their card backs was something that the team thought a lot about to try to evoke with this powerful moment.
Q: In a much less dramatic moment, that momentary hover when the card comes out and is about to either drop into your hand or drop onto the board, where you can almost feel the air resistance—
Chayes: Right, right.
Q: When it sort of floats on its way down.
Shimizu: It’s all part of—one of the company’s core values is “gameplay first.” It’s all part of the gameplay feel of it. Not prioritizing the art first or technology first, things like that. It’s the feel of it, the gameplay, that’s the most important thing. Everything else has to support that.
Chayes: We talk a lot about how much camera shake there should be when particular effects go off. How much of a vignette there should be in terms of the edges of the screen blacking out a bit to help accent a particular thing. There’s a lot of little details there that make the cards feel the way they do.
Q: Talk about the Hearthstone audience. Are you seeing a dichotomy in terms of how people are playing? Are there folks who are playing it truly as a casual game on their phones while they do other things -- “Hey, I’m waiting in the doctor’s office, I’ll get in a quick match” -- versus folks who might be more serious, deeper into strategy, deeper into deck-building, trying to challenge for legendary ranks, that kind of thing?
Chayes: Well, even saying it’s a dichotomy suggests that there’s basically two different ways and approaches there, and I think there are even more than that.
Q: What are some of the play styles you’ve seen?
Chayes: We’ve always imagined Hearthstone to be one of the most accessible games we could ever make. And so when you’re really trying to live up to that, it means you have many different ways in which people engage with the game.
Some people will be very competitive, very hardcore, keeping up with the latest on the esports scene. Then there are players who will just play—even “casual” is an overloaded word at this point. But they’ll play an hour or two over the course of a week. They’ll play to get to rank 20 in a particular month. We want to make sure Hearthstone supports that play style.
There are players who come back every week to play the Tavern Brawl to get the card pack. There are players who only play Arena. There are players who only go to [real world] Fireside Gatherings and play there because it’s more of a social activity. It’s our goal to make sure Hearthstone supports all of those play models.
We’re really trying to be careful about not neglecting any one of them, but at the same time making sure we continue to add new features that support each of those ways as we develop new patches over the course of the year.
Shimizu: Certainly the new Dungeon Run mode we have in Kobolds and Catacombs speaks to a certain type of player. We’ve had a lot of people come in and tell us, “You know what, I haven’t played in a while, but I’m excited to try out this new mode.” It’s really accessible. You don’t even need to have a collection to start playing. It’s free. Every time you go through the Dungeon Run mode we give you the cards to play with during that Dungeon Run. It’s super accessible.
Q: Why include Dungeon Runs? What gap do they fill?
Shimizu: I don’t that it’s necessarily a deliberate strategic response to fill any particular holes. The last expansion [was] the first one to have both the cards and free Adventure content. Part of the reason there is we realized that when we’re releasing expansion content, there’s not an opportunity to tell the story that goes along with it.
Really, that was motivated more by that [story] than anything else. [Previously], as part of the engagement with these cards, we were either doing this sort of story-based engaging lore thing, or we were doing the expansion cards. And so doing them both, even though it was a little bit more of a challenge for the team, I think creates a way more cohesive, interesting set.
Chayes: In addition to that, we also want to make sure that when we’re focusing on the next release with the team, we’re getting as much mileage as we can out of the resources we’re putting into releasing each new set. We’d love to have cases where players weren’t just experiencing the Adventure missions once and never going back and launching them again. I think this particular format allows people to go back in, see things again in very cool and exciting new ways, and keep trying to get down to the bottom of the catacombs with each successive run.
Q: What are the player rewards for making it through?
Chayes: We’re basically giving away two free legendaries just for logging into the game and playing. You get Merin the Fox just by playing. Beyond that you’ll get a free legendary, one of the new legendary weapons. [That and three card packs come from logging in now that the new expansion has launched.]
With regard to the Dungeon Run itself, there are rewards that happen when you get down the very bottom of the catacombs. If you complete the catacomb with all nine classes, there is a card back that you can get for some bragging rights. It will be pretty hard to do that. It’s hard to do even with a single class.
It’s something that probably won’t be for everyone. But by and large we felt like the design of the Dungeon Run was to make a lot of the fun itself just playing through it, going in there as many times as you want to have a different experience, rather than having extrinsic rewards like card backs.
Q: Why a card back for that, versus, say, another hero? It seems like the difficulty is equivalent to what it would take to get Arthas. That paladin hero was rewarded for beating the single-player boss of the previous expansion with all nine classes.
Chayes: It’s a good question. We’re trying different things. We may actually bring back new heroes from the past, like we did with young Arthas for Knights of the Frozen Throne. But for this one we have a really cool card back that I think players will totally dig.
Q: Looking forward beyond this release, are there things that you would like to prioritize from a development perspective, from a philosophical perspective?
Chayes: [To Shimizu.] You always talk about getting a little more time to help make the infrastructure more stable.
Shimizu: Yeah, it’s true. That is something that’s an ongoing technical challenge.
Q: Is that kind of like cleaning out your closet?
Shimizu: Kind of, a little bit, yeah. [He laughs.]
Q: "Future me" is totally going to clean my closet.
Shimizu: Sometimes we write checks that "future me" has to cash. But that’s certainly something that, especially with the popularity of Hearthstone and the number of players we’re seeing worldwide—there have definitely been some things that we’ve had to make better, just to support scale. I think scale is one of the most challenging things, from a technical perspective.
Q: Can you talk about some of the steps you’ve had to take?
Shimizu: A lot of it, again, is just related to scale, the number of players we’re storing and the number of connections we’re supporting concurrently, things like that. There are certainly problems that emerge, once numbers get past a certain point, that weren’t as obvious in the beginning. And so some of those are things we have to tackle as we go along.
Q: Can you give me an example of something you’ve had the opportunity to correct?
Chayes: Back in the day, when we first launched Hearthstone, we certainly had issues with keeping the servers up through patch cycles and through maintenance. What we’ve come up with is a system now where we’re popping back and forth between different sets of servers. That allows us to have a lot more uptime than we had in years past.
It’s one of the things we don’t talk about a lot, but it’s super important to us to be able to keep Hearthstone up, to make sure players are able to play whenever they want and not have a block of time where people just can’t log in and experience the game.
If you go back to where we were three years ago, we’re in a different place with regard to our general uptime across the game, which we feel pretty happy about. It’s a big credit to the guys on Steve’s team, as well as the Battle.net team, that we’re able to get there.
Q: Do you feel like the patience for downtime is less among folks for a game like Hearthstone, where a quick match can take five minutes, versus other games where the typical play time investment might be longer in a single sitting?
Chayes: I think it’s never really a good thing to be unable to play the game you want to play. I know this sentiment is shared by all the different game teams at Blizzard, that we really want to minimize that to the extent that we possibly can. Even for games like [World of Warcraft], for games like Diablo or Overwatch, sitting down in front of your console or your PC, launching your favorite game, and being presented with this message that says, “Sorry, not available right now,” that’s not something we aspire toward as developers or as a company.
There are times where it’s inevitable, because something happens and we’re still working on refining our technology. There’s a major upgrade that’s required, that’s planned. That happens from time to time. But it’s not something we ever take lightly.
As soon as that ever happens, it’s a five-alarm fire. There are people on the phone, people being called into the office. We take it very seriously. If all goes well and according to plan, we’d like to minimize that even more as we move on over the next few months and years, to try to get to a point where all the games are up pretty much all the time.
Q: What other things would you like to do?
Chayes: We still want to do more to support the growing esports scene for Hearthstone.
There is a lot of stuff we’ve done there, just as far as different formats and different ways to play Hearthstone competitively. But I don’t think we’re yet where we want to be with regard to different features in the client that can make the esports experience as strong as it could be.
I think our spectator experience is okay right now. There’s room for that to improve and get better over time. We have some ideas there that are on our backlog, but it’s something that will take more time and focus to get where we want it to be.
Q: Replays?
Chayes: It’s one of the things we’ve talked about, for sure. It’s a feature that could be cool for Hearthstone. But no specific real announcements on that quite yet.
