A Busy Night at the Inn: Talking Hearthstone with Blizzard

Hearthstone has come an incredibly long way in a short space of time. It’s only just entered open beta, but it’s already an established eSport and has legions of diehard fans around the world. It’s early days too - Team 5 has big plans for this one. IGN AU caught up with two members of the team: lead designer Eric Dodds and lead artist Ben Thompson, to chat Hearthstone past, present and future.

IGN: Hearthstone has really taken me by surprise. I didn’t expect it to be something I’d be so into – not having much an affinity with WarCraft or card games - but I’ve really tumbled down the rabbit hole. It’s really accessible, yet incredibly deep and a heap of fun to play. Were you surprised by how quickly it took off?

Eric Dodds: We were very very surprised by how quickly it took off, and speaking to what you were just saying, it makes me so happy that that was how you got into the game. You didn’t think you’d be excited by the game and haven’t played this type of game before… Our thoughts when we first started working on this game were that collectible card games are awesome and digital collectible card games are awesome, and why the heck isn’t everybody playing them? So maybe we can make an awesome digital collectible card game.

While we had that thought initially, we had no idea that there would be this much excitement and this much demand for it. We’ve just been blown away by the excitement around it, and the number of people streaming it on Twitch… it’s just been wonderful for us, and surprising and humbling. That and more.

IGN: In terms of that pro scene and that closed beta scene, what kind of interactions have you had with the Kripps and Trumps of the world? What kind of tools have you given those guys and what are you planning now that the game is in open beta and it’s already set up as an eSport?

Eric Dodds: That’s definitely been one of the challenges, because we were not necessarily expecting it to be a huge eSport. Certainly when we first started working on it, we talked about it and said ‘hey maybe this could be a cool eSport some day’! We were not thinking ‘hey, maybe this will be a giant eSport before it leaves closed beta.’ With us having a small team, what it’s meant is that we haven’t been able to provide all of the tools we want to provide, especially with the rapid rise of it, sort of feeling like an eSport, so it’s definitely something that we talk about.

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We were not thinking ‘hey, maybe this will be a giant eSport before it leaves closed beta.’

We’re definitely looking towards the future to figure out what tools we want to give the community, but we also have not even shipped the game yet; we’re still in open beta, and so right now, our focus is actually just about getting the game out there and making sure that everything’s super solid so when it goes out to everybody on iPad, everybody has a solid experience, and finishing the couple of major features that we really have to have in there for it to be this awesome, Blizzard-quality experience for everybody. Making sure that if you get disconnected that you can reconnect to your game, and things like that, that we’ve got to have for ship.

So while we’re talking about a bunch of eSports features, it’s not something that we’re focusing on developing right now because we haven’t released the game yet. We would love to provide more tools, but that’s going to be something that we provide in the future, and as we figure out exactly what they are, we communicate out ‘here’s what we’re working on,’ but for the moment it’s focusing on getting the game out.

IGN: Aside from being able to reconnect games if your connection is dropped, what are some of the other mission critical things that have to be fixed or added before you can officially release the game?

Eric Dodds: We’re also making sure that we fully support ranked play, so in ranked play there’s some communication that we have to do to the player to let you know where in the season you are, we need to provide a card back for each season you participate in, as a way of saying ‘hey, it’s great that you participated in this season’, there’s a number of bugs – a minion-swapping bug that I’m sure a lot of people would be happy for us to fix, and they’d probably be surprised at how tricky it’s been to nail this one down. But of course, the biggest thing is to make sure that our whole infrastructure is really stable, so that we can provide a solid experience when however many people jump in once we actually go into release and have it on the iPad.

Simple presentation, but clean and full of personality.

IGN: How has the response to the open beta been so far? Are you able to give us any numbers around it? Or ballpark indications?

Eric Dodds: Since we’ve gone open beta there’s definitely been a bunch more people jump in and that’s been very exciting.

IGN: How big is Team 5 now? Obviously when you load into the Battle.net client you can see that you guys have been hiring. How rapidly do you want to scale the team?

Eric Dodds: Well, our team is enormous now because we’re up to, like, 21 people or so! Our team is huuuuge! Okay, well, it’s huge by Team 5 standards in the past, so I mean we’re definitely scaling up and hiring more people to try and provide for all these features that everybody’s looking for in the upcoming year. So we’re hiring more, but we’re still a small team by Blizzard standards.

IGN: I understand that you want to have the most robust game possible before you start adding new features, but will Adventures – which you revealed at Blizzcon - be in the game this year? Do you have a timeline in place for that kind of stuff?

Eric Dodds: Figuring out the timeline of exactly where things fall is a little bit tricky, given that we’ve been in closed beta for a fair amount of time, because of course we want to provide new content for people who have been in closed beta since the early phases, but we don’t want to overwhelm players who are just starting to play the game for the first time when we open up to the iPad. I can certainly tell you that you will see an Adventure this year – that will definitely happen, but exactly when that happens I couldn’t say for sure, because we’ve still got a bunch of that stuff to figure out, and figure out exactly what all these new cards will be and how they’ll work and that sort of thing.

Existing cards have a wide array of really interesting properties and abilities.

IGN: I got the impression that the Adventures are your way of introducing new cards. Do the new cards have to be earned through Adventures or are they added to the general pool as well?

Eric Dodds: The idea is that you would play through an Adventure and as you play through the Adventure you earn these cards that would be added to your general pool of cards, so you could play these cards against any other player. It would be a relatively small number of cards compared to what you’d expect to see from a full size, traditional collectable card game expansion.

IGN: So you would have a similar percentage drop rate for the new cards, but only within the Adventure, as opposed to the game as a whole? So if you added one new Legendary through the Adventures, does that make it super hard to get that drop, because you can only get it through Adventures. Am I getting this right?

Eric Dodds: We’re a little bit far in advance to talk about that, because we’re not sure exactly how all of this is going to work, so get back to me in a couple of months and we’ll chat a lot more about this. For the moment we’ve got to figure out exactly how we want it to work internally.

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