Developer Insights: Days of the Frozen Throne with the Live Content Team
With the Days of the Frozen Throne event starting, Blizzard has posted a blog post detailing how they conceptualized it and went forward with the implementation.
Days of the Frozen Throne runs until September 23.
Quote from BlizzardDays of the Frozen Throne is now live, and we know that the Death Knights are crowd favorites, we’re excited to give you some insight into when we were developing this “brawliday!”
Inception
We tinkered with a lot of ideas for Days of the Frozen Throne before it was Days of the Frozen Throne, but none of them felt quite right. So we started looking back at our favorite sets from the Year of the Mammoth.
When we were thinking about timing, we figured the event would land sometime around the one year anniversary of the Knights of the Frozen Throne’s launch. Knights of the Frozen Throne was one of our favorite sets from last year, and what better way to celebrate its anniversary than by bringing it back to the game in such a substantial way? This was also when we came up with the term “brawliday”—one Hearthstone holiday event that lasts for the duration of a brawl.
Inspiration
At this point, the team was facing two challenges: what to name the event, and how to keep it concise but also have it live up to Hearthstone’s standards. The perfect solution occurred to us during our brainstorms.
We were sitting in a room kicking around concepts when it suddenly hit us: we already had (K)nights of the Frozen Throne—what about DAYS of the Frozen Throne? That immediately energized everyone: we went back to our desks and wrote the entire event pitch in one sitting.
Meanwhile, we also had to keep the other teams informed of what would go down during this event. One of the first people we spoke to was Josh Harris, one of our chalkboard artists on the Hearthstone team. He’s the guy who makes some of the awesome brawl chalkboards you see each week! We looked at different iterations of the art for the brawl before settling on what you see in the client right now. Below is one of the first passes at chalkboard art for Duel of the Death Knights.
Development
With Death Knights leading the conceptual charge, it was easy to put to paper exactly how it would work. We wanted players to be able to experience Knights of the Frozen Throne all over again, and we would do that through the brawliday’s quests. And if you’re a new player, or just don’t have all the cards you needed? Well, that was what the brawl is for!
The Duel of the Death Knights brawl you see in the Days of the Frozen Throne brawliday was specifically inspired by the Rise of the Zombies brawl. Seeing just how dramatically playing as a Death Knights changed a player’s Hearthstone experience was very inspiring for us. In Duel of the Death Knights, you start the game as a Death Knight and play with a random deck built from Knights of the Frozen Throne cards.
We also thought that rewarding a Golden Happy Ghoul on log-in would be a fun way to introduce players to the event. We considered other cards for the log-in reward, but we ended up picking the Happy Ghoul because it just fit the Days of the Frozen Throne theme. This little ghoul making snow angels (snow ghouls?) was one of the most lighthearted cards in the entire Knights of the Frozen Throne set, and also one of our favorite golden animations.This also helped us fulfill another goal we had for Days of the Frozen Throne: to make sure that players would be able to fully experience the Knights of the Frozen Throne card set, especially if they were new. It was also something that we kept in mind when designing daily quests for this event. And of course, in typical Hearthstone fashion, we also have a ton of fun playing with words when coming up with quest names! Plays of the Frozen Throne, anyone? See if you can find them all in-game!
Deck The Brawls!
And that was how this happy little brawliday, celebrating one of our favorite sets from the Year of the Mammoth, came to be! We want to create more brawl events like this one in the future, as they’re a good way for us to revisit the things we’ve loved from past sets and to give Hearthstone more micro-events. Be sure to collect your Happy Ghoul for logging in, and in case you’ve yet to complete your Knights of the Frozen Throne collection, check out the Bundle Up Bundle that’s available now.
See you in the Tavern!
I guess you haven't played it, if you consider Hearthstone shit compared to MTGA.
* Everybody is angry about the turn timer; the aggro players that have to wait for ages, and the combo players who can't combo within the alloted time.
* Yes, you get the keep the cards in "Arena" mode, but it costs the equivalent of 5 to 10 daily quests (5000 for quick draft, the rewards range from 500 to 750 gold).
* Your arena runs expires in 4 days. You need to go 6 out of 7 to get your entry fee back.
Blizzard's high on money, their games these days are like all those 80's movies that were only made cause everyone was high on Cola.
The quest will still stick around till the next brawl if you haven't done it, right?
Nope.
Given that the quest to get maiev or to kill the monster hunt bosses with tracker/cannonier/... were staying several month, I think it does. There is no reason why this quest should vanish.
There is a reason. This is event, not a new contents from new set or new year in Hearthstone.
Hey its 600 gold to forgone ~2 hours of your time, I'm a pretty patient dude playing DK Jaina mirror matches but there is a point where everyone will have to cross the line to insanity to get what they want.
Two people instaconceded against me when they saw Jaina. I felt sorry and thankful.
I played this brawl many times to get the quests done, and I was really unsatisfied with it, but I thought "Meh, it must be me". Then I came to this article and read lots of other negative comments. So, I realized apparently I'm not the only one unsatisfied with the state of the game and the overall laziness of the development team. And that's kinda sad, because I like Hearthstone, but I see that a lot of people just like me feel disappointed.
You won't be seeing me in the tavern for this insipid mess. Not even going to bother with the pack on my accounts, let alone the quests. Just wonder how long it will pollute - one slot reserved for 40 games of PvE and now one for this failure of a brawl. Perhaps they should add a daily quest slot if they intend to populate the existing ones with garbage.
Wouldn't want those 300 gold quests getting in the way of a 50 gold payday.
I only do the quests as part of normal gameplay, as in to be entertained by the game, but hey, if you want to slog through this shit brawl with the other rabble, clamoring for scraps from the Blizz, like starving dogs, be my guest - whatever floats your boat ya know?
One thing I did find is making a deck of low-cost frozen throne minions and 2x Divine Favor is a much easier way to complete quest 1 then the clown fiesta brawl.
"the deathknights are crowd favorites"
Blizzard logic: print overpowered cards that people are forced to use and "people really love playing these cards!! We did a good job!!"
Clearly jade druid was played like every other game for 2 months because it was everyone's FAVORITE deck....
Why is this downvoted?
Blizzard boyz, paying 80 buks for a skin, definitely feel insulted by this statement. LUL
"How dare you remind me that I spend hundreds of dollars on a sub par f2p childrens' card game"
Yesterday came up on YouTube the announcement of public beta for Magic The Gathering ARENA (coming on 27)
Perfect Timing for this shit we're seeing here
yeah,,, no ,,,,
Fuck you Blizzard :)
I can believe how many people got offended by reading this
Typing this up took longer than designing the brawl I bet. Literally, start as DK, get random cards in your deck, done. Easy work. Don't have to be a designer to come up with that. Now, if they'd gone through the trouble of actually designing the decks so that they're fitting for the given DK, we'd have something to talk about. But as much as I appreciate the easy gold, I sure as shit don't appreciate that it didn't even occur to them that DKs like Garrosh, Uther and Thrall get the majority of their value out of synergistic effects or their battlecry. I'd already gotten my quests done by the time they apparently gave Uther and Garrosh their weapons. Seriously? They literally just tossed the DK portrait and hero power on the board and that was the extent of their "design" effort. And now they have the audacity to write up their design process like it was hard work? Like the community response was so positive they want to share how such a success came to be? Give me a break.
There was no fucking design process. They didn't even do the very basics of designing this brawl. Jaina DKs with Snowflipper Penguins in their decks. Garrosh with a bunch of 1 health minions in theirs, fighting against Deathstalker Rexxar's hero power or (god forbid) Jaina herself. Thrall without his battlecry trying to face down turn 2 Water Elementals or Gul'dan's 3 dmg hero powers. And god forbid you get an evolve with the wrong health total. One Garrosh with a pile of complete garbage in their deck, the other with 3x Rotface. Did they even try? The fact they had to add Garrosh and Uther weapons retroactively just shows how little thought they put into this. So please, Team 5, go try bullshit someone else. We can handle 18 deck slots and we sure can see through your pathetic marketing spiel. Get your shit in order, then talk.