A Brief Look Into the Hearthstone Expansion & Adventure Set Design Process
Our friendly neighbourhood game designer, Max McCall, talked about the multi-step process behind set design in Hearthstone.
- Most cards in a set stop changing about two months before release.
- There are two design teams that work on sets, the initial designers and the final designers.
- The developers responsible for card sets work on multiple sets at the same time.
- Initial Design
- The setting, theme, mechanics, and deck archetype ideas of the set.
- The names, art, and flavor for cards.
- Final Design
- Make the set as fun as possible, balance the cards, and make sure each card belongs in the set in its current form.
- Play. Testing. Lots of playing with the new cards.
- Process takes 3-4 months.
- The Final Countdown
- The rest of the Hearthstone crew, which includes production, engineering, art, sound, and QA, work on the set.
- Flyswatter: Bugs get crushed during this stage.
- If there's any tweaks they want to make to cards due to what the live game looks like or its related to a future set, they'll make them here.
- Process takes a couple of months.
- Reminder that there are still others on the HS team always working on Brawls, Fireside Gatherings, Adventures, New Systems, User Interface, & More
Quote from Max McCallMost of the cards in a set stop changing about two months before it releases, but we can and do change cards up until a week or two before release. The design process is complicated because the folks who work mostly on card sets* are working on multiple sets at once. It’s complicated further by the fact that each set ends up having two teams work on it: an initial design team and a final design team.
The initial design team lays out the vision for the set. They determine the setting, the theme, the mechanics, and sketch out ideas for new deck types that support the set vision. They handle the names, art, and flavor text for each card. For most of the time that this initial team is working on the set, the goal isn’t really ‘make the set fun’ so much as it is ‘figure out what can be made to be fun.’ The goal is to figure out what the new set will be about and what new decks people will build with the cards.
Then, the initial design team hands the set over to the final design team. The final design team takes the set and makes it as fun as possible. A substantial amount of the work that the final design team does is to make sure the set’s complexity is appropriate. Weird and scary cards that reinforce the set’s theme are protected, but cards that are needlessly complicated are saved for another day. The final design team also ensures that the set has an appropriate power level. They play a ton of games to ensure that the new deck types are fun; part of that is making sure that they are strong enough to compete with current decks but not so strong as to obsolete them.
The final design team does this for three to four months per set. They ‘finish’ work on a set about two months before it is released, and move on to the next set. But, just because they’re working on, say, Mean Streets doesn’t mean cards in Karazhan are locked. The rest of the team (production, engineering, art, sound, QA, etc) spends that time working on visual effects and bug fixing, and we tweak cards in this period if we want to react to a new deck in live or discover a new interaction with the even-more-future set that we’ve moved on to.
*There are a ton of designers who don’t work directly on card sets, either. The folks who work on Tavern Brawls, Fireside Gatherings, adventure missions, new player experiences, new and reworked systems (e.g. set rotation, Arena changes, etc) and the UI elements that hold everything together are always working on newer and cooler stuff.
Every time Max McCall tries to explain the design process, it all just sounds like damage control. There are so many things that him and Ben Brode say that sound totally ignorant (i.e. Brode saying he expects the meta to slow down, McCall discussing non-existent class themes that Rogue and Priests have), and it's infuriating to see such an awesome game go to waste.
It may be Weebstone, but at least Shadowverse has depth and identity that Hearthstone is devoid of.
we need more nerfs, either that or better card designers......
either way, I QUIT until both wild and standard are less polarized and broken!
I guess i'll take my money elsewhere. PEACE
Or they could simply at least deal with the issues with reasonable nerfs (after the meta is figured out) but instead they have a ''deal with it'' attitude.Then after having to face the imbalances for months and months we just get the ''we are working on it'',''maybe'' and other with little substance posts.
As a result people are getting pissed off and the costructive critism is buried under a salt pile.
"Do lots of testing"
"Notice horrible imbalances"
"Shrug shoulders, it'll rotate out in a couple years"
Team 5 should be like
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think one of the reasons Blizzard has trouble balancing cards before they're released is not because they are unskilled players or because they don't understand synergy, but because they lack the competitive environment that causes extremely aggressive and unfun decks to be made. The way I see it, lots and lots of playtesting for Blizzard is not too different than what friendly matches are to most players: a place to play fun decks, win or lose, and experience good games. I think very few people play friendly matches with pirate warrior or aggro shaman, and the same probably goes for Blizzard's playtesting. They need to simulate a more competitive environment where coin doomsayer isn't good enough to be able to see the actual problems with every meta so far and with the ladder system in general.
For all the research, and effort they put into the design process, I find it hard to believe they didn't intend on golems, and pirates in a single deck.
"Make the set as fun as possible." yep you see, it's funnier when games end by turn 4-6.
its not 1 card that is broken, its a collection of cards together. i feel like they were testing the new cards in a vacuum, like a 1 mana 3/2 pirate with condition isnt the craziest thing in the world, but getting lethal on turn 4 is, and that shouldnt be a thing that happens outside of insane rng circumstances not seen in a normal game.
honestly what we need on the dev team is top legend players. people that make possible meta decks before they release and test them to make sure it isnt a cancer that cripples the game.
honestly like hire even just 2 top legend players on the dev team to test new decks out against eachother for a month with new cards before they come out and proper balancing would happen
I've seen a few job postings for those jobs. Being able to hit legend is one of the job requirements. They probably have a lot of legend rank players in the office. Whatever their problems are, lack of play time or skill are not among them.
I mean usually these types of posts give new information, but none of this is new. we've heard this all at least twice before and it still fails to address the issue they admit with what they did with STB. This is one of the times that they really are just spewing information out to create an illusion of communication with the community.