Ben Brode on Design Space, Game Design, Adventures, and Feedback
Josh Calixto of Glixel sat down with Ben Brode to discuss game design, community feedback, and keeping Hearthstone fun.
Mr. Brode
- One of Ben’s favourite ways to decompress from work when he gets home is to talk to people on the internet who play Hearthstone. That’s how he became a big part of their communication strategy.
- Ben has a passion for explaining the team’s point of view to help give people a deeper understanding of things they may not think about.
Adventures
- They're currently ramping up a team for Adventures, with the next one releasing alongside the next Expansion (as previously announced).
- Adventures will be free content for players to consume. It will reward card packs.
Game Design
- Cards removed from the Classic set for this year's Standard rotation were due to the fact that they were hoping to get more variety out of certain classes.
- As an example, Conceal was very popular with Miracle Rogue for years.
- Sometimes, they just need to make room for new stuff.
- Standard needs to always be fresh, Wild is allowed to have the same decks forever.
- Designing a top-level metagame is hard. People will always play the best decks out there, leaving less room for variety.
- For the high end of play, they try to create lots of tools and cards that test the skill-level of the player.
Card Design
- Yogg-Saron, Hope's End may have been one of the most fun cards ever created, but it was bad for competitive; It didn't belong there.
- Sometimes, they have a really cool idea for a card but during playtesting, it gets re-evaluated due to someone finding a broken combo.
- Animated Armor was originally going to be a Neutral minion but due to bad interactions with Master of Disguise, it went to the mage set.
- A similar issue with Dreadsteed and the old Warsong Commander is why Warlocks ended up with the minion.
Feedback
- The community “hugely” affects the final design of the game. They're here to serve and are heavily motivated to make the game more fun.
- The top concern for the team is making Hearthstone as fun as it can be for as many players as possible.
- Feedback from Un'Goro has shown that the expansion has been super fun.
- Feedback on pricing shows they have some discussion to do internally.
Ben on Design Space
Quote from Ben BrodeThere's this concept of design space, which I think is an oft-misunderstood term, but it's basically: if you imagine every "vanilla" minion: a one mana 1/1, a two mana 2/2, a two mana 1/3, a two mana 3/1 – all the way down to a 10-mana 10/10, a 10-mana 9/11, or whatever. That's all the design space there is for vanilla minions. You can't make any other vanilla minions. You've used all the space for vanilla minions.
Then once you start putting words on cards, there's a lot more space. Let's say I made a card that said: All your 1/1 minions get +29/+29. Stonetusk Boar makes it so that you cannot make that card. It's just game over. Stonetusk Boar has reduced some design space. Every card both uses some design space and restricts some design space for the future, and often, what happens during playtesting is that we try some new thing and then realize it totally does not work with this other combo that we've got in the game, and so we have to cut it.
Hello,
3 Expansions 300$ each.
I hope they reduce the card pack price or the dust price to half.
Adventures was helping the players and give them 6 months instead of 3 to prepare for an expansion.
or make a new expansion every 5 months.
I have collected every card, but I still need around 1000$ every year :( to keep up.
so expensive.
Thank you very much :)
Just imagine quest Rogue with Conceal...
Man that would be sweet in standard.
Not sure if... You know...
This design space stuff would be nice if we hadn't just seen how miserable some of their design decisions were. I mean come on, Quest Rogue, Aggro decks galore and Quest Warrior. A few odd "control" decks, and literally everything is about how lucky you get. Blah.
At least these 'adventures' will still have some gain for us, as apposed to being some flavour add-ons. Free packs!
And from the way Brode was talking it certainly sounds like the adventure is going to be more than 'some shitty missions'. For example they have a 'team' working on it, and it will also be releasing 'alongside' the expansion as apposed to 'with' or 'in addition to'. That second one might be stretching a bit but still, it seems promising.
And as for Adventures being 'f2p friendly' as a f2p player I found it the other way around. Sure it was easier to get Emperor Thaurissan than it would be to craft a legendary, but at the same time the amount of commons like Tomb Pillager or Blackwing Corruptor that were integral to certain archetypes and also extremely expensive really ruined the game for me. It's definitely easier to buy a pack than to spend 3500 gold on a common.
I'm still upset that they decided to nerf Master of Disguise with the other stuff AFTER LoE was released. I bet there were a few more cards that should've been neutral as well, and I would've liked to see Animated Armor played where it would be useful. Such wasted potential :(
Just lost to a Priest whith my Jade Druid, they pulled 2 elementals one of them is Kalimos, Primal Lord From an Elise the Trailblazer pack, then a Mind Blast from his 3/5 legendary, I was on 10 Health with five 12+ attack Jades on Board... You can tell how the fcking game ended, and Mr.Ben can tell us where is the Skill/Fun in that!
You definitely deserve it for playing jade druid tho
Neverlucky! third time in a row to get this much hate on fucking Hearthpwn
You're comparing Jade Druid to Miracle/Elemental Priest and talking about Skill/Fun? Are you fucking joking?
In this expansion, Jade Druid is SLOW. It isn't reactive. Miracle Priest is near 100% reactive. They'll dish out spells that allows them to control the board, while getting beefy minions on the field for cheap. If you were any other class with FAST control elements, the priest would have been creamed no problem. Murloc Paladin comes to mind.
The client is fantastic, they've added Tavern Brawl and divided Ranked into Standard and Wild, added a great Spectator feature, and the game launched with a variety of in-game achievements. Maybe you're playing an entirely different game? But most of what you said is flatly false.
I'm not sure if this is what he meant, but I would love to see some work in potentially optimizing the mobile client. It is one hell of a hefty beast these days. It's a beautiful piece of UX, but maybe if some of the animations could be downgraded / turned off, it would't be such a memory hog.
It's a first world problem though.
Mr.Brode may need to redefine the definition of fun. For most people, win is fun. RNG Card that yield random result isn't fun, it's frustration !
It is fun, when You play for fun. If You play just to win, avoid the card. I have loads decks that are pure RNG and i have fun, of course I lose almost all that games, but i had my fun :) It's all about mindset.
I'm glad they finally admit this and I can't agree more. Call me salty or whatever but Yogg is one of the reasons I stopped watching HS E-sports. There's enough RNG in Hearthstone to begin with, and watching lots of big tournaments being decided by a 10 mana coin flip is just not fun in my opinion.
there are hardly any even matchups for it. Either you have a deck that can disrupt them (Dirty Rat, Counterspell, Aggro etc.), or you have a horribly unfavored matchup. Most matchups for questrogue are 70-30 or 30-70 or higher, there are no 50-50 or closer matchups. Quest Rogue is the definition of a helmet deck. (Helmet Deck = A deck that only plays towards an internal wincondition and avoids interacting with the other player to get said win condition faster - you see how lots of Quest Rogue cut Evis/Sap just too get their wincon out faster)