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 like the whole idea behind micro-events, bundle sales and stuff, they should definitely continue doing these.
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But honestly, guys, you missed a big opportunity to make this Brawl actually fun and different. It is not that hard to make 9 decks built around DK on t1. It would be very unique and something new to dive in. But you made just super unbalanced bad random generated decks instead. This just couldn't work. Most of DKs are strong with proper synergy only - Uther, Valeera and some are good without any synergy in deck at all - Jaina, Rexxar. So making random decks for all classes just made whole brawl pretty unfun.
I love to do my daily quests in Brawl whenever it's online because it makes grinding more fun. But I'm going to pass on this one (unless I'll get "Win x games with Mage" quest).
"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."
What better way? Well a KoFT pack as a brawl reward would have been nice!
Also I am probably not the only one to win my classic brawl pack, play some more brawls for fun, complete the 40 KoFT card quest then find out I needed to go back to Jania Wars. Maybe this was made clear somewhere and I missed it so it's my fault but I do these quests on 3 regions which made the 30+ brawls I needed to play a chore.
Still good to get free stuff so still worth it - just could have been executed slightly better I think.
The event is awesome, the free gold is awesome, the 6 legendarys and 14 epics from the bundle were awesome.... we just need more events like this
"We also thought that rewarding a Golden Happy Ghoul on log-in would be a fun way to introduce players to the event."
"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."
Giving players a single golden common equates to fully experiencing an entire card set? What?
Don't get me wrong, it's cool that they do events like these, but they shouldn't act like it's the best thing ever when it's not...
And in the end, the event truly lived up to Hearthstone’s standards.
Did you mean: Days of the Frost Lich Jaina
So they threw together a completely unbalanced brawl with randomized decks, threw a bunch of gold at us and that warrants "Developer Insights"
I'm glad they're looking for different ways to give more gold to players, but can we stop pretending like this was some well planned and epic event?
I'd say that KoTFT was the expansion that had the best cards & concepts. Obviously a strategy to milk it before it goes out of rotation next year.
Event's terrible, had to go against a friend to win 5 brawls.
KotFT “was one of the favorite sets from last year”.
Hm, I wonder what the other two favorite sets are...
I like the event in general. I mean, really gives an opportunity to some of the younger and less rich players to get KFT. But the brawl is horrible.
Wish they gave the pre order card back too for purchasing the bundle for people like me who missed it.
So you think buying a bundle a year after the expansion came out is equivalent to a pre-order ?
That's not happening, you better get that idea out of your head.
Milk nothing else matter (Metallica)
This was probably the most inspired and creative thing they ever did. We need a behind the scenes making-of video series and a developer AMA about this incredibly creative event. /s The only purpose of this article was the "buy the bundle" instruction at the end.
Worst bundle ever
I wouldn't say its the worst bundle ever. Its timed intentionally to milk the last bits of value out of a set before it rotates. Its clever marketing, even if its a bummer for people that would have loved to see it a year ago or whatever. Its still a good value, especially if you're missing a few key cards.
It's worst bundle ever. I don't have it 4x DK (Jaina, Rexxar, Gul'dan and Uther), but after 29 packs I had Moorabi.... TY Blizzard for the worst legendary, that I mised in this set...
I've got the same problem with this expansion. I opened up to 100+ packs and still got 4 legendaries, including the free ones you get.