Rumble Run - New Details On Upcoming Solo Content + Looking Back At Adventures
Like with the past few expansions, Hearthstone is getting some new solo content to play through! Here's everything we've learned about the mode so far.
- Rumble Run releases on December 13th, 9 days after the expansion launch.
- Shrines - Passives! They sit on the board giving you a special effect. They can be destroyed, but they will respawn after 3 turns.
- Like other solo content recently added to Hearthstone, successful wins let you add more cards to your run's deck.
- They really want to celebrate each of the teams (classes). Overpowered fights had to be done.
- You will fight eight opponents - all the other teams. Each team has 3 different shrines, and 3 champions so your runs won't always be the same.
- Rikkar is your champion you play with. He evolves over the run. He doesn't have a team to start with, that's up to you.
- You earn "Prize Fighters" for successful clears. Pick your own teammates.
- We'll get to play as the champions in "a series of" Tavern Brawls.
Adventures of Old
- The old way of doing solo content, adventures, didn't work out for them due to not having enough cards for a meta.
- Adventures needed to be easy so everyone could unlock the cards.
- The low replayability of adventures was also a problem that needed to be solved.
Frozen Throne - "Linear Battles"
- Knights of the Frozen Throne was the first expansion with the missions team. They went with the old formula, "linear battles" because it was known to work.
- The Lich King fight originally had you getting trapped into Frostmourne with a janky animation that made your game look like it bugged out.
- During QA of the Lich King fight, it was reported that the "Shut Up, Priest" could be stolen. They used that as an opportunity for an easter egg.
- There were several easter eggs within the Frozen Throne adventure that not many people found.
- One easter egg that didn't have many mentions online was the one when fighting The Lich King as a Paladin, turning yourself into Uther of the Ebon Blade and using hero power allowed him to collect your cards. When at 3 out of 4 Horsemen collected, he would say that it would be embarrassing it would be if he collected them all.
- Making the adventure more challenging then usual due to no card rewards turned out to be a positive. They learned players enjoy the challenge and lots of people played.
Kobolds / Witchwood - "Build As You Go"
- One of the big focuses was to make the content replayable. It's sad when they create content that doesn't get to be seen again.
- Making deckbuilding less intimidating was another priority. Lots of players beat the Lich King thanks to the deck copy feature.
- Increasing the challenge even more than before was their final goal for the modes.
- The initial prototype for Dungeon Run saw you playing as Mage and the entire running being just one very long game.
- When the boss died, the board would be reset, you'd pick your bucket of cards in a discover selection, and the new boss would start.
- A fun bug in the prototype caused Arcane Giant to be playable for 0 mana on turn 1 - they didn't reset the spell count between bosses.
- Thanks to that bug, it lead to the special treasure cards which got stronger as your run continued.
- Originally there were 12 bosses to beat each run instead of the 8 we got. They found the decks were too big and the bosses had too much health though which made it less fun.
- You were able to pick your boss in addition to the loot you got. It felt like a negative experience though if you didn't know what each boss did and you lost to them.
- They experimented with Tower Defense a lot with Witchwood. It's a mechanic they are always trying to get into the game.
- Darius Crowley became Hearthstone's Tower Defense and the first hero added to Monster Hunt.
- The final boss in the Witchwood prototype was Jaraxxus.
- Tess Greymane originally had a hero power which was a bag of weapons. Each time it was used, you would get a weapon out of the bag.
- Handgonne - 1 Mana 4/2
- Stake Thrower - 1 Mana 1/8 with Windfury
- Blunderbuss - 1 Mana 2/2 "Also damages the minions next to whomever your hero attacks.
- The weapons in Tess' bag ran out (there were only 3) and then her hero power became the one we have today, Scavenge.
- Magic Mirror allowed players to "break the dungeon" which is fun. Let the players do it.
Boomsday - "Puzzles"
- They always wanted to add Puzzles to Hearthstone.
- It was important to mix up the solo content after doing "Build As You Go" twice in a row.
- Boomsday thematically lead itself well to Puzzles. This was the set to do it.
- Puzzles originally got their start as a Tavern Brawl 2 years ago. They were Lethal-only puzzles. (We actually datamined this)
- The brawl created new tech that allowed them to save your state - absolutely needed for the real deal.
- Toki's replay turn tech helped out in the Puzzle Lab.
- First thing they tried to make was a Tower Defense puzzle.
- Netherspite laser beams tech was used to try and make a puzzle which required bouncing the beams off minions and into portals.
- Since they couldn't let you take extra turns, they instead gave you mana back to cheat in a multi-turn mechanic.
- Mirror was originally supposed to be seeing the solved board state and then having to replicate it. It was hard to remember in more difficult puzzles, even being able to see the solved state whenever you wanted.
- Sometimes there would be multiple developers behind one computer trying to get through a new puzzle they were given.
- One of the puzzles was accidentally unsolvable thanks to a number change and was given to Chakki shortly after he joined the team. Oops!
- They weren't really replayable, but there was very high engagement. They'll probably return to Puzzles again in the future.
i think the reason DR doesn't give rewards per win is to avoid bots, just think about it, if everytime you defeated a boss in dungeon run gave gold people would just program bots to beat the first boss, concede the run and repeat, plus bosses don't really get challenging until the 7th boss, so even if the first couple of bosses didn't give rewards botting the run would be rampant and really bad for server connection like when a new exp is released at that point they would be able to only give rewards for fully beaten runs and that just opens space for non-stop whining from entitled RNG hating europeans "feeling that they got their reward stolen from under their noses cuz they got to face X boss with Y deck" .
Bullshit. If they would omit the pack fillers, there are less cards in each set than an adventure usually had. Also, both Naxx and BRM certainly had enough cards to shake up the meta even though there were fillers as well.
The truth simply is that adventures aren't nearly as lucrative financially as expansions are. Adventures were buy-once things that most of the players paid with gold, not with cash. Expansions sell probably multiple times more pre-orders with money (as that is the only option) as adventures sell overall. And this isn't even considering plenty of players spend even more cash afterwards.
I'm fairly certain each adventure had huge meta impacts. Naxx gave us Undertaker Hunter, Blackrock gave us Dragon decks, Explorers gave us greed and value, and Khazaran gave us Shamanstone. I have no stats to back this up but I feel that proportionately adventure cards see more use than expansion cards which end up mostly being pack filler.
Welp, it’s clear the new team doesn’t know what the fuck they were doing. Adventures will never come back.
It was a good run boys, but the Hearthstone we all knew and love is long gone.
Old adventures were pretty boring imo.
Someone didn’t play League of Explorers...
Eh, adventures are more fun at first but dungeon runs have 10x more playability.
Confirmed.
Tnk god this shi.t called game died,Thank god!!
The great thing about adventure was you were guaranteed at least 45 unique cards of which are 5 legendary cards for 2950g. Sure the small number of cards didn't effect the meta much but players didn't need to get large amounts of card packs just to maybe be able to make one or two complete decks.
I'd love an option to pay 2950g for a start up expansion set or something
dont think 2950g checks out when it was 700 per wing with 4 - 5 wings each adventure (2800 / 3500g) but I certainly agree with your statement. adventures really helped f2p players and its frustrating to open packs.
i think we should either see an increase in legendary drop rate from 1 / 20 packs to 1 / 10 or we need some kind of adventures back.
I think I want the old adventures back, but I don't...
Yeah sure. In no way a financially motivated decision.
yeah they totally couldn't have just... like... given more cards per wing? if they can do singleplayer content alongside the current expansions why cant they do adventures with more cards?
Tell me which design is better:
1. Players need to pay money to unlock cards because they can't craft them until they do, and because unlocking cards is done by winning bosses, there can't be a lot of cards.
2. They print a bunch of cards and players have a few ways to get hold of them, most of them are free, and already implemented in the game. Quests, arena, brawls, and events.
The old adventure design is worse for everyone. Printing 135 cards each expansion and making some free replayable pve content with cool cosmetic rewards that don't affect your collection is a better choice overall.
Where is the cool cosmetic reward?
Sorry but most people not even care for cardbacks. If they really wanted to give a cool cosmetic reward they would gave atleast a alt hero.
I like the thematic feel of the build your deck modes. Each one was well fit into the lore of the expansion. As was puzzle lab and koft's story adventure. That said, I think they might need one more unique pve mode to put in the rotation. I think it would be cool if there was a mode where the player went through a story mode but instead of simply defeating bosses, they were given specific achievements to accomplish. The idea would be to make it feel like the npc quests you can take on in wow. Even cooler would be if the mode involved going back though old pve content to do it. They could even build it off the existing daily quest framework. They could make the mode reward a unique prestige currency which allows you to unlock new npcs with new missions as well as buy small rewards one time.
Anybody got a link to the video at blizzcon?
"The old way of doing solo content, adventures, didn't work out for them due to not having enough cards for a meta"
I usually don't write stuff like this but this time I have to agree that the only reason we're getting 3 expansions is because it's more profitable to them,and that's okay,I guess,they're a business and they have to make money but next time I hope they'll come up with more decent excuse to justify what they're doing cause I find this one to be an offense to the playerbase's intelligence....
BRM was still a lot of fun. I loved it!