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.
infinite? You can only hero power once in a turn if you do not own a special minion that allow more.
Wait, they originally allowed choosing the next boss in the runs? That would make those modes so much more tolerable! The "negative experience" of not knowing how bosses work would fade over time, and the current problem of randomly winding up in unwinnable games would be greatly mitigated.
Part of building deck is to build deck which you want to play, not against what you will face. For example in ranked, you try to counter the meta, but you don't know against who you will face, so you may make decision to put more or less technical cards. Actually adventures was so easy, that the fact that we don't know who is next boss, at least make them a bit more challenging. Which actually is part of the idea, to be harder.
The solo adventures have always been my favorite part of hearthstone. They’re well made (except karazhan for the most part) well balanced, and you can tell a lot of work goes into them between all the voice lines and the creative mechanics implemented. The new content is great too, but I hope one day they come back with a heroic mode. I always enjoyed a new take on a boss but they were much more powerful. Nobody can forget heroic chromaggus or saphiron. It was also a lot of fun to discuss strategies between friends for what worked and what was bad. The Lich King fight with all 9 classes really captured this feeling, my friends and I would share all these different strategies. All of this is to say the dungeon run format is enjoyable, but lacks that refreshing challenge that the heroic modes provided.
"The old way of doing solo content, adventures, didn't work out for them due to not having enough cards for a meta"
What the hell are they talking about. I can think of tons of cards in the adventure that saw play as well as some that spawned their own goddamn deck type. Reno Jackson alone was a savior from Aggro decks. You could print high power level cards with Solo Adventures and everyone could get them by going through a wing as opposed to hoping you either have enough dust to get it or hope your luck is good enough that you get one in a pack.
People used to complain (in the typical way of the Hearthstone "fandom") quite loudly that the meta was too stale without three full expansions a year.
They still do that even with three full expansions. The quality of the cards can effect a meta better than quantity.
I didn't make an argument for either position - I'm merely explaining that they listened to a very vocal contingent of the fanbase in changing gears. Blizzard's argument was the same as yours at the time.
The thing with new adventures is (as I see it) there's no particular reason for any player to play it, except cardback (but let's be honest not that many people even care about those adv. cardbacks) and fun. There is only two daily quests related to it and they're REALLY rare; I did get dungeon run quest only once since KnC release. Like Blizzard what's stopping you from adding some actual rewards for defeating all the bosses like: 1-3 packs, thematically related cards for defeating every boss (or maybe just an additional legendary after defeating final boss ), hero skin - any of these options would've been better than a cardback. In my opinion even 1-2 packs as a reward would bring much more popularity to this mode, than a cardback.
Well, people who don't have all the cards and get screwed over in PVP or are just not into going through the anxiety of competing can play dungeon-run nonstop and not play anything else in the game.
I have quite a few friends that do that. They have hearthstone ONLY to play Dungeon Run.
I mean, I'm pretty much enjoying solo content too - when it comes out I can spend 5-10 hours in a row just to finish it with all classes/or pick meme variants just to see how different interactions work, but still.. I don't think everyone would enjoy it without any encouragement from Blizz (because again not everybody cares about cardback) and 1-3 packs or different small rewards imo are the best way to do it.
@jim
I understand your point. However, these modes will be much more played if there is an actual reward in packs.
At this point the people who play are usually people who don't have many cards yet and have this mode for fun factors.
If you add a few packs as reward, the competitive player will play this mode more often as well, which leads into more popularity.
I myself have tried these modes and the only mode I still do every once in a while are dungeon runs.
All the others... meh.
I Know!! Dungeon run is how i got my friends into Hearthstone after 3 years of massively failed attempts
Agree SO hard with this. A mini-adventure released in the middle of an expansion's cycle (roughly a month and a half after initial expansion release) would breath new life into the meta, without a doubt.
It doesn't have to be a full on adventure with five wings or whatever; just enough content, maybe one large wing, with Idk, a dozen cards that aren't filler that will impact the meta. Monetize it for a few dollars or a reasonable chunk of gold and BOOM instant meta-refresher. This is such an obvious idea and frankly, after the meta growing stale and the increasing complaints (enough to force their hand on nerfs apparently) I fully expect Blizz to implement something of the sort before long. Perhaps after next rotation, which cannot come soon enough.
Mini-adventures, Blizzard; it's a win-win.
They said Tournament mode is coming around summer. I’m pretty sure summer has ended..
https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/22483774
Ok, I DO like the new solo content more than old adventures, but I'll bite and play devil's advocate here:
To everyone saying "Adventures didn't have enough effect in the meta because they had less cards"
NO!
Adventures have less effect in the meta because it mostly only had filler and trash cards!
If giggling inventor, a single neutral card can have so much effect in the meta, a few class cards could change the meta completely.
The problem is them printing bad cards when you only have a limited number of them to make.
With a handful of new cards they can change the meta completely if they really wanted to. I like the new solo content because I am not that much of a fan of PvP and playing PVE solo every once in a while is cool. You could barely do that with old adventure systems.
I'm totally okay with that being the motive to get rid of adventures. To engage different kinds of players and all. But to say that you need to print more cards because the ones you print aren't enough?
THEN STOP PRINTING CARDS THAT WILL NEVER SEE PLAY. I know that some of this stuff is subjective and yeah, they can print better cards in the future that make older cards better but some of the stuff they make would not even be played in a different context.
I'm not arguing I think the guy is wrong, or blizzard is wrong. I just hate this argument that "more cards = meta shift = better game"
We got 2 expansions now in a row that barely changed anything for most classes. Getting 500 cards when only 30 is making a different is not solved by "MORE CARDS". It's solved by better balancing of the game. Both getting rid of decks that make archetypes irrelevant and by printing better cards instead of underpowered ones that don't even work on meme decks.
I completely agree that the idea that less cards = less meta is kind of stupid as we look at the past few expansions.
I think what they really meant is that with less cards, they can't build so many different archetypes for a single class. For example, if they were to only want to push an aggressive mage, but the cards did not turn out as meta as they expected, then mage will feel boring or just dead as a class.
Meanwhile, if they give mage two or three different archetypes they can work off of, then maybe one will come out meta out of the three they will push. It becomes more secure way of guaranteeing every class will be competitive at some point.
It is entirely possible that with the current design philosophy they have going they could attempt to do that with a current adventure, but it is definitely safer to print out more possible meta cards instead of a few cards that might not work, because in the end of the day, it is hard for Blizzard to predict what cards will actually be used.
When will people understand that they don't do all those things not because they are incompetent or they don't know how to do best. They just have a marketing team, and this marketing team is telling them what to do, and if they say "make 80% of the set garbage filler cards, because people will buy it anyway" they will do 80% garbage filler cards because people will buy it anyway. Pretty much that's why.
The thing is, that KaC, KFT and Ungoro were too high in terms of power level. Quests (partly), DKs, cheating out high stat'd minions. WW and BDP did not follow that trend, which is why only a smaller pool of cards found its way into the meta (even though more than a handful did manage that). Blizz hinted, that RR won't be different in that point.
Once the rotation comes, you will notice the difference though. Last years power creep brought in new cards but not healthy metas but rather high roll combos, this year we got lots of different but interesting mechanics and meme stuff (for now at least they are memes). I hope blizzard finally finds a way to not power creep as much. A new standard year might solve this unless they begin to shake things up again with topping an expansion with the next one.
For example: Karazhan was a major failure which proved how horrible adventure cards can turn out. Little additions to the meta made shaman rule for 6 months straight. Only the high power level of MSoG managed to change that.