Blizzard unveiled its next Hearthstone expansion yesterday, and boy, is it going to shake things up. Knights of the Frozen Throne is coming in August and will take players to Northrend and give them 135 new cards to play with, including a new type of card, the Hero card. There’s one of these per class and playing them sees the hero transform into a Death Knight version of themselves. An evil, undead version of themselves.
Rexxar, for instance, becomes Rexxar Darkstalker. Playing his card will gain you armour, do AOE damage and give you a new hero power that lets you stitch together hideous chimera-like creatures, via a double Discovery, where you choose two beasts and then they fuse into one, with all the stats combined, all the abilities represented and costing whatever the total mana cost is. (Mike Donais has clarified how this works a little. You’ll be offered Hunter and neutral beasts at equal rates, they’ll always be five mana or below and the first pick is cards with text, the second with keywords or vanilla.)
This will also be the first expansion that’s paired with mission content, which was formerly the domain of Hearthstone’s adventures. They’ll take the form of eight boss battles as players enter the Ice Citadel and eventually face off against the Lich King himself. The Lich King is obviously one of the most significant and important elements of World of Warcraft lore, so seeing him in Hearthstone is a big big deal for WoW fans.
The feel of this expansion as a whole is obviously a lot darker than something like Karazhan, dealing, as it does, with Death Knights and the Lich King, so I’m very curious to see where Team 5 take it. They’ll be revealing more cards starting July 24, but for now, I caught up with Lead Mission Designer Dave Kosak and Senior Concept Artist Jerry Mascho in Shanghai to chat about the expansion, and there’s some really great stuff in the conversation that follows. Enjoy!
IGN: This is obviously a concept that you guys have been kicking around for a long time. How did you decide on this particular direction for Northrend and the Lich King?
Dave Kosak: This theme has been really powerful. We always kind of had it in the back pocket, as something that would be great for Hearthstone. We also wanted to time it out right. We like to mix it up a lot with Hearthstone – have some funny stuff, charming stuff, and kind of make sure you’re always surprised with each expansion. So it felt like this was a good time to bust out with this one. It’s got a little bit more of a serious take, but at the same time it’s still Hearthstone, and you saw some of that – it’s the Hearthstone version of this theme in the preview stuff we’ve shown so far.
IGN: How did you get to this point? Were there other ideas you explored that didn’t work out?
“The idea that all of our nine marquee heroes get changed into Death Knights, that came pretty early…” – Dave Kosak.
Dave Kosak: With this one we were really looking at – what’s the coolest fantasy? How do we express the coolest possible thing that could happen with the Lich King and Northrend and Death Knights? How do we make sure that every class has a lot of fun? And the idea that all of our nine marquee heroes get changed into Death Knights, that came pretty early, because that was like – that seemed like the most fun, right? So we began noodling on that idea really early on and that stuck throughout the process. That was one of those ones where you kind of hit on it early. The individual heroes – definitely we iterated on it and some whole designs were thrown out, but ultimately we wanted to do this, we wanted to make sure every hero had something really cool going on.
Jerry Mascho: On our team, one of the internal artists, Jomaro Kindred, he’s the senior concept artist on the team, he did these really cool designs for each of the heroes, and he worked with [game] design to find out what these guys would look like, as far as taking those iconic heroes and showing the dark side, and really amping that up. They’re not just Death Knights, they’re something totally different.
IGN: It must have been a lot of fun to reinvent all nine of those heroes.
Jerry Mascho: Yeah, we had a lot of fun with that.
IGN: I’m curious whether the art direction informed the game design at all? Like, if the initial concept art for Jaina includes her holding a particular staff or something and then that feeds back.
Jerry Mascho: On the art team we always want to support gameplay first, so it was always an idea that came from design, and we’re just trying to amplify that and make sure it’s really clear to the players, so it’s super accessible and also really clear that when you’re playing that hero that looks like what he or she does.
“We wanted to embody the three presences of Death Knights – the blood, the plague, the unholy – and so, the nine heroes kind of do fall in those categories, and maybe if you do look at the art closely you might be able to figure out who’s falling into each one.” – Dave Kosak.
Dave Kosak: Something that did come from the art team, though, was the idea that we wanted to embody the three presences of Death Knights – the blood, the plague, the unholy – and so, the nine heroes kind of do fall in those categories, and maybe if you do look at the art closely you might be able to figure out who’s falling into each one.
IGN: It’s Mean Streets all over again!
Dave Kosak: (Laughs) Yeah, but mechanically they do all play uniquely.
IGN: People have been asking for Death Knight as a class since the earliest days of Hearthstone, so I love that you’ve found a way to implement it on a whole other level, implementing it in a unique way across all nine classes.
Dave Kosak: We tell people – it’s nine times the fun! You want to make sure in an expansion everybody has something to do, and this way all nine classes have something really exciting going on. You really get a whole lot of gameplay out of that, and then going down the line it’s much easier in expansion after expansion to follow it up, because we have these nine hero cards, and there’ll continue to be hero cards while this is in standard rotation. They’ll still fit into what’s happening down the line.
IGN: Having a bespoke idea embodied in a build-around card for each class is an interesting trend for this year’s expansions. First we had Un’Goro’s Quests and now this. I think it’s a really cool direction to go in because it just opens things up so much more – they’re much less likely to simply build on archetypes that are already there. And using Rexxar as an example, that class is a bit hamstrung by its hero power, but now this allows you to shift it up.
Dave Kosak: Yeah, I think that one should see some [play] – it’s costed so it’s kind of at that line where just as you’re transitioning from the mid-game to the end-game you make this big splash, this big impact and suddenly you’re changing up the way the game plays out. It’s a fun card.
Jerry Mascho: The fact that you can do it each turn and you can choose what you need situationally is powerful. It’s nice.
Dave Kosak: The “build-a-beast” lets you really change up your game.
IGN: It’s very much like the next evolution of the Discover mechanic. The biggest question is just whether it’s too slow. You guys have been adding control Hunter tools for a while though, so maybe this is the set that it’ll come together.
Dave Kosak: Our final design team is working really hard to ensure that it becomes part of the play.
You can see "build-a-beast" in action, as well as other new cards, above.
IGN: What were the initial discussions like in terms of your roles – concept art and mission design?
Dave Kosak: It’s a super collaborative process… it’s the whole team getting together and saying “what’s going to be really really cool?” What’s fun is that we all come at it from different angles, so I – until recently – was on the World of Warcraft team, and so I was really fascinated by “what’s the kind of story we’re telling?” And by story I don’t mean, y’know, the narrative of A happens and B happens, I mean, like, what’s the theme behind these heroes. Who are they? What do they become? So the story with Rexxar is he gets this unholy power and starts stitching together his animals and these abominations. It’s a really fun story for me. And so I was trying to look at it as – what’s the story with each of these heroes, whereas another approach is – what’s the cool design? What would be really fun to see in Hearthstone? Does that map to any of these heroes? And again, super iterative and what we try and do is put stuff in the game and try it right away, and see if works, see how it plays. Hunter was one of the ones where once it was in-game and we started putting the cards together, it was super fun, so that stays! (Laughs) That works really well.
Jerry Mascho: On the art direction side it was super collaborative. I personally didn’t work on the new designs for the heroes - Jomaro Kindred did, but he worked with Ben Brode and Ben Thompson, our art director, in a very collaborative process. And for the first pass, they were just trying to get an idea of what these things could be, and as design tightened up what they wanted to do mechanic-wise, that really informed what the art would be, and they built that into the next level, take everything to 11 – what these guys look like is Death Knights – and go from there.
Dave Kosak: Talking about that iteration, mechanically we tried a lot of different things to sort of express how these characters become Death Knights. Do they shuffle different cards into your deck? Do they do different things like that? Until we finally came out with the – let’s change up the hero power, and lets have them enter the board with a huge splash. That big entrance really ends up becoming part of the marquee. In the case of Deathstalker Rexxar when he comes on the board and just fans out arrows on every minion – FOOM! – and then just starts making these monsters, it makes a big impact, and then once we had a couple of heroes that did that, we’re like “okay, that has to happen”. That’s the fantasy in a big way when you sort of slam your fist on the board and say “I’m a Death Knight now!” And we really doubled down on that.
IGN: It’s one of the things that Hearthstone does better than any other CCG – the impact of all the animations and sound effects. It’s all just so lovingly crafted.
Jerry Mascho: One of our FX artists, Hadidjah Chamberlin, created all of the “come into play” effects on the new heroes and I think Rexxar really sells that story. Even playing Rexxar for so long and now you’re telling the story of becoming Deathstalker Rexxar, and that come into play effect happening as he slams down, it tells that story. And it’s really good to feel that and to play that card.
IGN: How has the shift from missions being linked to adventures – and a smaller set of cards, to being linked to a full expansion set changed your opportunities for storytelling? For instance, when Mean Streets came out, I was like “man, I’d love to see some more story content around this!”
Dave Kosak: Right! That’s exactly how we felt about Mean Streets. We had these great great characters, and you kind of had the quest that you could do when the expansion launched to sort of introduce the characters, but you really didn’t get to interact with them in a way that was narrative. And this gives us an opportunity to do that. And yeah, going forward, we’re excited about that. It’ll be full 135 card sets, as well as this opportunity to tell a little bit of story with the missions. And the goal of missions now, it kind of changes, because you’re not gating cards behind the content. Now it’s really about getting people excited about the expansion, getting people interacting with the new cards in a new way, introducing these characters to players, that’s important. It’s especially important here because Hearthstone players might not have played Warcraft 3 or World of Warcraft, they might not know who the Lich King is yet. We’ve got to really establish who the Lich King is and that can be fun, because we kind of give a Hearthstone take on it.
IGN: Well, I’m that guy. I came to Hearthstone having played very little WoW. The game just appealed to me because of how great the game design was and how great the presentation was. So yeah, I’ve just been piecing together bits and pieces of WoW lore over the last few years. I obviously know how important the Lich King is to Warcraft fans, but it’s not like I’ve played through that content. It must be an interesting challenge balancing fan service with also trying to get to the core essence of what newcomers need to understand about these characters.
Dave Kosak: Yeah, and it really informed the mission design. If you played World of Warcraft, it’s kind of like a greatest hits of the raid. You see the characters you recognise in a new context, they’ll be doing mechanics that kind of echo the things that happened in the raid, but with a very Hearthstone spin on it. But even if you’ve never seen these characters before, now you get to be introduced to them and what they’re all about, and have a lot of fun with them. And a few of those bosses then are going to become collectible cards that are in the set. Super super fun.
Continues
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire