by hsdecktech - 7 years ago     show comments

This afternoon, Ben Brode, Game Director of Hearthstone and infamous denizen of the bastion of flannel, sat down for an AMA (“ask me anything”) with the Reddit community. He discussed card design, pizza (he’s OK with pineapple on it), and his rap career. You can find the entire thread (including all the questions he could not get to) here, but if you don’t want to read through all of that, here are some highlights:

• Additional player stats will become available in time, but not in the form of a “profile page.” More details to come later this year.
• The team would like to make Handlock a thing again, but they are not yet sure if the best course of action is to “un-nerf” Molten Giant while moving it to the Hall of Fame or rather to print new cards that work with the archetype in both Standard and Wild.
• Each class will get both a Hero Card and a Legendary Minion in Knights of the Frozen Throne.
• Lord Jaraxxus is still Ben’s favorite card.
• They are not currently considering a port to consoles.
• Ice Block is “definitely a card that [raises] red flags for cards that maybe shouldn’t be in Standard forever[,]” but that does not mean it will be in the next rotation. Cards will continue to rotate to Wild at the same time as Standard rotations (with the first set each year).
• Ben is working on a video of all his favorite memes. He has a special fondness for “4 mana 7/7.”
• There will be more cards (like Flametongue Totem and Meteor) that relate to minion-placement.
• There will be “lots of opportunities to earn packs of the new set through some upcoming events and through the single player missions that will be free with the new set.”
• Ben likes the Charge mechanic, but states it has been their biggest balance challenge and that he is not sure what the future of the mechanic will be.
• Game length has been “remarkably consistent over every meta, and it feels pretty good (about 7.5 minutes on average.)”
• Stonetusk Boar is the card “most guilty” of limiting design space. Principle Game Designer Mike Donais agreed and added Preparation, Innervate, and Malygos to the list.
• They are nearly done with design on set 3 of the year of the mammoth, are hard at work on set 1 of next year, and have begun brainstorming for set 2 of next year. [Author’s note: this does not mean that set 3 of this year is nearly ready to release. It almost certainly still has to go through a lot of testing (part of “development”) and may also still need art assets and programming.]
• (Despite community theories to the contrary) Ben does not believe they have “basically ever” been restricted  in what features they can implement based on the fact that they design for mobile and desktop.