Hearthstone released a balance patch this week, making changes to the build mode and tavern wargame mode, which is basically the last major change before the next Hearthstone year arrives. If nothing else, there will be a preview next week, with new core series, new Hearthstone year, new expansion packs, wild callback cards, and possibly even new classes. Various game assets and new card backs previously released by the authorities suggest that the Samurai Monk has the potential to become Hearthstone's 11th class.
However, Hearthstone's director Ben Lee announced on March 4 that he was leaving the Hearthstone team to join Blizzard's other divisions to develop a new game. It's unclear which project he joined, with Blizzard unveiling a survival game last month, but last year Hearthstone's chief game designer Alec said he joined the development of a new game, and Mike and Peter two years ago joined the new project, and they may be reunited this time.
Ben Lee, who joined the Hearthstone team in December 2018, often appears in launches and videos, and veteran players are no strangers to him, bringing a repetitive protection mechanism for opening the bag, making it easier for novices to adapt to the game, and insisting on introducing the tavern wargame mode. Under his leadership, Hearthstone has grown tremendously in the last three years, and of course, the game Horse Rush has nothing to do with Ben, who is not responsible for the design and balance of cards.
Before saying goodbye to Hearthstone, he himself was interviewed today by foreign podcast Coin Concede. The content of this podcast is relatively long, and Sara is here to excerpt the highlights of the interview.
- The Hearthstone team wanted to provide a different gaming experience for different types of players.
- In fact, players don't really want to pursue real balance, and it is difficult to do everything right.
- Blizzard isn't afraid to admit that they made mistakes.
- It's not easy to roll out some changes, and the logistics of the game update are challenging.
Ben thinks we'll see fewer OTK decks in the future, and the game environment is always going through cyclical changes.
- Some versions will have more hero cards, some versions are partial control or combination technique ideas, and the game content will be released periodically.
- Part of the Stalker class theme is to give the player a lot of choice, so in a way, passing cards and resource generation are things that designers want to offer to this class.
- It's hard to change certain cards when they support the strength of a class, and they don't want to make all players in that class feel bad.
- Sometimes they don't do a very good job of balance because Hearthstone's development team is still relatively small overall.
- They argue that "cards cannot be reduced to less than 1 fee" as the default rule is not suitable for Hearthstone, which is not intuitive and should be written on cards. If a card with a fee reduction mechanism is really strong, they will use this rule directly on the card.
- Designers know that players have a lot of enthusiasm for the fee reduction mechanism, and they will reduce the number of cards that introduce the fee reduction mechanism, but it is not bad to give a little appropriately.
- When the new expansion pack goes live, players use new cards more than the team's internal testing capabilities.
- Spell factions are a means of increasing the depth of the game.
-The Pub Wargame mode continues to grow.
- Adding armor mechanics to the Tavern Wargame mode is a fun thing to do.
- Tavern Wargame's buddy system makes it easier for them to adjust their strength and learn what players like.
- New minions will be added to the Tavern Wargames and will bring more fun to the game.
- The Tavern Wargame mode is easy to get started with, helping Hearthstone stay popular on the live platform.
- Duel mode has always been played, and now there are some anchors playing.
- Duel mode has some stable audience.
- Hearthstone has been out for eight years after all, and some players are understandably bored. They will continue to give players more to dig into and keep everyone interested.
- They admitted to not being able to launch more new content they wanted to add after the release of Mercenary Mode.
- There have been a lot of problems in the past year, and the epidemic has caused working from home to affect a lot of things.
- Mercenary mode has some interesting game systems coming soon.
- They didn't expect players to get a lot of extra coins so quickly in mercenary mode.
- Mercenary mode is a mode where players can come back at any time to play and play PVE content at their own pace.
- Some players finish all the mercenaries in the first week.
- Last year's mercenary model's commercial success led to Hearthstone's continued growth.
- If Hearthstone hadn't been financially successful, they wouldn't have had a chance to make these new content.
- Getting more players to play Hearthstone is the primary consideration for the success of the game, and you need to let everyone know when new content is coming.
- Login bonuses are just fake active and game indicators, they want players to really enjoy playing this game and are willing to stay in Hearthstone.
- Hearthstone earns more money each year than most AAA games.
- The core series is very interesting for the team and has been a great success.
- In the next core series, some familiar faces return, including some of the old cards that were previously rotated, as well as some new cards that use old characters.
- The theme of the next Hearthstone year is related to the return of some characters.
- Pandaria's Cooking Contest was once the theme of the top three expansion packs, but it has not yet been officially produced.
- In the new year, Hearthstone will have a bunch of new card types that they're experimenting with, and Ben hopes players will love these new cards.
- Production director Nathan temporarily became the new game director and continues to be in charge of more PR work for Hearthstone.
Overall, Hearthstone is still moving in a good direction, and even if Ben leaves the design director position, many of the game-making ideas will remain. With Microsoft completing its acquisition of Blizzard, the hearthstone team's developers were able to free their hands and feet and bring more interesting new content in the future. And Ben mentioned the return of the old faces of the new core series, most likely the Explorers Association and the Cosmic System, which is one of the most popular mechanisms in Hearthstone, and last year's Core Series brought back various well-known dragon cards, and this year it may be the Likes of The Cosmic Card and Renault.