Blizzard senior game designer Ben Brode has posted a seven and a half minute developer diary to discusses upcoming content updates for online collectible card game Hearthstone. The video led to an intense Reddit discussion which became sort of an impromptu AMA.
The main reason for the video, according to Brode, was to reassure that the development team wasn’t sitting on their duffs eating bon-bons, and that just because there was no news coming out of the studio it didn’t mean they weren’t working on improving the game.
He discussed the timing of announcements, in that it would be a mistake to tell the community about plans too early for several reasons. For starters, after a certain period of time, excitement over a new feature lessens, and by the time it’s released, it’s almost an afterthought. Then there’s the possibility that a cool-sounding idea would end up either being unfeasible, exploitable, or hackable, which would lead to disappointment from fans that it didn’t work out.
He did mention that one of the most-requested features, deck slots, was ”not far away”, and revealed the team has made many iterations of a deck management feature that haven’t been released yet. He added there are ”many (ideas) in the pipe for down the line.”
In the Reddit post discussion about the video, Brode noted some interesting facts. For example, he stated the only place that Warsong was nerfed was in eSports play, and not in the general ladder. ”One of the things I am worried about is announcing a nerf too far before the patch that contains it,” he stated, ”I think it feels worse to lose to Warsong when we’ve announced ‘this is broken and we are going to nerf it’, than when it’s a still a point of discussion.”
Brode also revealed that the team had grown in size since last year thanks to the success of Hearthstone. ”Since last year we’ve almost doubled the size of the team (over 50 people now! Remember when it was 15?!), and we are still hiring like crazy!”
