Interview with Hearthstone Developers: Eric Dodds & Ben Brode

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Hail and well met fellow Inn dwellers!

Last Tuesday I had the pleasure to talk some Hearthstone with Lead Designer, Eric Dodds and Senior Game Designer, Ben Brode. I’ve gathered some of the most amusing questions from various community members and feeling prepared I’ve eagerly answered the skype call from Lyndsi Achucarro. Allow me to tell you the story on how I’ve spent those exciting 20 minutes.

After a short greeting and introductions I fired away with the first question that was tormenting many players and nobody dared to ask it before!

Gnimsh: Why is there dynamite in Nat Pagle’s boat?

Blizzard : <Laughter>

Ben Brode: Yeah well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because Nat Pagle is a non-traditional fisherman willing to take any means necessary to catch fish. He’s always trying new techniques, dynamite happens to work very well at getting a lot of fish.

Eric Dodds: Well it works about half the time I’d say

<Laughter>

Gnimsh: That’s hardcore! Next question! Are there any plans for implementing a timer for player duels? When there’s a tournament and people play, we use the duel option and some people think for a really long time. Is it on the list?

Eric Dodds: It’s definitely something that we’ve talked about and really what we’re doing right now is while we’re trying to finish the game we’re paying a lot of attention to the eSports community and seeing what features are most important. As we do that, we’re going to go “Okay, these are the things we really have to get in there” and then start working on that shortly after ship. Exactly when we get in what feature depends because there’s a whole lot of features people are looking for. It’s certainly something that we’ve heard before and talked about before and are looking at in the future.

Gnimsh: Okay so it’s on the list but it won’t be released before launch?

Eric Dodds: It’ll probably be a little while after that because there’s definitely a lot of features people are looking for in Hearthstone.

Gnimsh: Ah okay, that’s cool. Next question would be; What do you think about adding more emotes like “Good Game” or “Lucky?”

Ben Brode: You know, we actually had a lucky emote in the game in our prototype and what ended up happening throughout our alpha testing was basically anytime your opponent did anything good you would emote “Lucky.” It felt really kinda bad because you felt you were making good plays and everything you did your opponent would go “Lucky, lucky, lucky” and you’d go “Come on! I just made a great play!” It was used for evil more than good. “Good game” we talked about as well, we even went so far as to record the audio good game emotes but we were really concerned with players preemptive gg’ing eachother because that feels bad. Players mostly use “Well Played” mostly for good game as well right now. We couldn’t come up with a way that let us have a good game emote and prevent players from using it in a negative way.

Eric Dodds: Yeah but all that said we’re certainly paying a lot of attention to the emotes players are using and how they’re using them and talking about them. We’re not just going to let it sit as is, it’s just a question of when we get around to looking at expanding and improving the emote system.

Gnimsh: That’s totally fair. Is there any chance for an Observer Mode to come out for launch?

Ben Brode: There’s no chance it’d make launch, but it’s definitely high on our list for something we’ll be looking into after that point. Right now we’re really focused on fixing all the remaining bugs, getting card backs and golden Heroes in to incentivize the rank play. We’re working on a reconnect feature as well.

Gnimsh: Oh the reconnect feature will make it before launch?

Eric Dodds: Yeah we intend to have the reconnect feature in for launch.

Gnimsh: There has been talk about having different heroes for each class to choose from. How many do you feel is enough? Is two or three enough?

Ben Brode: That feature is something we’re just at the start of discussing so we don’t have any real information to share about it right now.

Gnimsh: Now a question about art. What’s the process behind art selection? You obviously have a bank of all the Warcraft art so how do you select art for specific cards? Is it a team that decides art or one person that designs it?

Ben Brode: The process right now is that I go through all of the art that we’ve made for all different kinds of things. Book covers, other products, comic book covers, etc and I look through it all and try and find the

piece of art that best fits the card that we’re designing. Sometimes we see a piece of art that I think is awesome and we design a card specifically for that art. Sometimes we have a card that we’ve never really done a high quality illustration for that character or that monster-type. For instance Acidic Swamp Ooze we had to commission new art for. Archmage Antonidas or Anduin Wrynn

we didn’t have any art at all and we wanted to put these characters into the game so we commission the art when we don’t have it already. Then I take that art and Ben Thompson the Art Director and I discuss it and I’ll pick five different shadow-damage spells and pick the one that best fits the card design that we have.