Hearthstone’s upcoming expansion, Perils in Paradise, releases on July 23, although the cards will appear in Arena shortly before then. This new set takes players to the Spiral Isles, to the resort of Marin, asHearthstonecollectively goes on “vacation.” That is, except for the pirates and everything else going on with the Isles.
Game Rant recently visitedBlizzard Entertainment’s campus in Irvine, California, where we sat down with Hearthstone director Tyler Bielman and executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith to talk about Perils in Paradise. We talked about the top-down and bottom-up approaches to its development, how Tourists and “Hearthstone on vacation” came about, and much more.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Making Hearthstone’s Peril in Paradise Expansion
Q: How did the team settle on the idea of a vacation-themed expansion for Hearthstone?
Bielman: We have a bunch of different set and theme ideas in the Hopper, a bunch of exciting things. We do some amount of focus group testing on different ideas. While that doesn’t make the decision for us, it generally gives us a bit of a signal. In the case of this one, it started as apirate-themed expansion, which tested really well, but then when really started digging into what we could do with just pirates and swashbuckling, it felt a little bit limited. It felt a bit too indexed on this tribe, and it didn’t have the support for the classes we wanted.; So, the team put their heads together and thought–sometimes it’s a fun exercise to be like “Okay, this is Hearthstone in blank, a western or murder mystery or whatever.”
The idea of Hearthstone on vacation came up as you were thinking about pirates and boats and water, and it naturally evolved from there. As soon as it was Hearthstone on vacation, the ideas just came flooding in from a thematic point of view. I also like it because it’s a very accessible theme. Not all of us were around in the Wild West. I’m old, but I’m not that old. Vacations and holidays are things we all can identify with. We can identify with cool destinations, identify with drinks that you get on vacation, and what it’s like being a tourist. That’s kind of how it flowed. We went from the core idea of pirates into something broader and fell in love with the idea of Hearthstone on vacation, which I think comes through – especially in the amazing art and humor.
Q: What was the process like for deciding and defining those vacation elements like drinks and locations?
Bielman:Yeah, there are generally two ways that this stuff sort of evolves: top-down or bottom-up. Top-down is where you have a theme, creative idea, or what-if, and then you figure out how to express that mechanically in the set through the available rule sets. The top-down is Hearthstone on vacation, but the bottom-up is…I’ll just give you an example. ForTourists, we’ve done dual-class things in Hearthstonebefore, but in a lot of cases, they were somewhat mitigated versions, right? It had to feel a little bit like Class A and a little bit like Class B, and it can’t be too hard one way or the other. What we got excited about–and have been for a while–is the idea of a dual-class deck-building set where you can grab a real Mage card or areal Rogue cardthat you can bring into a deck and that gives you a two-class deck in a real specific way.
The idea of combining that with Tourists was bottom-up first and then top-down. It was really about wanting to dodual classesand having that in our pocket, then figuring out how we actually wanted to do it and finding a home for it. We found that home with Perils in Paradise. This translated to other classes, the theme, and consumables. Well, what are you consuming on your vacation if not colorful drinks? It’s always a combination of top-down and bottom-up.
Q: You touched on the Tourist keyword there a little bit, but I was curious if could you talk about the balance and development of the idea? Because that is a big change.
Bielman:Tourists went through different iterations of what it could be. At one point, it was wider than just cards from this set, for example. It became pretty clear that being able to balance that would be effectively impossible, but the team was really dedicated to finding a route to really explore this idea of a true dual-class deck. We decided to pare it down and into the context of just the Perils in Paradise set, and then that allowed us to make sure that the combinations of the cards worked well. The same thing happened with just having one-way Tourists; Tourists, at one point, unlocked a lot of different classes, right? In this case, we narrowed it down and found the rightHearthstone classcombinations. It was really important to find combinations that weren’t intrinsically obvious in every case, but we looked for synergies and made sure the cards were there.
We’re really excited because we’re giving players more interoperability in Standard than you’ve had before. Then, as the meta evolves, what we’re hoping is you’re going to hopefully get unique archetypes. But also, as the meta evolves, you’re going to see people be able to reach for solutions in other classes to whatever is currently happening in the meta. From a balanced tuning point of view, it’s definitely a challenge and definitely interesting. We are optimistic that we’ve gotten absolutely 100% everything right, but as with everything, there’ll be a balance patch in two weeks after its release. We’ll verify that we have the healthiest meta we can, right?
Q: You touched on the synergies and a little on my next question, but in general, what was the logic for the Tourist classes? Paladin into Rogue is wild.
Bielman:Yeah, it’s really just the two things I mentioned, right? One is making sure it wasn’t something that you would expect, right? It has to feel unexpected, exciting, and unnatural. Two, I would say it’s fairly case-by-case, and I wouldn’t say there was a general philosophy except to try to unlock new archetypes.
Q: Can you discuss the design and card approach to Drink Servers and Travel Agents? I get a big old kick out of those.
Bielman:The thematic elementsare crowdsourced. In a lot of cases, we have a young, energetic, pop culture-savvy design team. It’s a creative team, and they really get a kick out of referencing other games, pop culture, and writing cheeky flavor text. If you go to the trouble of inspecting it, you will find really funny stuff. In a lot of cases, a lot of that stuff is crowdsourced, so internally not externally, but we have calls for flavor text, for example, and calls for card naming. We’ll get stuff in our inbox like “Hey, here’s the art, and here’s the power.” Then you’ll submit names, and those names go to a voting people where people can vote. People can submit flavor text across the team. It is at the quality that it’s at because it’s not any one person’s voice.
Ultimately, the lead designer of the set is the vision holder for the set. They know what the overall goals are from us as the leadership team, but they have a lot of creative authority over how that set is going to develop, what that set is going to be in conjunction with our initial design, and in our final design. I don’t think any one person could be that funny. Adding those concepts to those cards…sometimes, it’s just talking bottom-up. What is the tour guide? It’s this. We have a drink. What’s the right name for that, or what’s the right thing to do with that?
Hearthstone’s Perils in Paradise Expansion Comes at an Important Time
Q: Throughout development, are there any behind-the-scene moments that come to mind as a particular fund moment for the set as a whole?
Lyons-Smith: I want you to get that the pitch of pirates came across strong. It started as pirates, right? Tyler talked about that a little. Design said, “Hey, we want to do a pirates thing,” and it was like great, we love pirates. Hearthstone has a bunch of pirates. Players love pirates. What’s next, and we talked about how it evolved. Another thing we did differently in this expansion was we did acontent creator announcement flight safety video. We’ve been very deliberate about shaking up how we’re doing our marketing. And Cathy Magnien, our marketing director, we had talked to her about doing something different from what we’ve done in the past. She got her team together, brainstormed a bunch of ideas, and then said, “Hey, we think a Hearthstone-esque flight safety video on the way to the resort with our content creators could land really well, and we can pull it off.”
This was fascinating to me because, as a developer, I know software, building software, and shipping software, and I rely on Cathy completely for marketing and logistics of all that. That looks way hard to me, but she was like, “Nope, it’s no problem.” We have an agency who go and do this and got it all together filmed. She was on site there with her team, and it landed really well with players. It landed really well with the content creators that were in that, so, yeah, behind the scenes, it was a very deliberate decision to take a different tactic, to make something different, to get eyes on Hearthstone. We’re 10 years in here trying to verify that players understand that we’re still doing, innovating, and putting out new experiences when we go check out the game.
Q: We’re at 10 years of Hearthstone now. How does it really feel to be at such a major precipice for the game and continuing to work on it?
Lyons-Smith:Exciting and Terrifying. I’ve been a player since beta, longer than I’ve been an employee of Blizzard. I’ve only been on the Hearthstone team for five and a half years, but I’ve loved and enjoyed10 years of Hearthstoneas a player. I just feel incredibly lucky to be leading the team working on this game that has been my favorite game for 10 years. From the player perspective, I get to know what’s coming, and I’m really excited about all that, jumping in, having fun, and seeing the delight from players. The terrifying part is “Oh, there are millions of players out there” and we have to constantly ask how do we continue to find the right fun and different things to do. Thankfully, the team is incredible. The fun and whimsy that you see in the game is because the team itself has this nature of being fun and whimsy.
All they do is like ask what would be fun and whimsical, then they go out and just make that thing. It’s this momentum that just keeps going and providing that content out there for players. We’re charged with making sure there’s another 10 years of Hearthstone, and what you would expect to see there is a lot of what you’ve been seeing over the last few years of a focus on the modes where we’re seeing all of our players go and play. It’s primarily inConstructed and Battlegrounds. You’re seeing some more in Arena because we’ve got a really core group of Arena players that are having a lot of fun there. However, we’re experimenting on the side of what the next different thing could be, and we’re always running different types of internal playtests, some of which eventually do get out to players. For any given thing players see, there’s 10 times more scope that we would have liked to have done that doesn’t always fit in, but they are always in the pocket if players really like and enjoy certain things. We’re always noodling on about what’s going to come next, and setting that roadmap out in front of the team.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Bielman:Just one quick thing, you’ll able to play it in Arena next week before the launch. That’s going to be super cool. We can’t wait. It’s going to be sort of people’s first ability to mess around with the cards, so get on that next week and then be there for the launch the week after. We can’t wait to see what you do with the set.
Lyons-Smith:I actually have two things. One,to the community, thank you for all the feedback however it’s given. We really do appreciate it, and we do consume all of it. We’ve got people dedicated to the community who will go find it, summarize it, and consume it, and then the team itself loves playing the game in those community spaces, reading, observing, and calibrating based on what’s being communicated there. Thank you for that. To you, Joshua, thank you for being a conduit to a different section of the community that’s reading what you’re writing. It really does help us get the message out of what’s fun and why, and hopefully, it can reach more people so the resort can be successful.
[END]
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Deceptively simple, insanely fun. Sheathe your sword, draw your deck, and get ready for Hearthstone—the fast-paced strategy card game that’s easy to learn and massively fun. You’ll play your cards to sling spells, summon creatures, and command the heroes of Warcraft in duels of epic strategy. Did we mention it’s free to play? Get Packed for Paradise with Hearthstone’s newest expansion, Perils in Paradise.Play on your own schedule—most games take less than 10 minutes whether you’re battling your friends or the AI. Hearthstone’s easy to learn and extremely accessible gameplay is available for Windows, Mac, and iPad.Your deck is centered around a legendary hero and composed of minions, spells, items, and abilities from the epic Warcraft universe. While you play, the sights, sounds, and other details packed into Hearthstone bring the Warcraft universe to life in a way you’ve never experienced before.
