Hearthstone: 10 Bits Of Design Wisdom

hello so first I've been asked to have you silence your cellphone's and then we can start so I am Eric Dodds I am the game director on hearthstone and I'm going to talk a little bit about 10 things that while we were developing hearthstone we found to be very very useful sort of as high-level design things so I'm going to talk a little bit about the specifics of the things we did and also sort of why those things are important and so here are the things that I'm going to be talking about as you'll see there's a whole bunch of things crossing a whole bunch of different ideas and they're all pretty big topics so I'm not going to be you know deep diving into any of the specifics it's going to be more just talking about a couple of and examples how they related to hearthstone and sort of the ideas behind them so the first thing that worked out very very very well for hearthstone is that we were able to iterate fast and that's certainly something that you will hear over and over if you go to GDC talks it's it's not like rocket science or anything to iterate fast and certainly on hearthstone we found that we had tons and tons of bad ideas that we needed to try and then not do and so that quick iteration let us not do all of those ideas and I guess the interesting thing is is perhaps how we did the quick iteration so to start we had a lot of pure design time and what I mean by that is me and ben brode the other designer on the project spent a lot of time before anything else really happened trying to figure out what the design of the game was and i would love to say that that was planned but accurately what I can say is that instead all of our engineers were moved to another project for a while to help out with that project and and so we got a lot of but inadvertent pure design time and for us it was very very important for a couple of reasons the the first reason why this design time was important was of course because our engineers were not asking us questions and bothering us asking those questions so we could focus on design but actually one of the big reasons it was important is because if we had had engineers to ask us those questions we would have answered their questions and we wouldn't have had enough information to actually know what we were going to do in the final design and so we would have told them things that later on would have kind of hosed us because we would have later on said okay here's our design now and they would have gone you know a year ago when you told us that you wanted it to work like this well we implemented like this and then it would've made it much more difficult or impossible to do the actual design that we sort of wanted to follow through with and in this pure design time since of course we had a couple of designers and and we had our lead artist as well but no engineers we spent a lot of that time doing paper design and it works of course very well for our game because our game is based and comes from you know the physical collectible card game genre that's that's its basis but I actually think that there's a lot of games that could end up doing more paper design time than they otherwise do and certainly I can say as far as game development goes one reason that it was super useful for to us to do this is because strictly from an expense point of view I mean having two designers working on stuff doing paper design is a cheaper thing to do than having a full team rolling I can talk a little bit about this specific design so when we were working on the game we were trying to solve a whole bunch of different design problems and this specific card or idea was trying to solve the problem of the hero's feeling really powerful because when we were working on hearthstone one of the ideas we had is we wanted heroes to not just be a punching bag but to be this powerful character that actually interacts with with the environment and and isn't just something that gets beat up and the the issue we had with that or sort of the the reason we went in this direction is we decided hey maybe we can make a really powerful hero who doesn't show up until later in the game so there's a fortress that you have to smash your way through before the hero leaps out and then once the hero leaps out he can actually be powerful and we actually had a whole system where you spent points buying supercool weapons and armor and stuff for him but there ended up being a number of problems with this model not the least of which being that you generally didn't destroy the enemies for because you just built up a huge army waited till you had overwhelming force and then crushed their fortress and hero at the same time but it was very very valuable for us to try things like this discover they were terrible and move on just in a paper format another thing that worked out very very well for us is we made a flash prototype of the game this this is a picture of the game sort of in the middle of our flash prototype ideas not not very early but not towards the end and what worked out well for this is that we we got to try a whole bunch of the ideas in the flash prototype and our final flash prototype mechanically actually looks almost identical to how the game looks today as far as mechanics I mean it doesn't have the the pretty 3d world and a lot of the cool effects and all that kind of stuff and some of the cards are certainly changed but but the game field itself and the basic interactions and mechanics and UI were all already and done and what that meant was when we finished with this flash prototype and we were ready to start building the real game we pointed to the flash prototype and told our engineers hey we're just going to sit around for a few months why don't you just make that thing that's this game right here and and it let the engineers make the backend of the game exactly how the the it was going to end up being design wise so we didn't have to later on make changes and get in trouble because they were engineering problems behind the scenes so it was a huge advantage for us to build this flash prototype and of course it also meant that we got to very quickly try a whole bunch of ideas put them into the flash prototype not worried that it was jumping up the code because we knew we were going to throw it away in the long run so another very important thing for us in hearthstone was sharing the vision with our team certainly everybody on our team is going to be participating in making the game and if you've ever been on a game where everybody on the team is not making the same game it doesn't go so well and yeah there's a lot of ways of communicating what the game is all about and you can communicate it'd be you know just talking a lot about it or showing some example games or sharing design documents which normally make people fall asleep but what we did is we had a set of the six stakes in the ground and these were the basic ideas that we used to communicate both to ourselves and to new people who are joining the team and pretty much all of the people who are involved in around the game what the game was all about and so that at a high level made sure that everybody who is making the game was making the same game and had these same high level ideas yeah these are actually two of the the six stakes in the ground and I'll certainly be talking about some more of them later but these stakes were just critical for communicating to the rest of the team what the game was and the reason why that ended up being so important or I think it's important really in all games is that certainly on the hearthstone team everybody on the team is a designer and I think this is really just true across all of game development that all of your engineers and artists and pretty much everybody involved in the game is making design decisions large and small and there's a couple of ways you can go about sort of designing the game and and the way we decided to go about it is that on the design side we sort of said here's the big way we want this idea to work here's sort of the big picture idea behind whatever the system is that that our engineers our artists or whatever we're putting in and then the engineer artist has both the knowledge because they understand sort of the big vision and also be the on-the-ground knowledge to make the right implementation choices there because there's often going to be a lot of small details that the person who's actually doing the implementation you know the engineer artist or whatnot is going to notice that's going to be hard to notice up front you of course could handle this as a designer by putting out a design document that details every little detail but I've had bad experience with that in the past because design documents end up being outdated about two seconds usually after you send them out and you can't really cover all the details so sort of along the lines of this one of the things that was very important for us and I certainly recommend is making sure that everybody on your team has what I think of as designer brain and when looking at somebody to be on our team I'm much more excited about an engineer who is a good engineer who has designer brain and sort of can think like a designer isn't engaged in the game rather than an amazing engineer who's not really into the game you're making they're not really interested in playing it they're not they're not really don't have strong designer brain so it made a world of difference for us on a hearthstone that sort of everybody on the team was able to make those design decisions and let us move forward together sort of as a whole so simplifying car stone is probably at a high level our our biggest goal from the very beginning I mean our thought about hearthstone as a whole was we wanted to make a game that took what's cool about collectible card games and made them accessible to a lot more people because collectible card games in general are pretty complicated beasts that are pretty intimidating to get into and so we wanted to make sure that we made a game that everybody could sort of understand and start playing immediately and one of the things that that meant was we started questioning the basics of what it meant to make a collectible card game or for something to be a collect card game so for instance there's a lot of collectible card games that have a lot of specific different turns and uh you have to understand this phase in this phase in this phase and what can be done in each of those phases and we decided okay we're going to rip all of that out the only phase that there's only one phase the the time you get to do stuff your turn and during that turn you actually can just do whatever the heck you want to do in any order and one of the reasons that turned out very well is because it actually adds some tactical depth and one of our general rules when we're looking at simplifying a system is can we simplify that system without removing sort of depth of play and in fact in this case as we removed this sort of the turn order in a lot of ways it added depth of play another basic thing that we that we sort of thought about and challenged when working on hearthstone was the traditional collectible card game resource model which traditionally has your resources being cards that are drawn that that are part of your collection just like your creatures and spells and that you build your deck out of them and for a whole bunch of different reasons we felt like it was pretty important for us to simplify the game in that area and to make it so that the resources were in fact a that you've got automatically every turn rather than that a thing that that was a card in your hand and and there's a bunch of different reasons for this certainly one of them is as a new player of a collectible card game and and I actually can even say for myself who is a very experienced player of collectible card games whenever I look at a collectible card game and go what percentage of man our resources or whatever I should put in the deck I generally go online and look up something because it's just very complicated to figure out how you should build a deck and also putting resources in your deck is not nearly as exciting as as minions and spells so if I'm putting together an awesome deck I want to go I'm gonna put fireballs and Giants and Dragons and resources is just it was not as exciting and lastly it actually helped speed play which was really important to us for hearthstone to make sure that the game played pretty fast and normally in a collectible card game I have two choices at the start of my turn I go am I going to play a resource or which resource or am I going to play and then I choose to do the cool thing which is playing my spell playing my minion you know that sort of thing and so this speeded that up as well another thing this is sort of a geeky thing that I makes me happy but it's also a good example as well as that we were able to effectively remove the idea of exhaustion in a lot of ways and to me why this is cool is as we were simplifying the game we made a lot of specific smaller choices to simplify things that let us do something on a larger scale that that felt simpler and the the smaller things that we did as we were working on hearthstone is when we were working on the game we were talking about well do we want minions in play to be able to have an ability that you can activate you know a lot of collectible card games let you use either attack with your minion or use it to do something else and from a UI point of view we looked at and we went we really like it that I can single click on a minion and it's always going to mean attack we don't have to have a pop-up menu we don't have to have left click right click it's a very simple thing so we decided for you know the shipping of hearthstone we're not going to have any abilities on minions that are triggered by you activating them you just attack with your minions then a separate thing that we did was as we were looking at defenses and how creatures defend themselves traditionally if I have a guy who can stop enemy attackers you would you know tap or exhaust or whatever the term is depending on the game to block an enemy attacker and we at first we were thinking that was the right way to go we didn't really like the fact that it was a response on the enemies turn and then I think it was actually it was a long time ago but I think it was actually a bug where the the taunt to actually stayed up permanently and we played it for a little bit like that and we liked it and we thought hey this is great let's get rid of a defensive creature having to you know Tonto exhaust or tap or exhaust or whatever to stop an attack and once we got rid of those two things we realized that this concept of tapping or exhaustion normally applies to a bunch of different things but for us at this point all it really applies to is whether the creature has attacked or not so what that meant was when we were doing our tutorial we could say hey if the creature can attack it has a green glow around it if it can't it doesn't we're not explaining anything more to you in fact we only barely explained that and so this whole concept sort of goes away and and and you can understand the game much more quickly early on summoning sickness is something that is also traditionally in collectible card games and it's a mechanic where a creature when it first comes into play cannot attack that turn and we didn't like this very much either because it had the complexity of a creature could either not be able to attack because it already attacked or a creature could not be able to attack because it had just come into play and so and I don't again remember if this was when we were doing the the flash prototype or doing it with physical cards but we decided hey let's try to remove this and see what happens and we removed it and it was really really bad and really what happened was we were trying to simplify something and we lost so much depth that we went okay we don't really love having two different things that are are indicated sort of in the same way but it doesn't matter we have to have summoning Cygnus in there it just makes for a much worse game to not have some inning sickness so this is an example of something where we tried to simplify the depth was just not there after we simplified so we just decided we're going to undo it and and do it the old-fashioned way and so this is one of the things that I have discovered after many years of working on WoW and hearthstone which is you never end up never stop adding stuff to your game and so when we're talking about the game we're going okay this is sort of the right level of simplicity that we want and then over time we start adding additional things to the game here and there for various reasons and often it's like oh little thing here and a little thing there and very quickly you look at your beautiful simple UI or interface or whatever it is and realize that it's not quite so simple or beautiful anymore and that's not even to talk about what we're looking at on hearthstone now is to be adding additional features going forward and you know having this struggle between a very simple accessible UI with all of the cool features we want to put in so really a big example of this is our victory screen when we were working on the game we are like hey we want to have this awesome victory screen we're going to make it look super cool and we did that and you know we had the the big victory or defeat happen at the end of the game and then a while later we went you know what we'd probably have to have quests that that awards you for doing various things so okay okay the end of the game is victory defeat and then a quest screen pops up because that we felt like was the best way to the best place to indicate that and then we went well sometimes there's two quests so it's a victory or defeat screen and then a quest screen and then another quest screen and then we decided that we needed to make some changes to rank to play to add a lot more clarity there and so then the victory defeat screen was the victory defeat screen and a quest screen and maybe another quest screen and maybe the indicator that you went up or down rank and then suddenly our beautiful simple you know end of game screen was much more complicated than than I would have liked so that's certainly an area that you know if I could travel back in time I would have gone back and seen what we could have done to make it more simple or more integrated or something like that but it's an example where you just never stop adding stuff or or certainly we don't so the next big point is sort of a super obvious one keep it deep and it's sort of of course at odds with the simplify idea but again really what it meant was that whenever we were simplifying the game we were focusing on removing complexity rather than removing depth and if we ever removed complexity and also remove depth we thought about that change like the the summoning sickness one or if we ever were in a case where we felt like we really had to simplify the game and we were going to lose some depth we then thought about what's an idea that we can put back into the game to make sure that we still have all of that depth there that that's not as complex as the previous idea so probably the biggest biggest thing that we did in hearthstone to sort of address that directly was hero powers and in in some other collectible card games there's a variety of things that you can do with your mana on the board and you can play cards out of your hand and other things so there's a lot of combinatorics and as we change the game we realized that we didn't have as many combinatoric as far as the possible ways you could play your set of cards so for instance without hero powers and without anything else if I have three mana and I have a card to call three and a card don't cost one I'm pretty much just going to play the card that cost three so what we did was add hero powers which is a thing that you can do every turn that costs two mana that is not as powerful as a card but it's still a very useful thing to do and also very class specific so if I have three men and I have a hero power I can either use the three mana card or use my one mana card and use my hero power or maybe I just use my hero power and and this is only in the simple case but it's really an example of us wanting to make sure that there were a lot of tactical depth and a lot of tactical choices as sort of as you are playing the game and we put hero powers in to do that as well as a few other things but that was the primary reason this is a slide that will jump back a little bit to the simplicity slide when we are making a card we have sort of a general rule which is if someone new reads that card for the first time and they do not understand it immediately they have to stop and parse it then that card is probably too complicated and either we go back and we spend a lot of time wordsmithing that card to make sure that that that effect is something that you can instantly understand or in a lot of cases we actually went through and we just jumped that card or that idea or or changed it in some way to make it easily understood and actually as a quick aside parse is a word that I use a lot when we're talking about the team and for me that means does the player who's reading the whatever the text is have to actually stop and figure out what it meant so if I have to I'm reading along and I go what was that word oh yeah that word means this other thing okay I had to stop and it's a bit of a jarring experience and we really want a flow state so you're reading the card and you don't even know that you've stopped to read it you just understand what it does and going back to the keypad deep idea for our game where we focus on the depth is focusing on combinations of cards making for interesting interactions so for instance the first card here is whirlwind it does one damage to all minions there's some interest in that card in and of itself but when you add a second card to that there's another pretty straightforward card a card that whenever it takes damage you draw a card it becomes a lot more interesting because you might play your acolyte of pain out and then whirlwind and suddenly a negative thing turns into a positive and throw the throw the berserker on top of that that gets stronger every time anything takes damage and then suddenly you have a lot of interesting depth there but we didn't get that depth through just making a lot of text or a card you have to really parse okay so the fifth thing is immediate fun and this was actually one of our stakes in the ground immediate fun for new players and one of the the conundrums here is that learning is normally fun in as a new player you'd think hey I'm learning a game all these things I'm learning it's normally a fun thing except that when you don't know enough to see where the fun is to see where the depth is it's it's not often not immediately fun and so we talked a lot and worried a lot about the experience of players having ten seconds into the game in 30 seconds into the game and how quickly can a player really understand this game and how quickly are they having fun so one of the things that we did was we made sure that we kept text short and it led to some pretty funny conversations because we talked about some piece of our introductory text where we're teaching you the game and we'd go wow that that text has six words in it that's kind of a lot is there any way we can cut that down and those were serious conversations we had and then we use context in combination without text so lots of bouncing arrows a sort of a green highlight around the thing that you should be interacting with to very quickly get you playing the game rather than reading about how to play the game and that was super important to us another thing that was pretty important and I think it's pretty straight forward but that as long as the player has learned enough to actually start playing the real game we didn't want to teach them anything else so sort of our goal with our introductory experience was to teach the player enough so they felt like hey I know how to play this game I'm going to go jump into this game rather than teaching them everything that they needed to know to play the game sort of in the long run and this is partially because learning stuff is actually really fun but it's also partially because we just wanted to get you to get you through this experience and through the sort of the talking experience and to the main experience very quickly and very painlessly so there was very often during development people around the company would say hey you don't teach the player about fries or secrets or all kinds of things that we deliberately didn't teach the player about because we felt like we teach the player about this you know what they're going to learn this later once they're actually jumped in and having a good time with the game in playing the game and we just don't need to explain this to you you will figure it out and you'll have a good time figuring it out but really I can say we actually just listen to George fan he's the designer of plants vs. zombies and he has said a whole lot more than I will say today about how to make an awesome awesome introductory experience and he gave a talk here a couple of years ago if you do a search for Jorge Phan GDC 2012 you'll find it and internally we really just said is this experience up to the sort of Plants vs Zombies introductory experiences that sort of the gold standard we used and if you're working on an introductory experience I cannot recommend enough listening to Jorge because he's just a smart dude especially about introducing players to games so this is a point that has a lot more to do probably with our games than a lot of games you're working on and that is embracing the medium and to us what that means is we're coming from this physical CCG space and we're going to a digital space and our goal was to make the best digital collectible card game we could so we didn't want to end up thinking about or getting stuck with any of the things that work great in a physical space and do not work as well in in a digital space and there were a number of those probably the biggest thing that we implemented along those lines were secrets and what that is in response to is in I would say an awful lot of physical collectible card game there's a concept called responses where I play a card on my turn and my enemy out of turn can play a card in response to that and I can play a card in response to that and so on and this works great in physical collectible card games because sort of the nature of the interaction that you're having with the other player I mean you're basically having a conversation with the person who's sitting across from you and the nature of just basic conversation has a lot of shifting backwards and forwards in time and interrupting and and it's sort of built for that and so with the response in in a physical collectible card game I can go I'm going to play a giant and now I'm going to play a drat and then go wait wait wait wait no go back to that other thing I'm going to counter spell it or lightning bolt it or whatever the heck you're going to do and it works great in that space in a digital space because you don't have that mediate back-and-forth that conversation it's it's more it's either one person's turn to the other it causes a lot of problems and so because we were designing specifically for the digital space we put secrets in the game and this is because we wanted to make sure we kept the depth of me doing something on my turn and not knowing that I'm going to get to do all the cool stuff that there might be a surprise waiting for me on my opponents side and a secret is a card that that you put into play that is triggered by a set of circumstances and when it's triggered it does a specific thing but your opponent doesn't know what those circumstances are so they can try to play around it but in a lot of ways it's a lot like trying to play around a response you know if if you were seeing your opponent in magic has to bloom a nope and you're definitely assuming certain things and secrets are a lot the same way so that's what we did to make it a digital game and emphasize that another thing we did was put digital cards in cards that you can really only make in the digital space some of those cards we just put in because we wanted to mess around with the space and see what the possibilities were like Nozdormu which is a card that changes the turn timer to 15 seconds so that's a card that wouldn't work at all in a physical space but in a digital space it's kind of fun it's kind of interesting and as we try cards like that we're going to find some that are super exciting for me one of the the more exciting things though was where we got to solve problems by being in a digital space that you can't really solve in a physical space so the thoughts field card here is was originally long ago a card that when you played it you actually took two cards out of your opponent's deck rather than copying them and when you take two cards out of your opponent's deck there was a lot of emotional negativity to that especially from our high level players who felt like you're taking two of the cards that are my the cards that you know sentiment my deck together my endgame cards the cards that that solve problems and it was very emotionally negatively negative and we wanted to solve that problem and so what we did we thought about it when hey we're a digital game let's just make it copy cards out of their hand it's it still gives you the feel of beating up the opponent with their cards but we lose that emotional negativity of actually stealing the cards from the opponent so another thing that was important to us and it's kind of funny to be saying this because in one hand I'm saying we wanted to look at what we wanted to be changing and on the other hand I'm saying don't change too much and what I mean really by don't change too much is make sure that all of the things that players are sort of expecting when they come to the your game that you are providing for them because those are things that you don't have to explain to the player and anything that you don't have to explain to the players just godsend so for a first-person shooter it would be something like okay WASD are going to be my control keys because I don't have to explain that to the player and they'll get angry if you don't have that but there's some areas where that are a little bit interesting in the decisions we made in hearthstone and why we made them so for instance early on we were talking about hey this is a digital game one of our stakes in the ground was embraced the digital nature of the game and we went does it have to be a card could it be rune how about a potion vial that pours the guy out on the ground of course there was lots of talk about you know Star Wars chess hey it'll be little miniature monsters fighting it out there and so these were all this is actual concept art for the game where we were trying to figure out what the heck is our collectible going to be because it could be anything it doesn't have to be a card and after talking about it a lot we went you know what it's crazy for us to not make it a card because as a card anyone who's ever played cards whether it's you know a collectible card game or hearts or spades or any card game knows that you can shuffle cards that you can draw hand of cards that you can play cards they can be discarded there's a whole bunch of things that you understand about cards and a large group of people understand about cards that we don't have to explain and so there's no way we're giving that up because it's so important to have that sense of familiarity and sort of know what the game is going to be also we spent a lot of time talking of out the words that we used for everything because it's so important to use words people know and it sort of seems obvious that the attack value of a minion should be attack and the health value of a minion should be health but one of the reasons that that I point that out is because they're sometimes a idea of hey our game is all about this thing so instead of health let's call our our defensive trade morale and what that means is anytime a player sees morale first off they have to learn what that morale is and second off they have to end up parsing your game more because when something says hey gives a minion plus three health you don't have to parse it at all you instantly know I I know what that thing does assuming I know which bubble is attack in which bubble is health whereas if it says give plus three morale I not only have to know what Morales I then have to figure it out and so just using terms people know is super important we spent tons of time even talking about what should we call the offensive trade okay let's call it charge because when we were talking to a de Blizzard most people felt like that would be the trait that lets you attack right away what's the defensive trade it's taunted cetera et cetera tons of time spent just figuring out sort of the names for things and even the names of your spell's and minions and cards was pretty important so for instance early on we are trying to explain to the player what's the difference between a minion and what's the difference between a spell and it's not especially to someone who's new to collectible card games it's not a super obvious thing but if we call one of our early spells fireball you actually in your head already know what a fireball does you know oh it it's going to deal some damage and go away so while we're teaching you about spells at the same time you have a thing that you know is a spell from your outside experience which you can go okay I know how this is going to work and we even actually get additional bonuses here in that you probably think of fireball as a spell from the outside experience hey that's an attack spell that probably does a fair amount of damage and so suddenly you know hey 6 damage is probably a reasonable reasonably fair amount of damage so we're teaching you a bunch of stuff just by the names of things based on outside experience and that stuff is super valuable too in sort of keeping things the same for players and giving them what they expect this is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart supporting player stories and what a player story is specifically is the thing that your buddy is going to tell you that night about their experience in the game the day before and it's usually not about the narrative that they've read in the story it's usually hey I tried to play last night and the servers were down or hey I tried to play last night and I got crushed a couple of times I used this crazy combo and it was awesome and those are the sorts of things that actual player stories are and it's important for us to embrace player stories and especially as a game that's trying to keep sort of our scope down and be very focused we really wanted to focus on the player story and not really worry it all about like the narrative story so this is story time where I get to tell a story about world of warcraft this is a dungeon called sunken temple from world of warcraft and this dungeon has a whole bunch of story to it and there's a green dragon and some trolls trying to do something or other to a god and despite the fact that I worked on World of Warcraft for eight years I still couldn't actually tell you what the real story is but if something like that and that story was not super important to me as I was playing through World of Warcraft the story that mattered to me was one where me and a bunch of friends went into sunken temple and back in the day it was a very very vertical dungeon so we traveled all the way up to the top of the dungeon and once we got to the top of the dungeon we wanted to get to the bottom of the dungeon and you know we could have fought our way back down but one of my friends she said hey there's this hole in the middle of the floor why don't you just jump down there's water down there we'll jump down and we'll fight and we'll have a good time and we'll avoid all that horrible walking so all of us of course except for her jumped and we realized the waters about you know that deep and we all died and we all laughed our asses off and for me that's the story of sunken temple and while it's not a fantastic narrative story it's a story that's mine and it's important to me and so I really feel like giving players those stories is super important and arguably more important than giving them you know the narrative story so one of the things that we do in hearthstone to support this is we create cards that create player stories and really how we end up designing those cards is we think of a card idea and go I have no idea what that card ID is video is going to do that's probably going to do something really weird and scary and and when we're making these cards we actually have a general rule which is if the card doesn't scare us we probably should try to make it scarier and then we'll try to figure it out in design later or balance later if it's balanced or not so this specific card to give an example of a player story that comes from this specific card this is a card that is a very powerful card for cost too but once it comes into play all of your opponent's minions are free for a turn and so there's a well-known streamer who at one point on turn one played this card using the coin so they got an extra man on turn one so on turn one they had a 4/4 which is very powerful his opponent then proceeded to play a spell for free that took a bunch of cards out of his deck actually the thought steel and then another copy of that that took some more cards out of his deck and then a card that took that copied a card out of his hand and then the card that he copied out of his hand he played which all of these were of course free which summoned a random minion from the streamer's deck which ended up being Ragnaros which Ragnaros immediately fired and destroyed millhouse manastorm so the game went horribly horribly wrong but it was an awesome awesome story and it's not a story that when we were creating millhouse manastorm we had any clue was going to happen mostly we created a card that had a lot of possibilities a lot of open endedness and then the players gave us back the stories with all the crazy things that are happening with it another thing that is important to us is randomness and that's certainly an area where there's a lot of I would say contention in the community but randomness is a pretty important element for creating player stories as well so this is a picture of our arena mode and how arena mode works is you are presented with three different heroes at random you pick one of those heroes and then 30 times in a row you choose one of the three cards that is presented to you and we have some light light controls on on the rarity of some of these cards that show up but we don't have super-strong controls and we certainly don't control the number of any specific card that comes up so it's been known to happen in the past that you play an arena run and you get you know 11 copies of frost bolt or six unleash the hounds and six starving buzzards or any other combination of cards or heck four or probably not for probably like three Leroy Jenkins but combinations of cards that are just not possible in the real game and or the I should say the ranked game and that create really interesting stories and one of the reasons we can actually do this is because our arena mode you play until you lose three games or win twelve games so no matter what the deck is it's going to very quickly leave the environment one way or the other and then there will be a new crazy deck that you're playing and and once you get to the high end you're playing somebody else is crazy deck so this randomness creates a whole lot of stories and those stories again are really important to us for sort of the health of the game and this is just saying that our game specifically chose to have no story and we just focus on vibes so we say hey we're a warm cozy place coming in play games and what we want to do is is share your stories and again it's not because I think narrative stories are bad I think in a lot of games narrative stories are great I think they just require a ton of work I mean it almost has to be the primary thing you're going for if you're going for a narrative story and since that was not our focus we didn't go in that direction and I've certainly seen a lot of games that they go well we're not really going to focus on narrative story but we want to have one anyway and very often I see that getting in the way because that story is told with you know just pop-up dialogues with with text in them or something like that that is not telling a super compelling story so mostly I'm saying if you're going to tell a story just focus on telling the story but in a lot of cases it's probably better to just stick with vibe and and let the players tell the story and certainly that's our belief with hearthstone this is also very near and dear to my heart and that is that emotional design matters and what I mean by that is it's very important to be playing paying attention to the emotional state of the player as they're playing the game and as they're encountering things in the game and in a lot of cases that's more important than sort of the mechanical designer or in some cases even the high-level balance so one thing that we've discovered is very often there's emotion in unintended places that as a game developers certainly we don't necessarily I often don't think about and should think about more and still for instance a moment of high emotion that's going to probably be higher emotion than anything else a player will encounter you in your game is when they run into the server being down or there being an error message or a number of things like that that that are not things that normally we design for but I I like I think it's pretty important to pay attention to sort of the emotional state and this is actually an example of where we change the game a little bit to make the emotion of the game better so this is our spinner and this comes up whenever you're doing matchmaking and it has a bunch of funny things that it says and it always ends up on well back in the day at all ended up on a perfect opponent and when you actually play the game after your masked with with this opponent sometimes it is a blowout whether it's because they got good cards or you got bad cards or they're better player than you there's all kinds of reasons why it could be a blowout even if it was a pretty good match but what that means is early on a player would see a perfect opponent get blown out in the match and go I'm super pissed at Blizzard this makes me angry because it said a perfect opponent and this did not feel like a perfect opponent and so we actually just changed the text to read a worthy opponent because it changed qualitatively sort of the emotional response I mean it's still never fun to get blown out but it was qualitatively better just changing the wording and setting the expectation slightly differently we also do a lot of design for emotion this is a discard from the physical Wow trading card game discard card and this is a mechanic that we actually don't do any of in hearthstone because the effect of playing discard and certain other types of mechanics on your opponent is super distant hardening it sort of makes your opponent feel powerless and it's sort of a weird state actually because it's fun to play discard decks and counterspell decks is another type of deck that we're not really supporting or resource destruction all of those things it's fun to play those but it's not fun to have those played against you and we felt like the emotional negativity that came from having that played against you was so strong that we didn't feel like that we could really include those mechanics in our game and it's actually in some cases a problem for us because there are certain types of decks in the meta game that it would be useful if we had discard as a tool to put in players hands to deal with sort of those those types of decks but the emotional negativity is so strong so we're just not going to do it we're designing for emotion and just taking those straight out we also do a lot of balance for emotion a significant number of our changes over the last six months or so have been made actually for emotional responses and emotional feedback rather than like high-level balance thoughts and mind control is one of those cards that we changed it's a card that when you play it you take an opponent's minion and put it onto your side and now you own it and the emotional response to that is is very strongly negative and we heard all these people complaining everywhere oh my god mind control is too powerful I can't play against it it's the strongest card in the game and we looked at the numbers and it was just fine the card was not an overpowered card the problem with the card is it felt super bad to have it played against you so we actually increased the cost of the card significantly to make it so that it would be seen less sort of in the game as a whole that it's more of a nitch card even though from a pure balanced point of view we didn't have to make any changes to it it was just an emotionally balanced card or an emotionally unbalanced card I guess that we felt like we needed to change also one thing that was pretty interesting that we talked a lot about when we were designing the game is when do we provide the audio and like visual feedback to support specific emotions so when we were first building the game our artists were working on the effects of attacking and they're like we're going to make this awesome effect when my minion crashes into the enemy hero or your minion it's going to be super cool and after we talked about it for awhile we realized that while the attack is a very important moment narrative ly like in a movie whatever that is going to be the high moment of emotional you know impact in hearthstone by the time something's attacking you probably actually know what it's going to be attacking or or if you don't you were like and he could attack this or this yeah he attacked that it's not emotionally high moment so instead what we did is we instead of focusing our audio and visual effects there as much we focused a lot more on summoning cards into play because actually the high emotional moment in a game of hearthstone is when my opponent first put something into play because it could be anything it could change the game entirely and you just have no idea so that's the moment of tension what are they going to play what are they going to play oh my goodness is you know racnoss or whatever it was so just for us focusing our visual attention on the emotional moments that were actually relevant to the specific game more important and lastly another topic that is near and dear to my heart little victories and the idea of little victories is that in a player versus player game it's very important to give the player moments where they feel like they did something badass and changed the course of the game and to sort of and this is only referred to in a player versus player game because in a like a player versus environment game that's actually in a lot of cases what the entire game is is just a series of little victories I mean world of warcraft is just you doing lots of little cool things in improving your character and it's not a big moment where you go hey I beat World of Warcraft so we so we focus on so we talk about it relating to PvP and sort of an example I have of a good and bad version of this is a bad version of little victories is I play a first-person shooter and I get killed sort of at my spawn point five times and then we lose or even we win at that point but in either case I feel terrible versus a first-person shooter where I snipe a guy and then I sneak up on a guy and kill him and then I die a couple times and then we still lose I feel so much better about that and so I would argue that actually the little victories are in a lot of ways more important than the big victory so for hearthstone we think of the game is sort of like a puzzle in that on your turn how you should go about your turn is at the start of your turn go the enemy has a bunch of minions in play I'm in big trouble I've got nothing out I'm going to solve this puzzle and by the end of your turn you've done smart stuff they don't have minions and play io minions in play I've sort of turned it around and have it go back and forth each turn and in a lot of cases that's how it plays out is is a lot of back and forth and you get all of those little victories so that whether you win or lose the final game it's it's I mean it still matters and don't get me wrong it's still much better to win but it's it makes it so that either way you still felt like it was a good and fun game and this is actually one of the reasons why we have been aggressively looking at decks that are called 1 turn kill decks and this is a type of deck in hearthstone that a player sort of just hangs out and makes the enemy not be able to do anything for a while or removes their minions but it doesn't really damage you and then late-game it drops a bunch of cards on the table and kills you in one turn without sort of any warning and those decks are super fun to play and they are very challenging to play I mean it's it requires a lot of skill to play a really good 1 turn kill deck but how it feels for the opponent is it doesn't feel like you gave the opponent those little victories so basically as the opponent of a 1 turn kill deck in a lot of cases you feel like and I put up some stuff and it was destroyed I put out some stuff it was destroyed and I'm not doing anything cool and suddenly I lost without any ability to sort of save myself and so as we've been looking at the balance of the game the effects that do one turn kills have been ones that we've been very seriously looking on and made a number of changes to and I think that's actually it so that is I'll have to say about hearts come for now thanks a lot for coming I'm happy to talk to people if they want to talk afterwards

Channel: GDC

Views: 100,672

Rating: 4.7190518 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: pyjDMPTgxxk

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/r_e_k_r_u_l]

Isn't this really old? I think we've known about this for 2 years

[u/AkeemTheUsurper]

I'll never understand how to die turn 6 to aggro shaman or dragon warrior makes people feel better than having a minion stolen from them. But if that's the problem with priest why the hell do they keep on with the steal theme that leads to a pile of garbage cards? May as well change the concept behind priest so maybe we can have decent priest cards

[u/MAXSR388]

Was that about the nerf to 10 mana or was Mind Control less than 8 mana at one point?

[u/Porkton]

i think i would feel worse getting knocked from 60 health to 0 from an OTK warrior than priest stealing one of my minions

but hey blizzard definitely knows what they're doing

[u/kaioto]

I think it is interesting to keep in mind that "Emotional Balance" is the thing keeping Forced Discard out of Hearthstone. It's a natural check against overly greedy Combo and Control and Aggro "clean-up" strategies. That's sorely missed in some meta-games. Because it is missing, you have to ride herd on those other parts of the meta-game much more tightly.

[u/MAXSR388]

You know what feels worse? Dying on turn 5 to aggro. Can we balance around that? Maybe increase the cost of aggro cards to 10? Clearly it is not a great experience.

[u/heyboyhey]

I wish they would balance around my emotions and make [[Divine Favor]] cost 5 mana. That card triggers me like nothing else.

[u/notbobby125]

Being balanced=/=being fun to play against.

Let's look at Overwatch for a minute, specifically at Mei. Almost all of her abilities take away some degree of control. Her ice wall blocks off paths, her Ice Block makes her immune to everything (while still allowing Mei to contest whatever point is in being fought over), and her right click/ultimate completely freezes her enemies, giving them no escape from a quick headshot.

Mei is probably the single most hated character in Overwatch because of her "control stealing" kit. Yet, she isn't overpowered.

In fact, at the highest professional level, Mei has one of the lowest play rates of any hero. Once you understand Mei and know how to completely nullify her attempts to use her abilities, she is such an easy hero to deal with. Yet, she is so hated because she "feels" bad to play against.

So, do you balance for what is mathematically fair, or do you balance for what is FUN? You can't always cater to both at once.

[u/InvisibleEar]

Cabal and Entomb still make me flip my shit.