This theory we had, that this would be really fun, to craft your minions on the fly over the course of the game for your opponent, it sounds really awesome, and only through playtesting did we realize how boring it would be as it actually played out. You’re just drawing the same guy you built over and over again. The game is completely boring after the point at which you turn things into worgen, because every card is the same. That sounds pretty fun, right? It sounds kind of interesting.
HEARTHSTONE THE WHISPERER FULL
That interesting gameplay of, hm, which worgen do I commit to? Which buffs do I want to go for? Okay, now it’s full moon, everything’s a worgen and now they all have these attributes. Maybe you’re playing against an aggressive deck, so you want to make sure you play the guy who gives taunt to your worgen, so when all your humans turn into worgen they have taunt and they’re better equipped to face this deck. You get to choose which of the three bonuses you’re going to give to your worgen for the rest of the game. There’s maybe one that says, give all worgen divine shield, or give all worgen spell power +1, or give all your worgen rush, or give all your worgen +2 attack.Īnd as soon as you’ve played three humans, it’s full moon and all the humans transform into worgen and they have all these attributes. How do we deliver that fantasy? We had these humans – we called them Gilneans – and they give all your worgen a buff. You hear and now all your humans are worgen. What if there’s a moment that is the full moon coming out. One of the ideas we had was, okay, we have to have a transformation. Newman: Can you give me an example of mechanics where you initially thought, this is going to be great, and then you actually played it and you were like, oh, no, this is not good?īrode: There’s infinity of those. The worgen (center): Spawner of a dozen terrible 'Hearthstone: Witchwood' mechanics. Some of the other ones sounded cooler, but they weren’t as fun to play, so we ended up going with the one that had the best playtesting experience. Our worgen mechanic, for example, where worgen switch forms in your hand every turn until you play them, we tested probably 15 different worgen mechanics before we ended up on that one. We end up with tons of mechanics, many mechanics. That’s basically the biggest metric by which we decide. It requires playtesting, over and over again, to get a sense for how things actually are going to play and feel. It’s because it’s very hard to tell if something is fun or balanced by eyeballing it. It feels like almost inevitably the opposite is true. They say, this card is amazing, or this is absolute trash, horrible card. It’s obvious when you see people comment on cards online, when we reveal them.
I can’t tell you how many times the first playtest happens and we’re like, what the heck? That’s a bad idea. Things sound good and you’re like, oh, that’s awesome, let’s do that.
There’s this phenomenon where you just can’t tell if an idea is good or bad until you playtest it. Ben Brode: The biggest way we help make those decisions is playtesting.