Hearthstone is almost ten years old and the development team behind the game have some fun things in store for the next decade at the tavern.
Asked to explain why Hearthstone has managed to hang around while other digital card games have come and gone, senior game designer Cora Georgiou pointed to the game’s community first and foremost.
“All of us devs are really passionate about the game and we feed off the energy of that community. We are thrilled to keep making the game if they want it.”
While Hearthstone’s Fireside Gathering events were recently retired, these in-person gatherings were something that the game’s many competitors quite never managed to emulate.
Georgiou also highlighted to scope and diversity of the source material as another key ingredient behind Hearthstone’s long-term success.
“The Warcraft universe has such rich storytelling and characters and to be able to pull from that is incredible,” she said.
“There’s so much passion throughout the Warcraft universe and there’s no shortage of content.”
She added that the Hearthstone team has been thinking about what the next ten years look like “for some time now.”
In the months ahead though, Hearthstone players will have to make do with the Showdown in the Badlands expansion, the Catch–Up packs and a new Battleground Duo mode.
Co-op card games are nothing new in the tabletop world but this is the first foray in that direction by Blizzard. While Georgiou said the introduction of a co-op mode has something that’s been discussed by the team in the past, it wasn’t until they saw streamers working together to build their own co-op experiences within Battleground that a plan for an official take on the format began to take shape.
“Hearthstone is not as much of a social experience as I think a lot of players would like and certainly we’ve heard players asking for ways to play with friends. Battlegrounds wasn’t necessarily designed to be that but you know I suppose much like Hearthstone in the beginning it was something that players picked up and they ran with it.”
Several years ago, Blizzard began to expand the scope of Hearthstone beyond just being another card game and towards being a platform for several card games.
Since then, the developer has introduced new modes and experiences, including Mercenaries and Battlegrounds. It even brought back the original launch experience under the guise of Hearthstone Classic. That last one was retired in June.
Asked whether throwback mode could return, Georgiou said that it might come back as part of the new Twist format but said that there were no firm plans to bring back Hearthstone Classic anytime soon.
As for the future of that core Hearthstone experience, it’s hard not to look at things like Overwatch’s recent team-up with K-Pop group Le Serrafim and Magic: The Gathering’s going crossover with other pop culture juggernauts like Warhammer, Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who.
Georgiou said that these kinds of crossovers are something the team have considered bringing to Hearthstone.
“We’ve talked about it because it’s something that could be fun and we’ve done a little bit of it with Diablo in Battlegrounds.”
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