The making of Hearthstone Battlegrounds: 'We wanted a mode that didn't feel as polarizing'

Team 5's designers also discuss balance, new minion tribes, and what happens if players never go back to ladder.

(Image credit: Blizzard)

It's fair to say that most diehard Hearthstone fans, myself included, had simply given up on new modes being added to the game. The decision to put tournament mode on hold indefinitely had most of us resigned to playing the game in largely the same way forever: Three expansions per year, pick your poison between ladder, Arena, and the single-player PvE stuff. So the announcement of Battlegrounds at this year's BlizzCon was a genuine bombshell.

Inspired by autobattlers such as Teamfight Tactics, Dota Underlords, and the original Auto Chess mod, Battlegrounds sees you building an army of high-synergy idiots and then sending them out to fight in randomised battles against seven other players until your health has been whittled to zero. For a playerbase crying out for something new to do with Hearthstone's slick and poppy core components, the new mode has been like a fire hose of Evian fired into the desert. 

Popular content creators who'd abandoned the game have come back in droves.  The chance to play something that feels so fun and fresh has been a reminder of why many of us fell for the game in the first place. (Ironically, it probably helps that ladder is in the worst shape that it's been for a while.) To discover the story behind Battlegrounds inception, where it goes next, and what happens if it's too successful I spoke to principal game designer Mike Donais, and associate game designer Conor Kou, whose tinkering sparked the mode's creation.

PC Gamer: Other than the addition of PvE, Battlegrounds is the most substantial new mode added to Hearthstone since launch. What was the process behind its  brainstorming and birth?

Conor Kou: So actually, the way we started Battlegrounds was that I was exploring making an autobattler-inspired Tavern Brawl and it was a 1v1 game at the time. I started showing it to people and they thought there was something there. The whole office was super excited about autobattlers, so we decided to see if we could explore further and find something really awesome. 

What was the length of time between working on it as a Tavern Brawl and revealing it as a standalone mode at Blizzcon? Did it go through a lot of big iterations?

CK: It went through a ton of big iterations, actually. I started working on the Tavern Brawl in late February. The first version had a bunch of cards in your hand that did all your actions. You had a card that moved one minion to your left, very similar to the Karazhan chess event. So all the actions you were doing in the game would use a card in your hand and respawn every time you played them. It was a much slower experience. 

Mike Donais: Make character buy a minion, make character sell a minion, make a character move a minion to the left... Everything was done with cards. Your hand was five cards and when you bought minions they just added to those five cards. Your hand would be very full and hard to keep track of.

At what point did you discuss the idea that this should be part of the game permanently?

MD:It kind of happened simultaneously with the Tavern Brawl development, almost unrelated. We did an internal poll asking what the Hearthstone team should be working on over the next year or two.  There were a lot of different answers, but one of the things that scored the highest was a new game mode—a new way to play. And within that category, one of the most popular ideas was Autochess, no doubt because a lot of people were playing it around the office. We wanted to keep the scope pretty controlled. When we have too big of a scope, or too wide of a vision, we can get lost in that. So, this gave us a lot more focus. That was back in March. We had the poll and did a meeting with all the leads to figure out exactly how we were going to execute on that. 

Are you able to tell me anything else that that scored highly in the 'to do' poll?

MD: We definitely want to keep iterating on Battlegrounds to make it more fun and we want to make new expansions. We thought that last year we had really fun stuff, like the Wild event and the [Rise of the Mech] buff event. Those were good examples of how we can mix up the meta in the middle of a four-month cycle. We do want to keep the game fresh every month or so, and we want to keep supporting Tavern Brawl, but we don’t have any big new features that we are going to announce. 

On the subject of those mid-expansion events, let's talk about the current Wild event. I loved the idea of bringing cards back into Standard, but there's a lot of negativity around what it's done to ladder. Wouldn't swapping Evolve for another Shaman card be an easy fix? At the moment ladder is 30% Shaman, according to the VS numbers. 

MD: That’s a really good question, because we came very close to moving Evolve out of Standard. One of the things that goes on, that we want to encapsulate, is that it takes around two weeks [to deploy a patch] because we have QA and optimisation and things like that. It also breaks everyone’s decks, so if you had Evolve in your deck you’d need to rebuild your deck. Which we don’t mind doing, we do lots of nerf patches—more so recently. In this case, the tiebreaker was that by the time we ended up doing it, it would've been two weeks before the new expansion. Which meant we would break your decks again, and the Wild cards will rotate out on December 5th anyway. We just didn’t want to break everyone’s decks twice in a row like that. In retrospect, maybe it would have been a good idea.

Speaking about balance and going back to Battlegrounds, Mike has mentioned a Lightfang nerf is coming in the 5 December patch. What else have you got an eye on?

CK: We are constantly looking at all the heroes and where they stand in the meta. We are also looking at minions, especially the ones that we specifically designed for Battlegrounds. We just recently shifted that a little bit by moving Junkbot to tier five and Voidlord down. We're seeing how things shake out and will keep going from there. 

MD: This is the first time we will actually have data to work from for a client side patch. When we moved Junkbot and murlocs down, we did that based on data but it was a server side patch that we kind of omitted. Now we can actually see heroes and change hero powers and move minions. At least, if it’s one of the 10 minions we designed specifically, we can change the text on those. It would be nice to react to that data and get everything closer together. I think it will make the meta more dynamic, but also bring all four or five minions types closer together in power level. You'll see a lot more people playing different strategies. 

Is there an ideal number of viable comps that you want to balance towards?

MD: Yeah, there are the obvious ones, like the minion types and menagerie, but we also think there’s a Deathrattle and a Battlecry comp that could be a good idea. There are also two different styles of Mech—there’s the one with a bunch of 1/1s which is good for Junkbot and refreshing your Divine Shields, but there’s also another one with really big Mechs and Baron Rivendare, and you get giant 16/16 eggs. That hasn’t seen play yet but with the right tweaks, maybe it could. The thing is, when they are [balanced] closely together, a comp that's only slightly good—or even slightly bad—can become viable because nobody else is playing it.

Because the best cards are more available in the pool, is that what you mean?

MD: Yeah, Demons saw a little bit of that when nobody else was playing Demons. You could almost always play Demons, but it was so weak that you didn’t see it. Now that we have changed Demons to be better, if it’s a bit too weak or too strong, the number of people playing it could adjust. 

(Image credit: Blizzard)

There are not many Dragons, Pirates or Elementals that actually translate well... So we’d have to design all new cards, which we're happy to.

— Mike Donais

You've previously said Battlegrounds isn't intended to be a competitive mode, but I watch a lot of streams and it’s clear many pros are taking it very seriously. Do you anticipate that creating some tension down the line as they'll expect you to balance competitively?

CK: The competitive community has really embraced [Battlegrounds] and created a great experience for viewers. I think we need to strike the right balance between keeping it compelling for those players but also making it really exciting and not taking away from the crazy moments that can happen. 

Presumably you can’t just keep adding more minion tribes because it would dilute the effectiveness of existing strategies. Is the main way you’ll keep Battleground fresh by cycling things in and out? Is it different from regular Hearthstone in that fashion?

MD: Yeah, our original strategy was to design some new minion types and cycle old ones out. But after internal play testing we decided we can add another minion type. Five minion types is actually better than four. So, we are going to have five eventually and maybe after that we will talk about whether we need to cycle one out and one in. We also talked about the idea that maybe every time you press play it will tell you, “these are the minion types in your game this time”, or if we should [rotate] on a monthly cadence or not. We're not sure. 

I like the idea of swapping elementals for mechs one month. Which of the remaining tribes—Pirates, Elements, and Dragons—are you most excited to add?

MD: A lot of people in the office said Pirates. I personally love Dragons, so that’s the one we are going for. You’ll see in Hearthstone that there are not very many Dragons, Pirates or Elementals that actually translate well. We went through the list and there is basically like one of each that works, so we’d have to design all new cards—which we are happy to do.

(Image credit: Blizzard)

Does the fact that the players don’t need a card collection make Battlegrounds easier to balance? By which I mean, you're free to make decisions without factoring that people might have paid to craft the card you want to change.

CK: Yeah, it definitely does, but people get really attached to particular strategies or heroes they enjoy. So we have to be careful of shaking things up to much too much and ruining the experience they’ve grown to love. 

The new expansion, Descent of Dragons, launches on 5th of December. In a hypothetical situation that a week later 80% of playtime was still being spent in Battlegrounds, would that be a problem for Hearthstone? Wouldn’t Blizzard's accountants freak out?

MD: The thing about Hearthstone, in general, is that we like you to play the way you enjoy most. Some people like Arena, some people play PvE, some prefer casual, ranked, or wild… And some people play Battlegrounds. Whichever way you find most fun, we want to support you enjoying that.

But I need to buy a lot of card packs to play Descent of Dragons and I need to pay some money or gold up front to play Arena, whereas with Battlegrounds the barrier to entry is very low. It’s 20 packs to get the three hero choices and the emotes, and I don’t have to bother with those. If Battlegrounds becomes the default mode, wouldn’t that be an issue for Hearthstone’s financial health?

MD: I think if everybody was playing Battlegrounds exclusively we could figure out some system to let people who love our game gives us money. There are plenty of games out there that work on that system. We’d have to think about that and figure it out.

I don’t find myself getting as annoyed with losing in Battlegrounds as I do with the regular ladder. In some ways it's an even more random experience, but I still find it more relaxing. Do you feel the same, and if so why is that? 

CK: Yeah. When we set out to make Battlegrounds one of the big reasons was that we felt like we could make a mode that didn’t feel as polarizing. [Editor's note: The interview originally misquoted Kou as saying that the developers wanted to make a mode that didn't feel as "pulverizing." Blizzard has clarified that the actual word he used was "polarizing."] I think it doesn’t feel as bad losing for a couple of different reasons, one of which is that there are eight people in a game. Sometimes you’ll lose, but you might be in sixth and say “I didn’t come last, I’m improving”. 

Another thing is that there are all these exciting little moments in the game where you are anticipating your next turn, so there comes a point where you are so excited to get through combat because you feel like you’re just about to turn the corner. Sometimes when you lose you’ll feel like you were almost there. I think the combination of all of those things helps the game feel not as frustrating to lose and makes you want to jump right back in. 

It's definitely less polarising. I play on iPad sometimes and the older mobile devices can suffer in terms of performance. Are there plans to overhaul Hearthstone’s code to make those platforms have an easier time?

MD: Yeah, we actually have a bunch of different initiatives and teams looking to increase mobile performance. Some people are looking at specific animations, speeding them up or turning them off. Other people are looking at the back-end CPU problems and improving how our code is written to use less CPU. Every month or two we will make some improvements in that space and hopefully make it a better experience for everyone.

Am I right in thinking Poison is going to be one of the animations you look to shorten? 

MD: Yeah, we are adjusting the Poison animation in, I think, January.

Connor, can you give me any examples of weird hero powers that you tried that didn’t work out or stuff you are still thinking of implementing?

CK: One of the first hero powers we actually designed and had to change was Putricide’s. It used to give Poison to your leftmost minion. We actually played with that for a very long time. It was super cool because you could throw down your Cave Hydra and get guaranteed value. As we kept playing internally, and people got better and better, we found other things you could do with it, like getting a golden Kaboom Bot, putting poison on it, and then using Baron Rivendare to kill your opponent’s entire board. So we had to redesign that. 

It's pleasing to see cards than never had time to shine in Standard, like Junkbot, become some of the most powerful minions in Battlegrounds. Are there other effects from the main Hearthstone mode that might be incorporated down the line? I’m thinking of things like healing or introducing spells to the experience.

CK: One of the most fun things about designing on Battlegrounds, in general, is that there is so much unexplored space. So there’s definitely room for effects like that, and any new keywords or minions that we add to Hearthstone. We will evaluate it as we go. We are really happy with the core stuff we have landed on and we don’t want to change it too drastically and scare people away by making it very complicated, but we always want to explore new options.

Mike, have you been happy to see a number of high profile content creators come back to the game? 

MD: Yeah, it’s awesome. A lot of those guys I’ve enjoyed watching, and many of them I am also friends with—like Savjz, dog, and Hafu have all come back after different types of lapses and just enjoying the game. Also, the team in general have been feeling really good because of all the positive feedback that has been coming our way from different people. Like, they love the game, they can’t stop playing. Y'know, it’s 3am and they are supposed to be somewhere and they are just playing Battlegrounds instead. The positive vibe has just been super for us.

This article originally appeared at PC Gamer*.