Hearthstone developers talk about starships in the Great Darkness

HearthThe latest expansion, The Great Dark Beyond, takes Blizzard's collectible card game to new heights in a number of ways. this Hearth The theme of the expansion centers around the tragic banishment of a race of draenei into space, and its main attraction is undoubtedly the new Starship maps, which introduce game-changing mechanics expressed through previously unexplored visual themes.

In an interview with Game Rant, Hearth senior game designer Leo Robles Gonzalez and senior VFX artist Luke Mason revealed how the team brought the mechanics of Starship to life, both from a gameplay and visual perspective. They talked about the challenges involved in deciding what classes the starships would get and their approach to portraying space travel believably. Warcraftfantasy setting.

Some Hearthstone classes make more sense for custom Starships

Early on, the team knew they wouldn't have enough resources to create unique starships for everyone Hearth class, so the first hurdle was deciding which classes would be awarded an individual starship. Leo Robles Gonzalez noted that some classes, such as Druids and Rogues, have more room both stylistically and mechanically than other classes for a dedicated starship.

When we were deliberately deciding which classes would get starships, there were a lot of things to consider. For starters, there is a question, why not every class? Why only six? Deep down I wish every class had this, but starships and starship parts are so difficult to design. Frankly, the design space for what is an interesting part of a starship is narrower than you might first think. The coolest part of starships is the combos, but you also have to make sure that combining the two class pieces is the most exciting part, while still being relevant to the neutral pieces.

“There's also a value proposition to consider,” Gonzalez continued, “when you're playing a starship, it shouldn't be so valuable that you just want to play it for its own sake—that's not the fun part. The most interesting part is combining the cards.” All this led the team to learn that only about half of the classes would get unique starships at the beginning. This did not make the decision-making process any easier.

Although developing unique starships for the six classes was already a significant challenge for Hearth team, given the unusual complexity of the mechanics on the development side, the neutral starships for the other classes also required a lot of care. These starships should blend aesthetically and strategically with different classes and be an attractive prospect due to the variety of playstyles.

Hearthstone Starships should look like Warcraft, not StarCraft

Luke Mason talks about the challenges the creative team faced to make these custom starships fit Warcraft Universe in particular, how they needed to avoid leaning too much into science fiction. After all, it is Warcraftno StarCraftand although space travel is fundamental to Hearth expansion stories, starships should authentically represent each fantasy class.

As for the actual starship mechanic, we had to combine all these different starships. We knew from the beginning that we couldn't create custom visuals for each individual class, so we had to find the right balance. For example, Burning Legion's visuals should have no draenei language or holy magic. We wanted classes that use these elements to preserve them. We chose a more digital look that seemed generic enough, but as we went in that direction we realized that it wasn't really
Hearth
. We're so heavily influenced by fantasy that we couldn't just slap 8-bit pixels on everything and call it space expansion. It was too sci-fi.

Mason singled out the Rogue-class starship as a particularly inspired design. Since Hearth Rogue's play style and fantasy involves hacking from other classes, their assembled starship, which is made up of “borrowed” elements from other starships, is a great example of how the team handled this complex idea smartly.