Blizzard WILL Be Updating Deathstalker Rexxar With New Beasts Due to Community Feedback

Looks like Blizzard is going to be updating Deathstalker Rexxar to include all upcoming beasts going forward. If you missed the controversy, Blizzard had made the decision not to update Deathstalker Rexxar because of the difficulty of combing text boxes across 15 languages, which was explained by Mike Donais on Reddit:

The challenge was not a coding one. It was combining 2 text boxes into one across 15 languages. A lot of things that work ok in English don’t work as well in other languages. When text is written for a card, it has very specific templates and line breaks and spacing to make it fit and look good and some languages actually have very different rules and would surprise you what they have to do.

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That didn’t exactly satisfy the community which led to Realz, Game Designer for Hearthstone, to comment on the subject:

During KFT development, some designers thought it would be cool if DK Rexxar did something similar to Kazakus (create a custom spell) and could stitch together two beasts to make a custom one. We talked about how that could work, including considering making custom minions exclusive to DK Rexxar with simple abilities that could be interesting when combined (like Kazakus). As you know, we ultimately settled on the existing set of beasts to represent the tools DK Rexxar has at his disposal.

One major concern was the text. If you imagine combining any two cards with longer text, 4 lines from each becomes 7-8 lines of tiny text, and needing a magnifying glass to read a Hearthstone card (including and especially on mobile) would be a bit silly. With this in mind, every combination needed attention, and since every localized language is different, different languages had to settle concerns with different combinations. Moving forward, the number of new combinations introduced would grow (and grow and grow) with each expansion. We also would either have to restrict ourselves and never make a complex Beast with a long text box, or exclude cards on an case-by-case basis.

Given the above, we knew we couldn’t make a version of DK Rexxar with future updating. We gave DK Rexxar a set pool of options like Kazakus, but this time the pieces would start off as existing recognizable cards before they’re combined.

So we had to decide: Should we still make this card? We thought (and still think) the answer is absolutely – Yes! We wouldn’t have as many cool cards in the game if new ideas were tossed aside at the first sniff of imperfection. DK Rexxar is really fun, and we hope players agree that the version we have now is definitely worth having in the game.

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Blizzard seems to have had a change of heart based on continual community feedback, here’s today’s response:

Greetings,

Many players have noticed that Deathstalker Rexxar’s Hero Power does not include any of the new Beasts that were added with the Kobolds & Catacombs expansion.

Since then, some players have provided constructive feedback regarding the state of Deathstalker Rexxar, and we agreed that a change to the Hero Power was warranted.

As such, we will be updating Deathstalker Rexxar’s Hero Power to include new Beasts going forward. Please be patient, as this is a fairly complicated endeavor and we may need to start with a smaller change before a more permanent solution is implemented. We don’t have a date for this change to share with you today, but we will provide more information once we have it.

Please also note that as new Beasts are released, we may need to mark some of them as exempt for various reasons, much like how King of Beasts is currently excluded from the pool of Beasts that Deathstalker Rexxar’s Hero Power can pull from.

Thank you for providing constructive feedback. We see your love and passion for Hearthstone and believe that the best way to make Hearthstone better is to do so together.

See you all in the Tavern!

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