From Dungeons to Duels: Revisiting the Original Dungeon Run

Kobolds and Catacombs marked a seismic change in Team 5’s approach to the game’s single-player content, adding an unprecedented layer of depth and replayability to Hearthstone’s PvE experience with the introduction of the Dungeon Run and its ever-shifting dungeon.

If you want to read about earlier adventures, we’ve already covered them in our “Naxx Out!” series – you can find it here!

Prelude: The Frozen Throne

The shift in Hearthstone’s release schedule from two main yearly sets to three has confirmed the end of the old adventure format, which was already showing signs of decay after the lackluster experience that was One Night in Karazhan. Though it was Dungeon Run that served as the sea change for the game’s solo content, there was actually a mini-adventure of sorts included with Knights of the Frozen Throne before that came along, a set of old-school encounters with a big finale against The Lich King, with the prologue unlocking a free Death Knight for the players.

It was a bittersweet goodbye to the adventures of old, simply because it was so much better than any of the recent “story” content in the game. The prologue encounter where The Lich King batters you with ludicrous boards as hapless adventurers like A. F. Kay come to “assist” were among the funniest things Team 5 has ever produced and a wonderful homage to the corresponding World of Warcraft experience. Though the final encounter was quite grindy to get through with each of the nine classes at the time, it was an interesting alternative to the challenge supposedly brought on by Heroic mode.

What came next was even better.

Bah! Adventurers!

Play cards! Kill monsters! Level Up! Explore randomly generated levels as one of 13 classes in short, 30 minute, sessions.

Dungeon Run was the first draft-based PvE content piece in the game and it was a runaway success from day one. Though it’s impossible to divine the inner workings of Team 5 from the outside, it’s clear that July 2015 pickup Peter Whalen had a major influence on the direction of the future of Hearthstone’s solo content.

In fact, you may have thought the above excerpt to refer to some sort of early build of Dungeon Run: in fact, It is from the Steam storefront description of Dream Quest, the first of Peter Whalen’s two deckbuilding roguelike card games which were already quite popular with the Hearthstone devs even before his arrival.

In retrospect, the concept’s appeal is crystal clear, and there is a good argument to be made that the relative simplicity of Dungeon Run served it even better than some of the later, somewhat more bloated variations on the same theme. Just the nine original classes with their starting hero powers, a fairly vanilla starter deck, then it’s off to the races with the now familiar drafting buckets and special treasures. The trivial early encounters against Giant Rats and Wee Whelps may seem worthless in retrospect but they serve as a good introduction to the brand new format.

The mode holds up surprisingly well. Many of the treasures made it into Duels almost three years down the line, albeit with modifications in some cases. (Greedy Pickaxe, for example, went from a 2 mana 3/2 to a 4 mana 2/2 weapon and Wand of Disintegration used to cost two mana less. Meanwhile, Golden Kobold and Wax Rager remained untouched, just like some of the passive treasures as well.) Though the card pool is understandably limited, even considering you’re able to generate the minions and spells added to the game later down the line, there’s enough content here to enjoy even today. The limited scope of the available starting decks actually provides a tangible and attainable goal when it comes to “clearing” the content – so much so that there was a pretty infamous challenge built around it as well…

A Challenge Unlike Any Other

It is easy to forget just how ridiculously popular Dungeon Run was. Despite not even being a multiplayer piece of content, streamers and viewers flocked to the tryhard attempts, so much so that it sparked one of the first Twitch Rivals-esque events on the platform.

Open to everyone, the challenge was to obtain the Candle King cardback by clearing the entire Dungeon Run, winning with each and every class. Your score was determined by the number of attempts this took – a good idea made a whole lot less appealing by the fact that you had to pull it off on a brand new account, meaning hardcore grinders like Trump ended up playing the tutorial in multiple separate windows at the same time to get enough of the requisite fresh accounts for their attempts – of course, he was the only person alongside Freaky to reach the magical 9/9 score.

Phase 2 turned out to be a mess due to a combination of a poorly thought-out scoring system and a controversy on the winner’s part. Since the format was of a sudden death variety, it meant that the eventual winner, Sonecarox, won with a 9-round score of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 8, 2 – seventeen attempts overall – over Freaky who posted just ten but dropped his first attempt on the seventh run, putting him out of contention. There was also the matter of the infamous “password”: in an attempt to ensure there’s no foul play, participants were supposed to utter a specific phrase before starting each run, something the winner didn’t do. However, the admins eventually decided to overlook this matter, in part because this whole concept with the passwords wasn’t actually a part of the official rulebook of the event.

So, you know, just another day when it comes to Hearthstone’s Twitch Rivals events.

Indeed, the odd thing about the original Dungeon Run was how it clearly ended up being too successful for its own good. As we’ve seen with the early days of Battlegrounds, a game mode that can’t be effectively monetized is of no use to Team 5, and it’s even arguably detrimental if it siphons players away from Constructed. This is especially the case with a PvE mode which doesn’t require your own collection.

There was a straightforward band-aid solution to this: promise more of the same and those enthusiastic about PvE will no doubt stick around for the next expansion. It’s no surprise though that The Witchwood’s solo experience was a whole lot less ambitious than the original Dungeon Run and elicited nothing of the sort of player attachment we’ve seen for the original iteration. It was a play-once-and-move-on experience, and quite deliberately designed to be so – and it will be our topic of discussion the next time in this series.

Check back next time for a look back at a bunch of nemeses and hunted monsters, plus a very special final battle which still doesn’t quite manage to get as grindy as an 11-win Duels match!