Interview with Hearthstone Game Designers Dave Kosak & Stephen Chang – Galakrond’s Awakening, a Year-Long Storyline, and the Shaman Fiasco

The Year of the Dragon comes to an end, and it is time to reflect on drastic balance changes, improved communication by the dev team, and a year-long storyline. With Galakrond’s Awakening, Hearthstone closes out the Standard year with a total of 35 new cards and the final fight between the League of E.V.I.L. and the League of Explorers!

Check out our comprehensive Galakrond’s Awakening guide here!

During the staggered release of Galakrond’s Awakening, we had the chance to sit down with Game Designer Stephen Chang and Lead Missions Designer Dave Kosak to ask a couple of in-depth questions about the creation of Hearthstone’s latest expansion Descent of Dragons, the year-long narrative in the Year of the Dragon, and the “Shaman fiasco”:

Three of four chapters of Galakrond’s Awakening are out as of now, and players are having a blast on both Normal and Heroic mode, not last because they receive new cards for completing the single player campaign.

We have experienced staggered content releases in the past, and the same goes for staggered card releases way back in the days of Naxxramas. Why did you decide to bring back a staggered card release schedule in combination with a mid-expansion content update?

Stephen: We embarked on a tall task this year in trying to do a year-long narrative, and we thought it was a good opportunity to wrap up the storyline with Galakrond’s Awakening so that we can tie the story together but also to revisit a lot of the mechanics that we had explored throughout from Rise of the Shadow to Saviors of Uldum and also Descent of Dragons.

We wanted that opportunity to be able to put some of the mechanics that we introduced like Twinspell, Reborn or the Lackeys as a whole back into the game, and we thought Galakrond’s Awakening was a good fitting place to be able to re-explore those, and also to help give players another chance to revisit some of those beloved archetypes that they got to experience throughout the year. 

It’s interesting to hear that the design team tries to support the fantasy behind a year-long narrative by reintroducing mechanics from other expansions.

Have the Galakrond’s Awakening cards been developed together with the initial set, or was this done in a separate design process?

Stephen: We designed them with Descent of Dragons in mind, and we did it in the middle of the expansion design process. So we started with the core set, developed the Galakrond’s Awakening cards and finished final design with all cards of the set.

Dave: One thing that we always look at with Hearthstone is that it’s great to have something about half-way through an expansion that can kind of shake up the meta a little bit. 

We have been experimenting with that before Descent of Dragons; for example, the Rise of the Mech event changed the game through Rise of Shadows. This patch about half-way through Descent of Dragons gives us the opportunity to do something we really liked which as you said is the staggered release of content and cards.

The cards all don’t drop at once but over the course of a few weeks, which means that the meta game constantly shifts during these few weeks and gives new tools in the hands of the players. That should keep things fresh and changing and make the Ranked mode pretty exciting! We’re looking forward to see how things shape out. 

Going back to the storyline: You’re trying to support the year-long narrative with card releases. As we conclude the Year of the Dragon, we have the continuous storytelling of the Battle of the Leagues, which most likely comes to an end. Or does it?

The majority of the community learned to love their favorite heroes like Rafaam or Elise. Will they continue to tell their story in another year-long narrative? What were your experiences with telling such a connected storyline from a “Warcraft storyteller perspective”, Dave? You have been telling countless stories in World of Warcraft and back during Wrath of the Lich King as a Quest Designer, right?

Dave: On the very tail-end of Wrath of the Lich King, right!

Right! When fighting through the first chapter of Galakrond’s Awakening and the Dragonblight, it reminded us of the story that has been told back in World of Warcraft, fighting through the zone from west to east, and the same thing happens in Hearthstone now!

Dave: It’s great that you mention remembering playing through Northrend! We also try to capture what makes playing Warcraft games fun, so we always hope to hit those memories as it’s a big treat for us.

For year-long stories, one of the things we learned was that even in the context of Hearthstone you can become quite attached to characters, and especially the Hearthstone-specific ones! Our original League of Explorers had Brann Bronzebeard, who is from World of Warcraft, but had these other characters as well like Reno Jackson that people just attached to. Rafaam came out of that expansion as well as one of our favorite villains. Bringing these characters back was something we always wanted to do! Elise and Journey to Un’goro is another great example, especially since she changed, evolved and learned a lot of new tricks.

We definitely wanted to bring these characters back, and having this sort of supervillain supergroup was an idea we had on the team for quite some time, and it was the perfect fit for the Year of the Dragon. I think it worked out really well, and we did a good job tying the expansions together.

I don’t think we will immediately return to a year-long narrative in the near future, but I think it’s an idea we will probably revisit at some point, because it has been a great way to keep players engaged throughout the year. 

You asked about some of the storytelling, and I think what’s important is that we wanted to make sure that you didn’t feel locked into a story you weren’t interested in. Each individual expansion had its own story, its own vibe, its own setting, its own place. The three different expansions should feel pretty different, which was pretty important to us. So that is one level of storytelling. 

There’s also a deeper level in Hearthstone when you start to see the connections between characters and storylines and start to follow those, for example when Rafaam starts to plot around taking Dalaran and eventually completes his needlessly complex plan!

We also want to ensure that there’s an even deeper level of story for the really engaged fans by introducing minor characters into the storylines, for example the nine henchmen during the Dalaran Heist received separate stories. Characters like George and Karl form yet another layer of storytelling depending on how involved you are with the story of Hearthstone.

And that ties in with the design decisions to reintroduce cards with known mechanics!

Stephen: As Dave said, our approach to the Year of the Dragon was to make every single expansion feel very distinct. We had the magical city of Dalaran in Rise of the Shadow, we had the desert setting of Uldum, and now we have the icy cold of Descent of Dragons. We were able to play with those fantasies through the mechanics of each individual set. 

We also made sure that we had a year-long mechanic through every single expansion in form of the Lackeys. We had lots of the Lackeys already designed in the first set, only to be able to reserve a couple of them to introduce them in the upcoming expansions.

For Saviors of Uldum we had Titanic Lackey, which conveys a defensive playstyle while Draconic Lackey showcases the fantasy behind Descent of Dragons. For Galakrond’s Awakening we wanted to show off all the mechanics again as a sweet ending of the year-long storyline from a design perspective.

This sort of unity within the Hearthstone team and its general approach during the Year of the Dragon really shows outside of the game as well.

Communication has been a big topic in the last few weeks while a ton of balance changes have happened. We experienced a whole lot of talking on Twitter and Reddit from the whole Hearthstone team, and the majority of the community feels very happy about it. This development feels very organic! It’s great to hear all of your thoughts as designers.

Where does this change of mind come from? It almost feels like a corporate policy, but in the best way possible! How does it feel to build additional bridges within the community?

Stephen: I came from the community and I was also part of the community when I wasn’t working at Blizzard, so it’s very natural to continue that conversation. It’s very viable to us as designers to get that specific feedback directly from our players and to keep listening. It’s something we have always done. We may have been a bit more vocal about it now, but we’re always listening. 

In terms of the minor balance changes we’ve been doing recently, it’s something where we want to try and see where we can strike that balance where the community feels happy about it without introducing too much change so that the game feels completely different. This is a fine line to walk, and we will always be watching and listening to the community about the amount and timings of changes.

That feels very right, and Hearthstone has the right amount of personality, not only as a game but as a community including the whole Hearthstone team! 

Talking about those communication efforts: It still happened. The Shaman fiasco. The whole class has been nerfed multiple times, and everybody has been talking about it to understand why things went the way they did.

People always ask the same questions, and the devs tried to answer most of them, but we were wondering about the performance of not Shaman, but the other classes that still have to play against Shaman. How did classes perform against Shaman? Did you think that certain classes were a “counter” to Shaman, or did you expect other classes to rise up, like the Rogue matchup theory in terms of the value perspective? What were your initial thoughts after final playtesting with classes pairing up against Shaman?

Stephen: Internally during testing, there were definitely other archetypes that could compete with Shaman. You mentioned Galakrond Rogue, and internally as we were testing we definitely thought there were other decks that could compete with Shaman. But as we collected more and more data with expansion release, I think ultimately one of the factors that really played into how strong Shaman played was that the Shaman deck was really refined, really early, by the players. 

Combined with the fact that Shaman was strong in metas before Descent of Dragons, players were able to just slot in all new Galakrond cards and be very good with the deck right away. Ultimately, the power level of these new cards was too high, and that is why we made those changes. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a deck performing very well on the meta, and one of them is that players are having fun with playing and understanding the ins and outs of that strong deck. 

There are definitely other very powerful decks that were able to compete, but they didn’t get explored just as much as Shaman. It’s really interesting to see how decks can evolve together with the meta based off of who is playing what and how decks are being popularized through information spread online and between players. Ultimately we monitor a lot of these things as we look at the overall balance of the game.