Hearthstone Devs Talk Starships In The Great Dark Beyond

Hearthstone‘s latest expansion, The Great Dark Beyond, takes Blizzard’s collectible card game to new heights in more ways than one. This Hearthstone expansion’s theme is centered around the Draenei race’s tragic exile into space, and its main draw is undoubtedly the new Starship cards that introduce a game-changing mechanic expressed with previously unexplored visual themes.

In an interview with Game Rant, Hearthstone senior game designer Leo Robles Gonzalez and senior VFX artist Luke Mason revealed how the team brought the Starship mechanic to life, both in gameplay terms and on the visual side. They spoke about the challenges involved in deciding which classes would receive starships, and their approach to depicting space travel believably in Warcraft‘s fantasy setting.

Some Hearthstone Classes Made More Sense For Custom Starships

Early on, the team knew they wouldn’t quite have the resources to create unique starships for every Hearthstone class, so the first hurdle was deciding which classes would be awarded a custom starship. Leo Robles Gonzalez noted that some classes, like the Druid and Rogue, had more room both stylistically and mechanically than other classes for a special starship.

There were a lot of things to consider when we deliberately decided which classes would get starships. For starters, there’s the question of why not every class? Why just six? In my heart of hearts, I wish it could be every class, but starships and starship pieces are so difficult to design. To put it bluntly, the design space for what constitutes an interesting starship piece is more narrow than you might think at first. The coolest part of starships is the combinatorics, but you also need to make sure the combination of the two class pieces is the most exciting part, while still being relevant for neutral pieces.

“There’s also the value proposition to consider,” Gonzalez continued, “When you play a starship piece, it shouldn’t be so valuable that you just want to play it by itself—that’s not the fun part. The fun part is combining cards.” All of this led the team to know that, early on, only about half of the classes would get unique starships. That didn’t make the decision-making process any easier.

Although designing unique starships for six classes was already a significant challenge for the Hearthstone team given the mechanic’s unusual complexity on the development side, the neutral starships for the remaining classes also needed a lot of care. These starships would have to mesh aesthetically and strategically with multiple classes and be an attractive prospect through a variety of playstyles.

Hearthstone Starships Should Feel Like Warcraft, Not StarCraft

Luke Mason spoke to the challenges faced by the art team in making these custom starships fit within the Warcraft universe, particularly how they needed to avoid leaning too heavily into sci-fi. After all, this is Warcraft, not StarCraft, and although space travel is fundamental to the Hearthstone expansion’s story, the starships must represent each class fantasy authentically.

As far as the actual starship mechanic, we had to bring all these different starships together. Early on, we knew we couldn’t create custom visuals for every single class, so it was about finding the right balance. For example, the Burning Legion’s visuals shouldn’t have Draenei language or holy magic. We wanted the classes that use those elements to retain them. We opted for a more digitized look that seemed generic enough, but as we went in that direction, we realized it wasn’t really feeling like
Hearthstone
. We have such a strong fantasy influence that we couldn’t just throw 8-bit pixels over everything and call it a space expansion. It felt almost too Sci-Fi.

Mason singled out the Rogue class’s starship as a particularly inspired design. Since the Hearthstone Rogue’s playstyle and fantasy involve burgling from the other classes, their hobbled-together starship comprised of “borrowed” elements from the other starships is a great example of the team’s clever handling of this difficult-to-execute idea.

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ESRB

T for Teen: Alcohol Reference, Blood, Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes

OpenCritic Rating

Mighty

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