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Hearthstone can be a fragile game. Despite celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2024—a remarkable achievement—the CCG often lives and dies based on the quality of its most recent expansion. When a new expansion offers an incredible collection of cards that enable exciting new strategies, Hearthstone feels as alive as ever. When a new expansion falters, it forces people to rely on old cards in ways that make Hearthstone feel older than ever. Progress is difficult. Going back is far too easy.
Released earlier this week, Hearthstone’s Great Dark Beyond expansion already feels like the refresh the game so often needs. More than just a compelling collection of cards, The Great Dark Beyond generated excitement early on thanks to its striking sci-fi themes and notable Warcraft lore ties. There was a sense that this expansion was fueled by a strong dose of creative inspiration and the desire to accommodate fan requests. It turns out those early hopes may have been more than a feeling.
We recently had the chance to speak to Hearthstone’s senior game designer Leo Robles Gonzalez and senior VFX artist Luke Mason. Here is what they had to say about The Great Dark Beyond’s themes, its biggest problem cards, and what this expansion means for the future of Hearthstone.
Sci-Fi and Draenei
Thematically, Hearthstone expansions have been based on everything from music festivals to gang warfare. By comparison, The Great Dark Beyond’s sci-fi and spacefaring themes must seem humble. Yet, this expansion’s card art, effects, and character concepts showcase levels of creativity we rarely see in even Hearthstone’s more conceptually ambitious adventures. As it turns out, the broadness of that sci-fi theme enabled the team to explore a galaxy of ideas they’ve been thinking about for quite some time.
“If I were to walk up to any person and say ‘space theme,’ their brains immediately pull a bunch of stuff from sci-fi media they’re familiar with. The people on the team did that as well,” Gonzalez says. “We’ve never really gone into space this in-depth in Warcraft. When we said, ‘It’s time to work on The Great Dark Beyond, and we’re going to space,’ everyone was like, ‘I’ve got so many ideas! Do this, do this, do this.’ I think that shines through.”
The clearest connection between Warcraft/Hearthstone and the realm of science fiction are the Draenei, a Warcraft race that traveled through the cosmos before crashing on Azeroth. While the Draenei are one of Warcraft’s oldest and most prominent races, the Warcraft games have only offered glimpses of their sci-fi technology and the cosmos they once called home. The chance to explore those elements in depth proved to be both an opportunity and a responsibility.
“The art team understood that this isn’t going to just be any space story; it’s going to be the Draenei space story,” Mason explains. “There was a lot of free rein for what could be possible. The challenge became ‘How do we make sure this reads as if it’s not on Azeroth, Argus, or any planet that players would be familiar with?’”
The answers to that question ended up coming from many different sources.
“We were pulling from art nouveau, we were pulling from ‘80s early kind of sci-fi, but the one that I’m most proud of is Drew Struzan,” Mason says, invoking the artist behind the legendary posters for movies like Star Wars, Blade Runner, and The Thing. “[Struzan’s work] is kind of an abstract scene. It gives the impression of a larger story… One of the first solutions that we found a lot of success with was in the sky behind all of the card artwork. The skies are always vibrant and have this kind of cosmic look. When you see it all together at a glance, you instantly think, ‘Okay, that’s the space expansion.’”
Of course, that freedom to explore so many influences was tempered by the expectations that come when you are tasked with showcasing a previously mysterious part of the Warcraft universe. The team was aware of that responsibility, though Gonzalez doesn’t see it as a burden.
“I hope I speak for many people on the team when I say that it’s been super exciting,” Gonzalez says of the freedom offered by this largely unexplored terrain. “The coolness of a job like this comes from surprising people and pushing the envelope… It’s exciting, especially as a designer, when we get to explore new ideas that we haven’t really tapped into.”
Few of those ideas new ideas stand out more than the Great Dark Beyond’s marquee new mechanic: Starships. As it turns out, the inspiration for that mechanic can be found in the game’s past rather than in the stars.
Origins of The Starship Mechanic
Most Hearthstone expansions introduce at least one major card mechanic that opens the game up to entirely new possibilities. Great Dark Beyond’s “Starship” mechanic certainly fulfills that expectation.
What is the Starship mechanic? Well, various Great Beyond minions double as “Starship Pieces.” When they die, they combine with any previously killed pieces and stay on the board to form a powerful Starship that can be launched multiple ways. That launched Starship is essentially a new minion with all the stats and effects of the pieces that went into it. It’s a relatively complex idea that speaks to the trust the team has in new and veteran players to figure things out. It’s also an idea the team has been kicking around for quite some time.
“Starship started two expansions ago in the Whizbang’s Workshop miniset,” Gonzalez reveals. “The original description of that set was ‘misfit toys.’ I’d thought it be cool to have a toy Old God, and I really liked the C’Thun gameplay from the Whispers of the Old Gods expansion.”
Gonzalez is referring to a previous mechanic in which “cultist” cards were played throughout the game to increase the power of a C’Thun card in players’ decks. Gonzalez wanted to revisit that idea for a toy version of C’Thun in Whizbang’s Workshop.
“What if you could also add a bunch of different effects to make this amalgamated giant minion?” Gonzalez theorizes. “You’re building up to this giant Old God toy by sacrificing toy cultists that plug themselves into the sockets of C’Thun. Ultimately, we knew we didn’t have enough time or enough space to do that mechanic justice. Once I was slated to lead The Great Dark Beyond, I was like, ‘I want to do this.’” The work had already gone into it. We can re-flavor it to be Starships.”
Starships aren’t the only idea the Hearthstone team pulled from the past. There is one legendary World of Warcraft character they’ve been waiting to bring into the game who finally appears in The Great Dark Beyond. However, it turns out that summoning them to Hearthstone was anything but easy.
Kil’jaeden and Great Dark Beyond’s Biggest Problem Cards
The Warcraft universe is filled with powerful and feared villains, but few are as beloved as revered as the Eredar demon lord Kil’jaeden. Among other things, Kil’jaeden is known for his war against the Draenei. So, while the Hearthstone team knew Kil’jaeden would be a perfect fit for this Draenei-focused expansion, they still had to find a way to make the iconic character feel unique within their game. The eventual solution came from a strange place.
“In [Hearthstone’s] Battlegrounds Duos mode, I had so much fun fiddling with the portal that lets me interact with my partner’s board,” Gonzalez recalls. “It was so tactile, magical, simple, and cool that I was like, ‘Alright, I want to steal that and put it in the constructed game mode.’”
That inspiration led to Kil’jaeden’s incredible new effect. When played, Kil’jaeden replaces your deck with a portal that offers an endless stream of increasingly powerful Demon minions. According to Gonzalez, the idea was to invoke the classic demonic idea of inevitability. Play against Kil’jaeden long enough, and you probably won’t survive against what comes out of that portal.
However, Kil’jaeden not only destroys your deck; he effectively upends nearly every other mechanic that a game like Hearthstone relies on. It’s a problem the VFX team is all too familiar with.
“Even as Leo was pitching it to us, we were like, ‘There’s no way,’” Mason recalls. “We literally had to change how card draws work. We found many bugs once we messed with the concept of drawing cards in a game about drawing cards. It was very much a back-and-forth between the engineering team, the UI team, and the design team… It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, and I’m certain this will be a thing we’ll be keeping an eye on.”
While the team fully expects that players will use Kil’jaeden in unintended ways, the demon lord wasn’t the biggest “problem child” of the expansion. That title belongs to a card that few players are talking about at the moment: the Druid Legendary Uluu, The Everdrifter.
“I’m the person to blame for why that card exists,” Gonzalez confesses. “I was talking to my producer and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a couple of nicknames for Uluu.’ There’s Uluu. I hate you. There’s Uluu, the Everbuggy…he had just a whole list. And it’s like, what, what have I done?”
It turns out that Uluu’s effect (which generates a stream of the Druid class’ “Choose One” card effects as long as it is in your hand) isn’t necessarily a problem at the moment. However, when it comes to planning future expansions, Gonzalez may have created much more work for everyone than he intended.
“It’s always a matter of setting us up for minimal work in the future by making sure we are future-proofing everything we can,” Gonzalez says. “With Uluu, the reason why it took so much work is that if a ‘Choose One’ card is added at any time after Uluu’s creation, Uluu is going to have to be able to use those. At least as long as they’re not super, giga, omega, weird.”
In a strange way, the problem with Uluu represents the difficulty of making a live-service game like Hearthstone: the need to constantly think about the future. The future is, much like Kil’jaeden’s effect, a potentially frightening inevitability. So how is the Hearthstone team preparing for what comes next?
What Is Next For Hearthstone in 2025?
The Great Dark Beyond represents the end of a strange year for Hearthstone, developer Blizzard, the video game industry, and…well, humanity as a whole, for that matter. At the end of it all, what was the Hearthstone team’s biggest takeaway from 2024 that they hope to apply to 2025?
“I think it is something we’ve been doing and try our hardest to do: making sure to keep what our players want in mind,” Gonzalez says. “This year especially, we’ve been seeing feedback and comments about Hearthstone getting a little more silly. With Great Dark Beyond, it was important to bring in a lot of those Warcraft elements that we can add our Hearthstone sprinkles to.”
It’s a sentiment that Mason echoes on behalf of the art team.
“We’ve literally had graphs of the silliness-to-tone ratio,” Mason reveals. “[With Great Dark Beyond] we went into more high epicness without leaking into the kind of silly nature of the game… As far as the art team and the things that we’ve kind of taken from this past year, I think ‘surprise and delight’ has always been the name of the game for us. I think it’s still looking up and up, especially for the surprise and delight category.”
Perhaps it’s better not to know exactly what comes next. When it comes to life or Hearthstone, maybe that knowledge would come at the cost of future surprises and delights. The trick, one supposes, is to contribute to the world you’d like to live in so that you can maintain your faith that it is still capable of occasionally delivering such wonders.
With The Great Dark Beyond, Hearthstone once again seems to be in a good position to surprise and delight. If you really want to know what’s coming next, then Gonzalez has at least a tease to offer.
“I think for people who love like very iconic Warcraft things, there’s a lot to look forward to in the future.”
Hearthstone: The Great Dark Beyond is out now.
The post Hearthstone: The Great Dark Beyond – The Secrets Behind Starships, Problem Cards, and What’s Next appeared first on Den of Geek.
