At a recent trip to Blizzard HQ I had the chance to sit down with Hearthstone Game Director Ben Brode on the eve of the release of the latest card expansion Journey to Un'Goro. And we talked about how great dinosaurs make things, what crazy ideas the team has left by the wayside, and how his burgeoning
rap career is working out.
Plus, what goes into creating a new expansion for the game.
“There's a couple ways that we think about new expansions and worlds and ideas,” Ben explains. “We call them top-down and bottom-up. So, a top-down design is, ‘Hey, dinosaurs.’ What would a set about dinosaurs be like? What kind of things happen in that set? What kind of mechanics make sense for dinosaurs? A bottom-up design is where we come up with mechanics first and then come up with the thematic wrapping around that. An example of that was The Grand Tournament, where we knew we wanted to do a set about hero powers. And then we felt like this setting of World of Warcraft was the perfect mapping to focus on heroism and hero powers.”
Click Here for Talking Hearthstone with Game Director Ben Brode