“The designer that's been taking the lead is Paul Nguyen,” Game Director Ben Lee tells me. The Mercenaries team within the Hearthstone team is currently 15 or so dedicated to the project, but with plenty of other staff also hopping in to help out across different disciplines as needed. And we've been prototyping and building and growing that team over the last, I'd say, really 11, 12 months to then have a timeline of, ‘This year, we're expecting to release.’” But as we went through, we settled on… character progression, roguelike RPG … as the thing that we wanted to add to Hearthstone. “One of the things that gets asked about from the community, and that the team is passionate about trying to figure out, is some form of 2v2, and that was actually one of the original pitches. “We started with a handful of pitches and ideas to explore,” he explains. They’ve been working on it for almost 18 months, according to Production Director Nathan Lyons-Smith. Your characters’ levels and progression will be persistent across the mode as a whole.īlizzard is only really teasing Mercenaries right now, but despite that, the team has already put a lot of time into it. Each run will be comprised of a new set of randomly generated encounters, with players choosing who from their team will take part before each fight, then teeing up their actions at the same time as their foe and watching it play out. As we’ve seen with the hugely popular Battlegrounds and the Dungeon Run-inspired PVP action of Duels, new modes can completely reshaped Hearthstone’s gameplay, so it’s going to be exciting seeing what this mode has to offer.įor now we know that players will assemble a team of characters both new and iconic – including the likes of Sylvanas Windrunner and Ragnaros the Firelord – each of which has a unique set of abilities and can level up into increasingly powerful versions of themselves. There’s a lot coming in the immediate future, then, but arguably the most exciting new announcement made at Blizzcon won’t be with us until later this year, and that’s the new mode Mercenaries. Lastly, Forged in the Barrens will have spells that can rank up based on how much mana the player has in total. The set also introduces a new keyword, Frenzy, which is a one-time effect that triggers the first time a minion survives damage. Kicking this off, Forged in the Barrens will introduce ten legendary mercenary minions – one for each class – and we’ll follow their adventures for the whole year. You might say this expansion is being made… FOR THE HORDE! This won’t be a standalone expansion, however, as the Year of the Gryphon will play host to a story that runs across the entire year and touches many facets of the game – including Mercenaries mode. The first core set will go live alongside the new expansion Forged in the Barrens, which is themed around the iconic World of Warcraft location in central Kalimdor. Each year will see a new core set rotate in, and thus create the foundation for the year, giving the game’s designers more opportunities to shape the play patterns for each class and keep the game fresh. Previously, Hearthstone’s Basic cards and Classic sets were the evergreen underpinning of the game, but soon they’ll be out and a new 235 card core set (which is a mix of new and existing cards) will be in, and free for all players, ensuring everyone has the building blocks required to build half-decent decks. Not only will several sets of cards leave the Standard format, including Rise of Shadows, Saviors of Uldum and Descent of Dragons, but the cards that form the baseline for the Standard format will also change. During BlizzCon 2021’s opening ceremony today, the Hearthstone team announced a raft of updates coming to Blizzard’s hugely popular card-slinger, including a brand new mode called Mercenaries, which is built around strategic RPG gameplay and roguelike missions and will launch later in 2021, and the next expansion, the Warcraft-themed Forged in the Barrens, which will bring 135 new cards to the game and mark the beginning of the Year of the Gryphon.Īs we’ve previously reported, the next Hearthstone year will herald in the most sweeping set of changes in Hearthstone’s history.
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