According to Senior Game Designer Mike Donais' words last night on Value Town, Blizzard are already hard at work, preparing the next expansion set for Hearthstone. Unlike Curse of Naxxramas, this one will be bigger and will come in new booster packs.
The hour-long final episode of Value Town brought a Blizzard dev to the show. Mike Donais, senior game designer for Hearthstone, was happy to share information on the upcoming expansion (date still missing) as well as other developments for the game.
According to Donais, the next boost to Hearthstone will differ from what Curse of Naxxramas offered. While Hearthstone's first expansion offered players the ability to unlock cards by beating bosses in an improvised raid mode similar to the World of WarCraft experience, the next one will be a more "traditional" one, seen in tabletop card games like Magic: The Gathering.
What this means is that the next set of Hearthstone cards will come in a larger bulk, approximately 100. Players will be collecting them by buying booster packs just like they do for the vanilla Hearthstone cards. The store will thus have two options - purchase vanilla Hearthstone packs or the new expansion's packs.
A lot of Hearthstone enthusiasts have been waiting on some information about a stable expansion cycle for the game, but according to Donais one such is not set.
Other potential features, trends observed and lessons learned were also discussed on the Value Town stream, including:
- People loved the puzzle nature of Curse of Naxxramas boss fights which forced the players to invent specific decks and not just use cookie cutter standard decks
- The dev team doesn't want to settle for this CoN quality, rather want to take it more steps further
- The per-week release of the cards brought a dynamic to the meta where every week players would try different builds with the cards they're given
- When new cards are designed, there is slight emphasis on having a minion-based play
- [card]Dark Cultist[/card] was initially 2/4 but was changed in the last moment in order for Priest to get "the right amount of love"
- 2v2 formats - no such formats are currently in development but it is a feature worth exploring
- Possibly facilitating arena tournaments like the recent Lord of the Arena
- Adding new cards to address the influx of Deathrattle cards, not forcing players to go for silence effects necessarily
