PCG: Are you worried the simplicity is going to discourage fans of Dota or LoL? I could imagine a lot of the things I love about Heroes of the Storm being the same things a Dota 2 fan hates.ĭB: It’s really interesting.
And in many ways even “difficult to master” can be about clean game pieces, so we’re always shooting for that for all of our games. We think “easy to learn, difficult to master,” and part of “easy to learn” is clean game pieces. We don’t believe that simple means lack of strategy, or simple means lack of depth. It also still makes for an incredibly deep experience because, with the gameplay pieces being simple, everybody can focus on higher levels of strategy. Second of all, it makes it easier to balance and deal with when we’re building the game. This does a couple of things first of all, it makes the game easier for everybody to get into, which is very exciting.
Trying to keep the pieces clean and clear and as crisp as possible. So it wasn’t just this game, StarCraft has a core value of simplicity of design. It gets really deep and really interesting. The cards in Hearthstone are very simple in the design, but when they start interacting it gets insane.
We know that great games come from very simple gameplay pieces that are stacked fifty on fifty on top of one another.
DB: Simplicity is always on our mind at Blizzard game design and Blizzard art and Blizzard engineering.