Festival of Legends
Take the stage in Hearthstone’s music-themed expansion!
Company: Blizzard Entertainment
Contributions:
Established important pillars core to the expansion’s identity
Guided the design team in staying within the bounds of the aforementioned pillars
Collaborated with other disciplines to create a cohesive vision on the expansion’s development
Translated musical ideas into mechanics, characters, and cards to create a thematically cohesive expansion
Worked on both the Initial and Final Design teams for this expansion
Role: Expansion Lead + Game Designer
Fantasy Classes, Real-World Genres
My main goal for Festival of Legends was to fully explore what the concept of music looks like through the lens of the Warcraft universe. Music is a beautifully diverse thing, but at the same time each person’s connection to it is so unique. This contrast between music’s near-endless variety and its universal appeal lent itself perfectly to Hearthstone’s class system. By giving each class its own unique genre, the expansion as a whole felt cohesive while still giving each class its own unique spin on music in Warcraft.
Legendary Musicians
Legendary cards play a unique role in Hearthstone. Not only are they flashier and stronger than your average card, but they’re also great opportunities for us to highlight named characters in the world. Each class was given a Legendary Musician minion to act as the face of that class’s genre. Some of these are brand-new characters created as the ultimate culmination of a genre’s style. Others are previously existing characters showing off their musical side, helping make music feel not just contained to this set.
How Music Informed Mechanics
To keep Hearthstone accessible and familiar, we decided not to introduce gameplay reliant on a player’s musical or rhythmic execution. Instead, we explored how to gamify musical concepts and tropes.
Finale
A bonus if this card spends all your remaining Mana Crystals
We loved the idea of a Hearthstone match being two battling bands passing the spotlight back-and-forth. Finale gave us that fantasy of dropping your best line before handing it back to your opponent. The gameplay felt natural - spending your all of your Mana is already something you should try to do! That said, finding balanced ways to reward players for that was tricky. Most Finale cards were designed to be situational in order to prevent players from getting too much power by just playing these cards as soon as they could.
Legendary Songs
Legendary spells themed around a class’s musician’s most popular song
When a song tops the charts and defines a genre, what other word can be used to describe it other than ‘Legendary’? Typically, Legendary cards in Hearthstone are minions. Legendary spells weren’t anything new at the time of this expansion’s release, but it had been years since ALL classes got a Legendary spell at the same time. The fantasy of these spells being songs also let us do something really special with the art: we got to style them like album art! Each band/musician’s logo can be seen imposed on top of the art, helping sell the fantasy.
Soloist Minions
Minions that get bonuses if you control no other minions
One of the strongest fantasies I wanted to fit into the expansion was the idea of minion cards performing solos. Early on, we tested the condition of requiring the minion to be your only one in play. Since this is an input that works in multiple classes but requires the player to play around it, we felt great about doing it as a cycle across multiple classes. Plus, there was a ton of design space on what we could do for the outputs.
Harmony & Dissonance
Spells that swap their values each turn while in your hand
There’s a handful of musical concepts that are diametrically opposed: major & minor, sharp & flat, harmonic & dissonant, etc. The idea of spells with swapping value came about pretty quickly in development, but we struggled find a compelling way to present it. Testers were not enthused about a ‘major’ card turning into a ‘minor’ card, and ‘sharp’ and ‘flat’ have unrelated physical definitions. We shipped ‘harmonic’ and ‘dissonant’ because of how musical and memorable they are without confusing a player’s understanding of the mechanic.
Media Opportunities
For the Festival of Legends, I was able to participate in videos on the official Hearthstone YouTube channel and in interviews with media outlets. Check them out below!
