“Even as Leo was pitching it to us, we were like, ‘There’s no way,’” Mason recalls. “We literally had to change how card draws work. We found many bugs once we messed with the concept of drawing cards in a game about drawing cards. It was very much a back-and-forth between the engineering team, the UI team, and the design team… It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, and I’m certain this will be a thing we’ll be keeping an eye on.”
While the team fully expects that players will use Kil’jaeden in unintended ways, the demon lord wasn’t the biggest “problem child” of the expansion. That title belongs to a card that few players are talking about at the moment: the Druid Legendary Uluu, The Everdrifter.
“I’m the person to blame for why that card exists,” Gonzalez confesses. “I was talking to my producer and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a couple of nicknames for Uluu.’ There’s Uluu. I hate you. There’s Uluu, the Everbuggy…he had just a whole list. And it’s like, what, what have I done?”
It turns out that Uluu’s effect (which generates a stream of the Druid class’ “Choose One” card effects as long as it is in your hand) isn’t necessarily a problem at the moment. However, when it comes to planning future expansions, Gonzalez may have created much more work for everyone than he intended.
“It’s always a matter of setting us up for minimal work in the future by making sure we are future-proofing everything we can,” Gonzalez says. “With Uluu, the reason why it took so much work is that if a ‘Choose One’ card is added at any time after Uluu’s creation, Uluu is going to have to be able to use those. At least as long as they’re not super, giga, omega, weird.”
In a strange way, the problem with Uluu represents the difficulty of making a live-service game like Hearthstone: the need to constantly think about the future. The future is, much like Kil’jaeden’s effect, a potentially frightening inevitability. So how is the Hearthstone team preparing for what comes next?
