Interview mit Yong Woo

VolumeGames: We’re here with Yong Woo, Hearthstone’s Senior Game Producer at Gamescom 2014.
Yong Woo: Hi there. Pleasure talking with you.
VolumeGames: First of all I wanted to ask you, how deep was your involvement in the development of the game?
Yong Woo: Sure. So my name is Yong Woo, I am a Senior Producer for Hearthstone. I’ve been on the Hearthstone team for 2 years. So basically help to manage our team and I got started right before we had our first playable demo. We used to call it the Fire&Ice Demo, where you basically had Jaina playable. I started right around the time that was happening and then I’ve been with the team through Alpha, Beta and the launch of the game. I was the second producer on the game, I guess I’m the fifteenth person to join the team. So that’s how much my involvement goes.
VolumeGames: Do you have any experience with other Collectible Card Games?
Yong Woo: Actually, when I joined Blizzard I worked for StarCraft 2 first and then helped for Diablo 3. But you know, I am a enthusiast about CCGs. I’ve been playing all my life, but this is the first digital card game, I ever worked on.
VolumeGames: Is knowledge of CCGs required to be on the Hearthstone Team?
Yong Woo: Yea, I mean when we hire people on to our team, obviously they need to be good on what they do. At Blizzard it is really important that people who work on a game, do not only work on the game, they also like to play the game. What makes our game special is, that everybody on the team is a developer but also a #1 fan. I play a tremendous amount of Hearthstone all the time. I already have my 500 wins on Priest. So, it’s definitely a factor for joining the team.
VolumeGames: Did you ever think that Hearthstone had such a big impact? I mean, it’s a card game. Noone could ever have expected this huge success.
Yong Woo: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, when the vision for Hearthstone team is to prove that a small nimble team can make epic quality Blizzard games. When we first started thinking on which kind of game we wanted to work on, we first looked at: Hey, what are the types of games we want to play?  And then we make that game available for everybody.
A lot of people on my team, including myself, we play Collectible Card Games for like over a decade. There’s one picture we look at some times for inspiration is a picture from 15 years ago from Mike Morhaime, our CEO, and Bob Fitch, our lead engineer, back then he was lead engineer for Starcraft. I played Starcraft when I was in highschool, so it’s an amazing honor to work with him now. But that asides, on the picture you can see Mike Morhaime and Bob Fitch sitting on the floor, cargo pants and sneakers, like playing CCG. Whenever I look at the picture, I remember why we made Hearthstone. Because we love CCGs. I think the CCG genre is a little bit misunderstood, that people think it’s too complicated or it’s too nerdy, like it’s not fun for me. But we at Blizzard knew we can take a game like this, a game we love and help people understand what’s so amazing about it, we tease out the unnecessary complexity but kinda retain the strategic core, and why I think it did so well is because it’s a game that we, the developers have been enjoying for years and years and years and now other people can enjoy it too.
VolumeGames: So was reducing the complexity your biggest challenge for the game?
Yong Woo: I think it all comes together, because you know our vision is to create a CCG for everyone. And that means, yea, we need to reduce the complexity so it’s really easy for new players to understand the game, otherwise they’ll be too intimidated by. So, on the one hand we need to reduce complexity of the game. A part of the way we do it is to try to kind of condense the words down as much as possible. At traditional CCGs there is an encyclopedia of the word and it takes you 5 minutes to read it and then you’ll be like: What did that mean? And so for us it is really important to remove all the unnecessary complexity and rules about this card and reduce it to only one sentence. The other thing is, we don’t talk about this as much, but I think it is really important to state which tremendous job our art team did. In Hearthstone everything is very intuitive and visible. When two units attack the cards slam into each other and like you can see the damage being done and understand what happened like – That just makes sense. You can cast a spell of Blizzard and a rain of icicles comes down from the sky and things get frozen. Even if you didn’t read the opponents card you’re like – Oh, I get it. He cast a spell, the rain of ice came down, things got hurt and frozen. So the reduction of complexity and the visual, physical world we made around the CCG makes the difference. That’s why I think the game is really fun to watch and that’s why I think it’s really taken off in streaming. Maybe it’s the first digital card game which is really compelling to watch and that’s a really wonderful experience and we’re really glad people can enjoy. Whenever we start playing games at the office, the entire team starts stop working and watches the players behind their backs like – Hey don’t do that! Why’re you playing this card?  And to us that’s like the awesome experience to Hearthstone.
VolumeGames: What impact did the release of the Naxxramas expansion have on Hearthstone? Did many players come back?
Yang Woo: Yeah, I mean Naxxramas has been really awesome. I think we already talked a little bit about the fact that with Naxxramas we’ve seen the most number of active players we’ve ever seen. I also think many players took a little break and came back and I think players who are already playing actively are playing even more and we’ve got a lot of new players coming in. So the whole point of Naxxramas was to kinda offer a new way to enjoy Hearthstone. On the one hand we have 39 Single Player missions. So if you want a change of pace from 1on1 competitive gameplay, you can now play against the computer which is more of a puzzle-like element. You’ll be encountering what seems like an impossible situation and you have to make really cool decks to overcome this situation. I think it’s a really good change of pace and has been received really well and not only by competitive players, but also more by casual players, where they can take their time and figure these out. It’s a really fun experience. And for the people who are more focused on 1on1 competitive play, we have 30 new cards introduced and they’re making a crazy change on the meta. We’ve been releasing them on a week-by-week basis and it was just week 4 this week, the construct wing, and already a lot of crazy stuff is happening right now. We have this new crazy shaman deck where people are using rebirth and reincarnate to do some crazy stuff. I’m seeing a lot of demon decks coming out, so warlocks have a different way to play now apart from handlock and zoo. I play a priest, so I’ve got my dark cultist last night and I’m playing around with it. So I think on the one hand those are not a lot of cards, but on the other hand we really cut the fat out of the system. We don’t gave the people junk, we only gave them cards which are really meaningful and have an impact on the meta. I think it’s making a bit difference and people are having fun.
VolumeGames: Will there be another Solo Adventure? Can the players expect more coming out?
Yong Woo: Yeah, I mean we’re totally excited about doing more adventures. You know, we’re learning a lot what people like and don’t like, so for us this is all like a learning experience, so with adventures we wanted to figure out – Hey, we have a Digital CCG. What can we do which is not possible with a physical version of the game. And usually with a physical version of the game you recurrently release expansion packs and expansion packs, but with the digital version we were like – Hey, wait! We can release cards over the course of 5 weeks. This is physically impossible. That could be fun, that could be exciting. So with Naxxramas I think we learned a lot and we’re still receiving a lot of feedback but for our next expansion we’re trying a more traditional way of doing it. Just like we had Expert Pack, our next expansion is planned to be a new set of packs. We wanted to inject a lot of more cards into the system and let’s see how that goes. So the short answer: We will make new Solo Adventures for the future, yes. But our next expansion will be a new Expansion Pack.
VolumeGames: Referring to the big impact on e-sport, do you plan on adding any more options to the game like a Tournament mode or do you rely on the third parties?
Yong Woo: One of the things that’s been a delightful surprise to us is how the e-sport community has been embracing Hearthstone. We always knew that it´s fun to play and fun to watch but to kinda see people competing and enjoy competing on great tournaments like Dreamhack that´s pretty cool for us. There is a lot of diversity of types of tournaments that are being run by our awesome community. We want to encourage that and we are pooling together the communities to our Blizzcon tournament at the end of the year for a quarter million dollars prize pool. I think that is super exciting and I can’t wait to see who the best Hearthstone player in the world is going to be. We’re not opposed to considering other tournament options maybe that are built in-game. It’s currently not on our priority list but we’re considering it.
VolumeGames: Anything else in your priority list you’re about to talk to?
Yong Woo: [laughs] So, I think one thing I could talk about is… You know, we have a list of hundreds of cool things we’re considering for Hearthstone and the list wouldn’t even fit in this room. But the top most point in our list is the Observer Mode. And I think it’s important for two reasons: It obviously makes it easier for content creators to stream their games when they´re playing against each other and it also makes it easier to stream tournaments. We really want to encourage the community to make more content. On the other hand one of the great joys when playing Hearthstone for me is when I have my friends behind me, hanging out with me and telling me what to do or how to improve my deck. I think Hearthstone can be a very social experience and we really want to bring that experience online as well. So if you and I are friends and you’re playing a game and your game is open to being observed I could like log in and see that you’re online playing a game and I’ll be like – Hey, Dude. You’re playing a game. Can I come watch? – And we can discuss your new priest deck and how’s your Dark Cultist working out. To me that’s a really exciting experience to bring online. So for those 2 reasons Observer Mode is on the top of our priority list and we’re actively working on it right now. I don’t have a specific delivery date but it’s really coming along.
VolumeGames: Thank you very much for your time. We very much appreciate it!
Yong Woo: Anytime. Was nice talking to you!