• Video

Hearthstone designer Dean Ayala on The Boomsday Project and the challenge of building new archetypes

Hearthstone game designer Dean Ayala took some time during this year's Gamescom to catch up with Shacknews, discussing The Boomsday Project, the new Puzzle Lab single-player, and more.

Ozzie Mejia

August 29, 2018 6:20 PM

2

It's been a while since Shacknews last spoke to Hearthstone game designer Dean Ayala. Almost six months, to be exact. But fresh of the release of the Boomsday Project expansion, Ayala took some time to chat with Shacknews once again about a host of topics.

Ayala talks about the competitive meta following the Boomsday Project's release, the rise of the new-look Combo Priest, the new Puzzle Lab single-player content, and more. He also talks about some of the past lessons the team has learned that have applied to the new Boomsday Project expansion.

"I think one of the lessons that we learned is we're always trying to make cards that contribute to new archetypes of play," Ayala told Shacknews. "It's like if you have, say, Control Warrior. It's not enough to say, 'Let's make some new cards and people put these new cards in Control Warrior.' Because at the end of the day, it feels like, okay, you know these new cards, but it's the same deck, the same strategy, the same sort of thing. So we try to make a lot of cards nowadays with every set that are really introducing completely new archetypes and building on old archetypes, as well. So when we have stuff like Mechs and 'Magnetic,' that's totally different from before. It's a totally new deck-building kit when you have cards like Dr. Boom, where your Mechs have Rush for the rest of the game. Well, there's only a few Mechs in the Standard environment before the Boomsday Project came out, so if you're going to build a Mech deck, a Magnetic deck, it's going to be totally different."

Shacknews has written quite a bit about the new Boomsday Project expansion. Be sure to check out our full coverage, along with our interview on the topic of designing Dr. Boom, Mad Genius. For more, be sure to subscribe to Shacknews and GamerHub.TV on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?