Hearthstone director announces his exit and says new card types are coming
In this week's episode of the Coin Concede podcast, Hearthstone game director Ben Lee announced he is leaving the team to work on a different, unannounced project within Blizzard. Lee also outlined a host of changes players can expect to see from Hearthstone in 2022.
Lee has been Hearthstone's game director since the end of 2018, during which time he has overseen a slew of major changes to the long-running CCG, including the implementation of Hearthstone's «Rewards Track» season pass system. While initially met with fury over perceived reductions in player rewards, following some tweaking the Rewards Track is now a broadly-accepted part of Hearthstone.
Lee's tenure as director also included the introduction of the Demon Hunter class, and his time leading the team was characterized by a more regular pace of balance updates and increased responsiveness to player feedback. Less successfully, following its troubled announcement, the Mercenaries mode has widely been deemed a whiff. On the business side, new forms of monetization have also ramped up substantially, with cosmetics being added to the main modes—Standard and Battlegrounds—at a bewildering rate.
While not certain, many in the Hearthstone community believe that Lee has joined the same unannounced project as fellow Hearthstone vets Mike Donais and Peter Whalen. Given these developers' expertise, it would be reasonable to assume that this upcoming game will offer hybrid CCG-RPG gameplay akin to Hearthstone. Hearthstone content creator, RegisKillbin, speculates that it may even be a CCG-roguelike, a Blizzard take on Slay the Spire.
As an aside, Blizzard has a different 'unannounced' game in the works, except that it actually has been announced: The studio is working
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