Hearthstone has come an incredibly long way in a short space of time. It’s only just entered open beta, but it’s already an established eSport and has legions of diehard fans around the world. It’s early days too - Team 5 has big plans for this one. IGN AU caught up with two members of the team: lead designer Eric Dodds and lead artist Ben Thompson, to chat Hearthstone past, present and future.

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“ We were not thinking ‘hey, maybe this will be a giant eSport before it leaves closed beta.’

Simple presentation, but clean and full of personality.

Existing cards have a wide array of really interesting properties and abilities.

We were very very surprised by how quickly it took off, and speaking to what you were just saying, it makes me so happy that that was how you got into the game. You didn’t think you’d be excited by the game and haven’t played this type of game before… Our thoughts when we first started working on this game were that collectible card games are awesome and digital collectible card games are awesome, and why the heck isn’t everybody playing them? So maybe we can make an awesome digital collectible card game.While we had that thought initially, we had no idea that there would be this much excitement and this much demand for it. We’ve just been blown away by the excitement around it, and the number of people streaming it on Twitch… it’s just been wonderful for us, and surprising and humbling. That and more.That’s definitely been one of the challenges, because we were not necessarily expecting it to be a huge eSport. Certainly when we first started working on it, we talked about it and said ‘hey maybe this could be a cool eSport some day’! We were not thinking ‘hey, maybe this will be a giant eSport before it leaves closed beta.’ With us having a small team, what it’s meant is that we haven’t been able to provide all of the tools we want to provide, especially with the rapid rise of it, sort of feeling like an eSport, so it’s definitely something that we talk about.So while we’re talking about a bunch of eSports features, it’s not something that we’re focusing on developing right now because we haven’t released the game yet. We would love to provide more tools, but that’s going to be something that we provide in the future, and as we figure out exactly what they are, we communicate out ‘here’s what we’re working on,’ but for the moment it’s focusing on getting the game out.We’re also making sure that we fully support ranked play, so in ranked play there’s some communication that we have to do to the player to let you know where in the season you are, we need to provide a card back for each season you participate in, as a way of saying ‘hey, it’s great that you participated in this season’, there’s a number of bugs – a minion-swapping bug that I’m sure a lot of people would be happy for us to fix, and they’d probably be surprised at how tricky it’s been to nail this one down. But of course, the biggest thing is to make sure that our whole infrastructure is really stable, so that we can provide a solid experience when however many people jump in once we actually go into release and have it on the iPad.Since we’ve gone open beta there’s definitely been a bunch more people jump in and that’s been very exciting.Well, our team is enormous now because we’re up to, like, 21 people or so! Our team is huuuuge! Okay, well, it’s huge by Team 5 standards in the past, so I mean we’re definitely scaling up and hiring more people to try and provide for all these features that everybody’s looking for in the upcoming year. So we’re hiring more, but we’re still a small team by Blizzard standards.Figuring out the timeline of exactly where things fall is a little bit tricky, given that we’ve been in closed beta for a fair amount of time, because of course we want to provide new content for people who have been in closed beta since the early phases, but we don’t want to overwhelm players who are just starting to play the game for the first time when we open up to the iPad. I can certainly tell you that you will see an Adventure this year – that will definitely happen, but exactly when that happens I couldn’t say for sure, because we’ve still got a bunch of that stuff to figure out, and figure out exactly what all these new cards will be and how they’ll work and that sort of thing.The idea is that you would play through an Adventure and as you play through the Adventure you earn these cards that would be added to your general pool of cards, so you could play these cards against any other player. It would be a relatively small number of cards compared to what you’d expect to see from a full size, traditional collectable card game expansion.We’re a little bit far in advance to talk about that, because we’re not sure exactly how all of this is going to work, so get back to me in a couple of months and we’ll chat a lot more about this. For the moment we’ve got to figure out exactly how we want it to work internally.