“It's our own take on it - I think that's our MO, we do our own takes on these things, like Battlegrounds was our take on the auto battler genre. And there's a really great, awesome core working on the Mercenaries mode, but Paul's been spearheading this endeavour and doing really awesome, fantastic work.” Dungeon Run – and the many PVE adventures that have riffed on it within Hearthstone – already offers something of a roguelike experience, so what sets Mercenaries apart? Does it have more of a Slay the Spire feel? Or perhaps take inspiration from something like Thronebreaker? “It's more in the Slay the Spire vein, just for simplicity’s sake,” Lee explains. “He's the original creator of the Dungeon Run - the Dungeon Run was his pitch and his ideas, obviously tons of talented people helped make all of those Dungeon Runs across the years. “The designer that's been taking the lead is Paul Nguyen,” Game Director Ben Lee tells me. And we've been prototyping and building and growing that team over the last, I'd say, really 11, 12 months to then have a timeline of, ‘This year, we're expecting to release.’” The Mercenaries team within the Hearthstone team is currently 15 or so dedicated to the project, but with plenty of other staff also hopping in to help out across different disciplines as needed. But as we went through, we settled on… character progression, roguelike RPG … as the thing that we wanted to add to Hearthstone. “One of the things that gets asked about from the community, and that the team is passionate about trying to figure out, is some form of 2v2, and that was actually one of the original pitches. “We started with a handful of pitches and ideas to explore,” he explains. They’ve been working on it for almost 18 months, according to Production Director Nathan Lyons-Smith. Your characters’ levels and progression will be persistent across the mode as a whole.īlizzard is only really teasing Mercenaries right now, but despite that, the team has already put a lot of time into it. Each run will be comprised of a new set of randomly generated encounters, with players choosing who from their team will take part before each fight, then teeing up their actions at the same time as their foe and watching it play out. For now we know that players will assemble a team of characters both new and iconic – including the likes of Sylvanas Windrunner and Ragnaros the Firelord – each of which has a unique set of abilities and can level up into increasingly powerful versions of themselves. As we’ve seen with the hugely popular Battlegrounds and the Dungeon Run-inspired PVP action of Duels, new modes can completely reshaped Hearthstone’s gameplay, so it’s going to be exciting seeing what this mode has to offer. There’s a lot coming in the immediate future, then, but arguably the most exciting new announcement made at Blizzcon won’t be with us until later this year, and that’s the new mode Mercenaries.
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