Hearthstone got the ‘loss of health at the end of the card’ fatigue system thanks to Jeff Kaplan

The director of the Hearthstone title revealed something about the mystery of Hearthstone in a new video from Arts Technica. The whole video is worth watching if you want to know about Hearthstone’s history and how the game was made, but the most interesting part is at the end, when Brode explains Hearthstone how the game’s fatigue system works – increasing the amount of damage the hero takes every time they try to draw a card when the deck is empty. As Brode explains, fatigue damage is non-existent at first. It just so happened that Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan played Hearthstone himself.

“We were testing it and asked Jeff Kaplan to give it a go,” Brode said. “And he’s super excited, he’s starting to control the minion and attack, he’s learning how each card plays. He had never played this game before, so he was very interested. And when he was close to winning, the opponent’s computer ended his turn. And it says “Your turn, you lose!” (your turn, you lose) and he’s like, what?”

In the early version of Hearthstone that Kaplan played, fatigue damage was not present. Instead, when you run out of cards, you automatically lose, like other card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh. The problem was with the system, Kaplan’s feedback helped the Team 5 team realize this, and it made the game tasteless. “It doesn’t matter what decision Kaplan makes in the match, he will still lose because he runs out of cards,” Brode said.

“So we designed the fatigue system to cause the hero to take damage every time you try to draw but the deck has no cards left,” Brode said. “And what it does is this connects the game. If the enemy only has 1 health left for you to finish, the opponent will die if fatigue occurs. The aim of the game is to bring the opponent to that point that is very important.”

Fatigue damage not only prolongs the match, it is directly tied to the strategy of prolonging the match. If you’re playing a control deck against a control deck and you know the match is going to be long, you’ll think about ways to avoid drawing more cards to delay fatigue.

Racing fatigue has created surprising endings and spawned the existence of decks like Fatigue Rogue, Mill Druid, and more famously Fatigue Warrior – decks that “last forever” and avoid getting killed. injury due to fatigue. This deck almost led to the tournament having to change the rules in order for the match to end.

Source: PCgamer