This is an open letter to Blizzard. I have been a loyal customer for a long time now, and while this does not give me the rights to the design philosophy of the company, I am left baffled by the recent decision to remove the expansion classic: boards AND music!!! If there is one thing other than the cards themselves that get me hyped for the new expansion, it is the music, and somewhere in the middle of the content, the boards themselves. These things come as a package deal, for obvious reasons.
Now let me explain why this is important to me, and possibly for a lot of people: while you are in a game, what is happening to immerse you into the new expansion? Voicelines and SFX, maybe a new Hero portait for a few seconds? These immerse me to varying degrees, but what really does it is the music.
At the end of a rotation, I get the time to sort of tire from the music from the latest big sets. Just enough that the new expansion’s music will fill in for the issue, and Hearthstone’s team truly has talent for creating music that really gets me into the thinking space while figuring out the next few turns. The flavour for the set while in-game , to me, comes largely, in fact majoritarily, from the music.
Now I hear Hearthstone wants to allocate resources to some other aspects of the game while giving players the opportunity to select a past board as their favorite. While this is appreciated, it feels like a pittance to me. Where is this budget going? Why can’t I pay you for a new board instead? Because of how this would look? If I have to pay for a new board to get new music that will get me into your game, I most definitely will. Put it up as an “immersion package” or in the preorder and later into the store I don’t care, but one thing is for sure: I have lost enough interest in future expansions to stop buying preorders and just get a couple packs each expansion - until anything is done to bring back my immersion to similar levels as previously.
What does this NOT mean? Hero Portraits, Card Backs, Pets (cool idea but don’t toss the music out for a silly cosmetic!?), Signature Cards. For a card game, it IS hard to imagine what could bring as much immersion into new expansions as music does, but if you can find it, kudos I will be back for the preorders. Otherwise, please don’t mess with my music. 