Hearthstone: Across the Timeways devs on making time-travel work, and why now was the right time to dig into Warcraft realities

Hearthstone, Blizzard’s long-running card game, is not only a testament to the value of excellent, moreish game design, but it’s also a great way to showcase Warcraft heroes, villains, races, and spells in a new light.

With Across the Timeways, the Hearthstone team is taking this a step further with a trip through alternate timelines to recruit powerful characters from the franchise’s deep bench and stars alike, with unique twists.

I sat down with Edward Goodwin, the set’s lead designer, and Uriah Voth, Senior 2D Artist on Hearthstone, to talk about when the right moment to travel through time, the powerful new mechanics, and more.

“We didn’t wanna waste our shot”

Hearthstone is no stranger to pulling cards from Warcraft’s decades-long lore, but this is the first time we’re seeing a trip through what is essentially a multiverse.

“Across the Timeways shows off a bunch of different characters from all across Warcraft, some of the most celebrated and iconic ones,” Goodwin explains. “The time travel expansion is one that we’ve wanted to do for a very long time. I would say almost all the people on the team are lifelong Warcraft fans.”

“So this was like a moment where every single person on the team had like, ‘oh, that’s the character that I wanna bring back”

“It has never been quite the right time, I think this is the kind of expansion you get to do once, and people love it, and if you do it twice, people are like, ‘I don’t need any more of this.”

“We didn’t wanna waste our shot. And if we’re bringing back a bunch of iconic characters like Sylvanas and we’re trying to tell these new stories with them, the stakes need to be high to justify that,” he explains.

“If we’re bringing back all these iconic characters, we’re not here to have them fight like a bunny rabbit,” he jokes.

“Time travel, as a theme, is one that can be very evocative. And the mechanics, the actual core gameplay that we wanted to aim for, needed to capture that.”

“Hearthstone always has this kind of what-if flavor to it that we’re allowed to explore outside of the canon,” Voth adds.

“This set was really the biggest example of that. So we got really excited about checking out some of our favorite heroes and then also expanding on their story in a really cool way.”

“Take Medivh, for example, he’s very dark [in this universe]. He’s been corrupted by Sargeris in this timeline, and Chromie is travelling to save him.”

“It’s a version of himself where he fought against and defeated Sargeris and has become this beacon of light that protects Azeroth from the Legion. It’s very exciting to explore, and because of the timelines that we decided to explore, we had a lot of fun creating that art”.

Light and Dark

Warcraft is home to its fair share of darker tales, but there’s a real dichotomy between Chromie’s cheerful nature and big bad Murozond’s look. I was curious to see how Voth managed to juggle those two aspects.

“I think it was actually more of a benefit because contrast is such a powerful tool in art. So you have the bronze dragon flight and the infinite dragon flight, you know, warm and cool, already complementing each other, dark and light.”

“So there was a lot to play with there. And then to go off this question in another way, what was more of a challenge in this set is we’re going into all of these different timelines, recruiting all these different heroes with different environments, different backgrounds.”

“We were wondering how we can tie all that together because there are so many different things, and one of the ways that we did that was the portal that Chromie’s traveling through to get to each different world. So this environment is designed. 70% is like this ‘sand time environment’ with time magic winding through it, and then 30% is elements from each of these locations that they’re travelling to.”

“So the artists have control over that 30%, they can put in whatever buildings or environments they want to tell that story, but then it’s still grounded by this sandy magical environment, and you’ll see that in a lot of our cards there are references to sand magic, but also these new worlds that they’re going to helped create like an entire cohesion for the set.”

Voth has previously worked as an artist for Magic: The Gathering, leaning into a spookier, eerie style, so I was curious how the process differs for Hearthstone.

“My role in Hearthstone is a little bit more on the design side,” he explains, “And I would say that Hearthstone definitely leans more into the whimsical and fun.”

“There are definitely darker tones in it, but the first thing I noticed when I joined this team was how much we were allowed to just tap into jokes and try to find silly themes.”

“A great example in this set is our character Rafaam, who has all these different versions of himself from all these different timelines, and all those versions really span what I think is the range that Hearthstone has to offer.”

“You have Calamitous Rafaam on one end, who is Epic and cool. And then on the other side, you have Tiny Rafaam, who is like really a joke character. Very cute, very funny. Um, and, you know, Hearthstone just has that, that range and that flavor.”

Back to the Future

Still, Hearthstone sets are known for their new mechanics, and there are two to be aware of in Across the Timeways.

“Fabled legendaries come with additional legendaries in their deck,” Goodwin explains. “So if you open Sylvanas and put her in your Hunter deck, she’ll also come with her two sisters, Alleria and Vereesa.”

“I think the keyword is amazing for quite a few reasons. One of them is that it lets us tell these incredibly epic stories. It lets us tell the story about Sylvanas and her sisters, and it can be hard to do that on a single card.”

“Rafaam does a great job of capturing it as well, from a gameplay perspective, because these cards are intrinsically tied to one another – you can’t play one without the other.”

The other addition is a surprising one – Rewind. This lets players turn back time to the start of their turn, meaning you can cross your fingers for a different result.

“From a game design perspective, I think one of the challenges with Rewind is that if you give players the option to rewind time, you need to make that a compelling choice,” Goodwin explains.

“If I had a card that says deal one or two damage to something, and you roll the deal one damage, you know that you always have to rewind, right? Because two is better than one. So when we sat down to make these cards, they had to have a very wide range of effects.”

“You have to think about the situations that you’re in. The board state, what your game plan is, so there’s a very fun design challenge there about what kind of cards work with Rewind and what kind of cards don’t, and I think we landed on that.”

Turning back time, however, is a tricky prospect in a game like Hearthstone where cards are always interacting in surprising ways.

“We wanted to faithfully represent what it means to time travel, and there are so many interactions in Hearthstone that you have to consider when you’re doing that, and I think the gameplay team just did an amazing job,” Goodwin adds, pointing to early feedback that the mechanic was too slow.

It’s also something the team has looked to build into the game for a while.

“Sets take a very long time to develop,” Goodwin admits, saying the average is around a year and a half but that Across the Timeways took longer because the team “had a bunch of random scattered ideas”.

In the design process, we constantly iterate on new mechanics and new ideas. Some make it to ship, some get left on the cutting room floor, but then there’s also a set of mechanics where it’s not quite the right time for them, but there’s something promising there.”

“I think we had a version of rewind, maybe about two years ago, that someone came up with, and that was like, ‘Oh, this is a pretty promising idea. How can we use it?”

“We wanna do a time travel expansion, and this is just going to be a 10 out of 10 on flavor.”