You can’t possible fill every little thing with details like Hearthstone does. On the opposite part of the spectrum are massive open-world games like Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed, Saints Row, or a bunch of MMORPGs, where there’s big sprawling areas, lots of activities, lots of things to do. But Hearthstone is a game that is of a relatively small scale, not in a sense that developers don’t have a lot of things to do (they do), but that it essentially revolves around that card game box we see when the game opens. Hearthstone does this by adding lots of details – all the little animations in the UI to create a feeling that it’s a physical box, the screen shaking and crowd cheering when you attack an enemy with a very powerful minion, the ‘Job’s Done’ sound from Warcraft 2 when you can’t do anything that turn, the sparkles on your spell cards when they’re affected by spell damage bonuses. There are many different ways we can craft wholesome experiences, it all depends on a game by game basis. And a game is valued best when it all works as a whole. How controls themselves are used as a narrative tool in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. How the different sound cues of Left 4 Dead depending on the special zombie nearby influence the teamwork aspect of the game. How the wooshing sound of Hearthstone cards when you move them helps with that feeling of a physical card game.
And all the different areas of the game, – cool gameplay, technology, narrative, audio – feeds into those experiences. I firmly believe that what we as game developers do is create experiences for our players.
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