Hearthstone Explains Why There Was No Perils In Paradise Board, And Why There Will Only Be 1 Per Year Going Forward

When Heartstone’s Perils in Paradise expansion dropped, some players might have been surprised to see there was no new board included. Those who follow data miners knew it was a possibility, as we noted when we covered the launch.

Understandably, players of the collectible card game weren’t exactly happy with a standard feature being left out without explanation. Now we have that explanation, thanks to an update from the game’s Executive Producer Nathan Lyons-Smith.

Lyons-Smith starts out by acknowledging that the team realizes they should have communicated better with players about sudden changes to the game stating that they’d “made some changes over the past 18 months that were not what [players have] come to expect from Heartstone”. He goes on to say that they “didn’t do a good job communicating [their] strategy around those changes” and apologized saying that “going forward, it is [his] goal to be more open”. This means players should expect changes to be shared more readily as well as the context in which they’re being made.

The next section of the post covers the dev team’s strategy for future development. It’s a bit buzzwordy. The header is “Fun, Focus, and Fearless”. The five-paragraph section discusses changes they’ve made that people have enjoyed so far, specifically to the modes that players play the most – which they are focusing on. The “fearless” part basically boils down to the fact that they plan on trying out things and seeing what works.

As noted, one of the things they tried with Perils in Paradise was to not include a board. It turns out, the plan going forward is to only create one new board a year, rather than the traditional three. Instead, the effort that would go into making the new boards will be going into things like offering players a system to choose their favorite boards. There are new hero skins in the works as well.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing is going to depend on your perspective as a player. Some folks like shiny new things, but it seems like the ability to pick a favorite board – perhaps something that should have been available a long time ago – might be a fair tradeoff.