Hearthstone Team Explains Curse Of Naxxramas Delays

Hearthstone players have been waiting several months for the Curse of Naxxramas expansion pack. Today the development team explained how far along the single-player DLC is and why it's taken them so long.

"We recently just completed all major implementation tasks and are now working on polish as well as some final implementation items," said community manager Aratil on the Battle.net forums. "Our primary focus now is on bug fixing and getting the game ready for ship."

"The team has fixed over 200 bugs just in the last week alone, and new bugs continue to be discovered. After all of the identified bugs have been addressed, the game will still need to undergo several rounds of quality assurance tests to ensure that the game is ready."

Blizzard recently announced that they're going to release Curse of Naxxramas in July. They had hoped to release pricing details on July 1st but they're still deliberating the final details.

"Adventure Mode is a completely new thing for us; in fact, Hearthstone itself is still quite new. There are a lot of factors to consider when determining pricing and we want it to feel accessible to newer players as well as obtainable by players who do not wish to spend real money. This requires not only a lot of research on our part, but also a lot of back and forth on what could work and what won't. In fact, it took us a while to even determine that we wanted to separate the Curse of Naxxramas Adventure Mode into different wings."

Curse of Naxxramas is a five-wing dungeon. Players will battle A.I. opponents with unique abilities. The rewards include new Legendaries and class-specific cards.

Though Blizzard is still finalizing the price information, they already announced the general business model. The five wings will be rolled out one at a time across a five-week period. The first wing will be free to download and play. The remaining four, however, will have to be purchased with in-game gold or real-world money.

Blizzard is planning to release additional Adventure Mode expansions in the future. Aratil said that they won't take as long as Curse of Naxxramas, though.

"We are currently laying a lot of the groundwork for Adventure Modes in general and intend to be able to leverage this groundwork for future Adventure Modes. This should definitely help with future Adventure Mode rollout times."

Season 4 of Hearthstone's Ranked Play launched earlier this week. The new season brings a special reward: a purple-and-green card back inspired by Naxxramas. Players can earn this reward by hitting Rank 20 by the end of the season. The card back will be given out on August 1st, the start of Season 5. Hopefully by then you'll be able to use that back to decorate a slew of new cards you earned from Curse of Naxxramas.