Blizzard reveals the cards and features that didn't make it into Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

Blizzard's Eric Dodds took some time out to speak about the development of the Gold Award-winning Hearthstone with our sister site PocketGamer.biz.

Most excitingly for Hearthstone fans, Dodds talks about the features and cards that were cut from the game.

"We removed or changed lots of cards, but I can't think of any that I actually wanted to keep in the game," Dodds said.

"We used to have cards that had the keyword 'Critical Strike', and those cards had a 25 percent chance to do double damage, but it felt too random."

It wasn't just randomness that caused Blizzard to cut some cards. The studio also decided to remove features to ensure the player experience was the best it could be.

"We used to have another ability that gave Minions a bonus attack on their owner's turn, but it was confusing to see the Minions attack changing every turn, so I was glad we removed that as well."

Another reason for cutting features from the game is one we hear regularly: balancing.

"The original Rogue Hero ability used to give you a 1/2 weapon, and if you already had a weapon equipped it gave your current weapon +1 Attack permanently," Dodds said.

"We had problems with Rogues just hanging back and building their weapon into something huge, so we adjusted the ability to give the weapon +1 Attack until the end of a player's turn. Even that ended up being very strong, so we changed it to what it is today with the Rogue getting a 1/2 dagger."

That's only a snippet of the interview, mind. If you want to read the full article, just head on over to PocketGamer.biz now.