Blizzard announced the next expansion for hit card battling game Hearthstone at Blizzcon this month, and it's called Kobolds & Catacombs. Now the studio is ready to reveal more about the adventure with "Into The Catacombs," a series of exclusive videos on GamesRadar+. In this first installment we catch a shadowy glimpse of the biggest kobold of them all, King Togwaggle.
In case you're a little rusty on your World of Warcraft lore, the kobolds are a race of shady rat people who live underground. Think rodents on 'roids. They're more obsessed with candles than your Aunt Barbara at a Bath & Body Works sale.
"We wanted to do an expansion about treasure, and kobolds seemed like a perfect fit," explained Peter Whalen and Dave Kosak, both senior game designers on Hearthstone.
"Because the kobolds have been digging for thousands of years, they’ve found all kinds of stuff. That means we’ve able to put all kinds of fun things into the set, like fabled Legendary Weapons and other relics from civilizations across Azeroth."
Dungeons, loot and adventuring
There are a bunch of new features coming to Hearthstone in December with Kobolds & Catacombs, as well as 135 new cards to add to your battle decks. One of the biggest additions, and the one where you'll face old Togwaggle, is Dungeon Runs. Blizzard's Ben Brode calls this new single player mode "our love letter to that classic, fantasy, dungeon crawling vibe" and it'll give you the chance to collect special treasures, but only if you're tough enough to beat eight encounters in a row.
Usually Hearthstone is about crafting a deck and going head to head, one on one, with other players. In Dungeon Run you'll get a starting deck of just 10 cards and use them to battle, building your deck with new cards, treasures and abilities with each win. Sound easy? This is a dungeon, not a caving holiday, so die and you'll have to start all over again with a new basic deck of ten.
"Essentially, Kobolds & Catacombs is the dungeon to end all dungeons," say the designers. "This set really is all about dungeons and treasure. We took a lot of our favorite dungeon crawl tropes and translated them to Hearthstone, and this is the result." They also promise "terrible, terrible monsters, weird traps, rooms full of lava, and all sorts of bizarre things."
Bow down to King Togwaggle
King Togwaggle will be one of the final Dungeon Run bosses in Kobolds & Catacombs, as well as a Legendary collectible card. "As the leader of the kobolds, his main focus is collecting the shiniest treasures, and he’ll use whatever means necessary to get them - which, him being a kobold, usually involves chaos and disorder."
With a brand new way to play solo, cards like Dragon Soul (that lets you summon a 5/5 dragon if you can cast three spells in a turn), Gather Your Party (lets you recruit a minion from your deck) and Crushing Walls (destroys your opponent's left and right minions) and a brand new enemy to face, I'm off to dust a few cards and prepare my decks for a whole new era of taunting and smiting.
"We gravitated toward kobolds because they’re these little creatures that you often encounter in dungeons and seldom think twice about—we really wanted a chance to build up what their culture would be like. If you went on their turf, what would you find? What does a dungeon look like if you’re the smallest monster on the totem pole?"
Kobolds & Catacombs will launch for Hearthstone this December, but you can pre-purchase the new Kobolds & Catacombs cards in preparation now. We'll have another exclusive Hearthstone video for you next week.
