Should We Finally Be Allowed to Turn Off Animations in Hearthstone?

Hearthstone’s creaky Unity-based foundations and old engine have long been a limitation on how smooth the gameplay can get, and this isn’t the first time. The community has discussed the persistent issues with animation length and the possibility of turning them off for competitive play many times. Do the pros or the cons make more sense on this one, and which strategies would benefit the most from such an option in the game?

Skill Checks and Speed: A History of Janky Animations in Hearthstone

Veteran players will likely remember the Patron Warrior days, a deck that had to queue up a bazillion actions in order to boost up the damage output of a Frothing Berserker with Charge to finish off the game. Pro commentators often pointed out fifteen seconds into the turn that the player in question may have already missed their window of opportunity to pull off their OTK because they haven’t started to execute their actions. Not because they wouldn’t be able to play all the cards in time – no. Rather because the animations playing out repeatedly would block later actions.

We’ve seen a similar phenomenon with Razakus Priest: the “machine gun” of the refreshing 0-mana hero power took time to fire away, and sometimes we’ve seen mad scientists use the original Nozdormu to throw a wrench into the Priest player’s key turns and (supposedly) turn the tide from then on. It was a card that never really worked the way it was intended to (probably becoming the most problematic card in the history of Hearthstone, engineering-wise), and after many years of trying (and failing) to fix it, the devs put it out to pasture once the Core set rolled around.

Speaking of that particular dragon, the sheer impossibility of a fun “fast Hearthstone” experience was recently highlighted by the spectacular failure of Nozdormu the Eternal, a card no player seems willing to play with even when the special quest rolls around on the 15th of every month.

Who could blame them? Most of the decks are immediately rendered unplayable by the hard 15-second restriction because of animation times, cards like Secret Passage or Pen Flinger will lose you more games than win them. It simply becomes impossible to efficiently execute your turns regardless of how quickly you make your decisions and the APM you can output in StarCraft. The software just doesn’t have what it takes to support a blitz experience.

We could go on with other examples – Shudderwock, SN1P-SN4Plock, the fact that you had to wait for the animations to conclude before you could even concede out of the match for many years – but it’s clear that this has been a persistent issue throughout Hearthstone’s life cycle.

There were many discussions at the time of Patron Warrior about whether this is a software limitation or just another skill check in the game. In retrospect, most of the arguments look ridiculous. First of all, traditional card games (the foundation Hearthstone was clearly designed on, and whose principles like limited nerfs and long release cycles it aggressively followed for a long time) feature no such skill check revolving around execution and APM. It’s also quite clear that this isn’t – and wasn’t – a conscious choice by Team 5, with the occasional hotfixes rolled out to smoothen up the experience, never quite enough to make it all work right, but slightly less broken than it used to be.

We’re seeing the same now in Battlegrounds.

The Gatling Gun of Battlegrounds

The discrepancies between combat animations and turn timers have also remained an unresolved issue in BGs. The issues have been especially brutal since the release of the Buddies patch. Deryl will always struggle to get all the hats in place after her little buddy enters the field while The Great Akazamzarak can fully clog up a turn with the help of Street Magician (and some setup) as seen in this clip.

This isn’t just an issue for jaded veterans, by the way: just take a look at recent Hearthstone convert summit1g’s experience with the turn timer in Battlegrounds, trying to select a Tier 6 unit and getting the choice snapped away from him as the combat begins, the game randomly choosing a piece of junk for the player in this clip.

Just as a reminder, you can continuously manage and adjust your bench in TFT while making purchasing decisions during the combat stage. It goes to show that fully turning off animations with a toggle isn’t the only way to potentially streamline the gameplay experience – though that is definitely the most popular suggestion in the Hearthstone community.

Infinite Combos and Other Beneficiaries

I have no idea of the coding requirements (and the best practical execution) of a “turn off animations” toggle in the game, but it would certainly shake up things in the game. Any deck with endless resource generation and mana cheating could pop off even harder than they could already, but even aggressive decks could benefit from the reduction of jankiness.

Rogues drawing Secret Passage late into their turn would no doubt love those extra few seconds to actually see their replacement cards, for instance. Come to think of it, any card draw cards or long animations (Mimic Pod, Nourish, Ultimate Infestation) would be great to, well, not see when you’re gunning for the top spots in the game. Dire Frenzy also had a stupidly long animation – this is not an archetypal consideration, though combo decks and slow builds with chained resource generation may seem like the immediate beneficiaries. Ultimately, changes like these wouldn’t fundamentally alter the power levels of the game, but no longer would you rope out on plays you’ve already committed on your side without the servers registering them. (That is something we had a more reliable setup for back in the beta days of the game!)

While it’s true that some strategies might “take off” thanks to this option, especially in Wild (like the recent example of Ignite Mage), it’s just a matter of balancing. Right now turn timers and thus animation times are actually one of the balance mechanics – but should it really be that way? Maybe it’s just better to get rid of strategies that could really abuse no animation times, since they don’t seem to be very healthy in the first place?

Again, this isn’t the only possible solution: consider the option of bankable time, long a staple in other competitive games. Instead of having 90 seconds for turn two, where you may only have a single decision to make, which is time you will inevitably waste unless you’re Lifecoach, you could have a set amount of time to start the game with and a bit of added bonus for every completed turn. This way, you could bank some time for the critical moments of the game. To reduce the effects of griefing and to maintain the core casual gameplay experience as is, maybe you could just enable this in Legend.

A chance to turn off animations when trying to play competitively would also be a quality-of-life improvement, though. Right after global auto-squelch. The team seems to be changing their mind on the latter, so who’s to say they may not come around for the former as well at some point?

Yellorambo

Luci Kelemen is an avid strategy gamer and writer who has been following Hearthstone ever since its inception. His content has previously appeared on HearthstonePlayers and Tempo/Storm's site.

Check out Yellorambo on Twitter!

Leave a Reply

15 Comments

  1. Showwwwteeeeeee
    February 8, 2022 at 12:19 pm

    Leave it as it is. Part of the challenge of playing combo decks is that you have to act fast to get your turn off. If you remove that, you eliminate part of the challenge that comes with playing these type of decks.

  2. Banaani
    February 8, 2022 at 7:41 am

    Disabling ALL animations would be awful for the game. All cool Legendaries lose their coolness factor without animations. The game would be really boring. That being said some animations are still awfully slow, like drawing cards. They should be generally sped up.

    And for battlegrounds, automatic animation skipping should be implemented when certain amount of time has passed in combat, or even just ending the fight instantly if it takes too long.

  3. Nephilim99
    February 7, 2022 at 11:14 pm

    yes to disable animation time or at least make them faster on mobile device!

  4. WingedCastaway
    February 7, 2022 at 11:22 am

    I don’t understand why auto-squelch should even be a thing. You can’t say that emotes prevent you from playing the game, that’s nonsense.

  5. Junehearth
    February 6, 2022 at 5:41 am

    No. It is an easy fix actually. Every card of same mana should take same duration for animation. Rule is applicable for hero powers also. I do not play battlegrounds.

  6. 2asandab
    February 6, 2022 at 4:20 am

    I don’t think it’s necessary. They just need to make appropriate animations. Off hand, I think of the OG ETC. They don’t need to be that over the top.

    As for battlegrounds… just a ready option in the tavern and a skip combat would really solve the problem. Theres an advantage to watching the combat (sometimes) so it should actually add to the gameplay.

  7. H0lysatan
    February 5, 2022 at 3:24 pm

    No and No. And No. Because it would actually promote executing a cheat long combo deck.
    Like in Rogue, where you kinda be able to play the rest of your deck in 1 turn only to execute some 30+ damage with Garrote in one turn.
    Like in Mage where you would be able to cheat mana and draws Ignite endlessly without have to think of Fatigue.

    Playing your whole deck in 1 turn is NOT fun. Watching player plays all of his deck while we sit doing nothing is NOT fun. Go play solitaire instead. Animation is there so that we know we have limited time each turn and need to actually plan better every time.

    • H0lysatan
      February 5, 2022 at 3:33 pm

      The most viable option, were to give each players a 1x Time Bonus of 5 or 10 seconds in case of emergency. Turning off animation is not the answer.

      I had this idea long ago, when multiple occasions like drawing cards when the rope is ending and it turns out the cards I got is actually the cards I need.

      Even 5 seconds is enough if we are recovering from DC, and yet to play some cards instead of wasting the round.

    • Foeko
      February 7, 2022 at 11:32 am

      In battlegrounds it can get to the point where you skip your entire buying phase and enter the next combat when you just ended the previous one. This is a massive problem for this game mode and either heroes should be tweaked, some animations removed or the entire combat phases skipable.

      • H0lysatan
        February 7, 2022 at 2:06 pm

        I know BG is different. And so in this case, I really don’t have much information to reply. My main is still Ranked Hearthstone. Your case may be better pointed at someone who played a lot of BG.

  8. ScottAllen11
    February 5, 2022 at 12:52 pm

    Yes to turning off animations. Easily the most annoying part of Hearthstone. Sometimes I run out of time because the animation blocks the cards I need to click on next!

    • OokamiCZ
      February 5, 2022 at 2:56 pm

      On the other hand – I always wondered if slowing down the animation of some specific card would actually be “viable enough” nerf…

      For example – if (for example) Ignite had double animation time, (FPS cheating aside) you wouldn’t be able to play it as much times per turn as you can now… thefore it would decrese your DPS… and that might suffice in some cases…

      • ScottAllen11
        February 7, 2022 at 6:26 pm

        Sure, but a spell “cooldown” should be independent of how long an animation happens to take.

      • Pandamonium
        February 9, 2022 at 3:31 am

        Sorry but that would be the worst way to design a card game. That’s the opposite intent of this entire article and all the responses. I’ve always wanted to have a time bank system.