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There is a corner of Blizzard Entertainment that is now obsessed with death. As we grow older we all start to dwell on our own mortality, of course, but this is different: the people making Hearthstone are excited about death, the process of dying and the effect death has on the ones we leave behind. I can hear it in their voices, speaking to me over the phone from thousands of miles away. They are excited about finally realising the potential of death - and particularly the potential of deathrattles.Deathrattle is a mechanic in Hearthstone that activates when certain creatures are killed. The Leper Gnome, for example, is a cheap card that doesn't last very long, but its deathrattle gives it added bite: when it dies, it deals two damage points to the enemy hero, and in Blizzard's fast-paced card strategy game, where chipping health points away from the opposing hero is the main objective, that makes it rather potent. Yet there are only 11 cards out of 465 in Hearthstone that have a deathrattle. Curse of Naxxramas, the first major add-on for the game, is set to change that - hence the obsession.
"Almost all of the cards in Curse of Naxxramas have to do either with deathrattle, or things that happen when something dies, or things that interact really interestingly with things dying," says Eric Dodds, Hearthstone's game director. "The idea behind Naxxramas as a dungeon is of course that it was from World of Warcraft, ruled by the necromancer Kel'Thuzad, so we really wanted to jump big on the whole death and deathrattle idea, and we also really liked the idea of taking this mechanic which we'd done a little bit with and blowing it out and doing crazy stuff with it."
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