Murder at Castle Nathria and how Hearthstone’s stories feel like the most entertaining part of the Warcraft universe

Hearthstone has done a lot of really fun things with Warcraft lore. The Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion, which presented Gadgetzan as a sprawling city ruled by competing cartels, was cooler as a concept than anything we’ve ever seen for Goblin players in World of Warcraft. In Hearthstone, Gadgetzan became a vibrant new place rather than a sleepy desert city:

And every expansion seems to bring in a new, interesting story that plays off established Warcraft lore. The game had an entire expansion about Gilneas’ Witchwood that pitted players against Hagatha the witch — and featured the best Worgen content released to date in terms of the story. It brought heroes like Genn Greymane to the game, and introduced Worgen cards that shifted between more defensive Human forms and more aggressive Worgen forms each turn they were in your hand. The setup presented Gilneas as a haunted forest, full of spooky atmosphere.

Now, sometimes Hearthstone gameplay feels awfully samey between expansions — it’s not like Mean Streets of Gadgetzan or The Witchwood played particularly differently from one another. While Witchwood had a novel single-player mode, Hearthstone primarily sticks to a standard card battle format.

But despite its limitations, each Hearthstone expansion takes us to a lively new (or reimagined) location, full of colorful characters in the midst of somewhat unlikely scenarios. They’re characters we want to follow, and places we want to know more about. I think it’s fair to say that the concepts behind Hearthstone expansions — including the upcoming Murder at Castle Nathria expansion — tend to have excellent and strongly-thought-out ideas behind them. They take things from Warcraft‘s storied history and do fun, interesting things with them. I honestly think that the Hearthstone’s Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion — which took the game’s heroes and turned them into Death Knights — was a more fun, more interesting exploration some of the themes we later saw in WoW: Shadowlands.

And I say this as someone who liked Shadowlands and thought the story and content was really good — but as good as I think it was, it wasn’t easy to break down what exactly was happening, and we the Jailer was never as engaging as Hearthstone managed to the Lich King and his new cadre of Death Knights.

Even with its limited narrative, Hearthstone frequently does Warcraft stories that are more fun than anything we’ve seen in Warcraft lately. And the latest expansion, which is pulled directly from the Shadowlands, only drives home how much fun these familiar settings can be when given a Hearthstone twist.

Hearthstone bounces off existing Warcraft lore in fun ways

Of course, Hearthstone has some storytelling advantages. It can take stuff that has already been established and play a game of what if we did this? with it. Look at the coming Murder at Castle Nathria expansion, which re-imagines the WoW raid instance as a murder mystery with shades of the movie Clue. The expansion’s story follows a Murloc detective named Murloc Holmes as he investigates the murder of Sire Denathrius, killed in his castle by one of a who’s who guest list of the Shadowlands’ best and brightest. It sounds amazing, and there’s even a play about Murloc Holmes’ adventures — but none of this story would exist without Shadowlands to bounce off of.

And Hearthstone isn’t limited to the main narrative of Warcraft. The game did three expansions in a row as a year-long story focused on a motley alliance of villains looking to steal the entire city of Dalaran by strapping giant rockets to it. And they succeeded!

Of course you can’t let the bad guys win all the time, and so a motley assortment of heroes arrived to oppose them, resulting in an epic clash between the League of E.V.I.L. and the League of Explorers. It was the longest, most in-depth story Hearthstone has ever told, weaving together three sets of cards and three single-player adventures into an epic narrative filled with larger-than-life characters.

It was a fun, even comedic story that didn’t have to even really think all that hard about the Horde, the Alliance, or the constant struggle to destroy Azeroth from a variety of threats like the Burning Legion, the Old Gods, and so on. Mean Streets of Gadgetzan was a cool idea for a noir-inspired take on Gadgetzan, but an entire WoW expansion based on criminal rackets in a grim and gritty city out of pulp crime stories might not have had the variety we’d expect — or the liveliness it had in the more light-hearted environment of Hearthstone.

Hearthstone expansions don’t have to be big, epic narratives: they can just be small, fun stories. And that’s often what’s so great about them.

If Hearthstone is more fun, does that make it better? Not really.

While I do think Hearthstone does a lot to make the Warcraft setting fun, accessible, and even funny at times, I think it’s ultimately dependent on World of Warcraft to provide grist for its mill. Hearthstone’s various expansions are fun and can focus on specific aspects of the setting entirely because they bounce off from the larger setting and come up with novel takes. It’s not that Hearthstone does the Warcraft franchise better than World of Warcraft, so much as it does it with a completely different focus.

That focus just happens to be more fun, because it doesn’t get too serious. I think sometimes WoW takes itself a little too seriously for a video game where we can choose to play a panda or a fox person or a blue space alien with hooves, and we could use a bit more levity that isn’t yet another poop joke. I’m not saying ditch the cosmic storylines or high stakes, I’m just saying, Hearthstone is free to do an expansion where we see all of Azeroth’s most famous turned into Death Knights without worrying about it breaking the game.

So is Hearthstone better at Warcraft than World of Warcraft? No, but it’s better at riffing on Warcraft, on sampling the lore and making fun new things with it that don’t take themselves too seriously. And for a lot of us, that would be something we’d like to see in WoW.