[dropcap size=dropcap]O[/dropcap]nce upon a time, there was a card game called World of Warcraft – The Trading Card game. Unfortunately, the game was taken out of production due to the enormous costs of printing those pieces of cardboard. Instead, Blizzard Entertainment made the smart move to re-start the adventures in the land of Free 2 Play re-imagining the late TTC in a digital format. And so, Hearthstone was created.
Hearthstone absorbs the most interesting gameplay features of the TCG genre and carefully packs them in a beautiful digital format available to all fans of the card games from all around the world. The game itself does not have any particular story or any important narrative part. It lets you play with the heroes of the World of Warcraft universe, using classes, spells, abilities and creatures in order to create a familiar atmosphere for all fans of WOW.
Currently, the game is in closed beta stage, which means that certain things may be changed and amended according to the feedback received from the community. Moreover, at BlizzCon, production director Jason Chayes informed us about the next steps the Hearthstone will take in the nearest future.
“An adventure is essentially a single-player, PvE experience. I’ll fight against some bosses, and as a reward for taking down those bosses I’ll get additional cards. It’ll be in the 20 to 30 range of cards I can earn by participating in these Adventures. We’re going to have those a little more frequently than expansions, as another way to continue to expand the card set,” Chayes said.
“We do want to have other ways to continue to keep the card set fresh. You’ll be able to participate in Adventures as somebody who wants to play the game for free, or somebody who wants to buy stuff,” he continued.
Warcraft universe enthusiasts will find in the cards of Hearthstone characters, spells and weapons they met in the World of Warcraft Universe and the Warcraft games series. Moreover, the game gives the players the opportunity to shape their own universe, and fight their battles with an “army” formed of a mixture of characters, spells and weapons that would not be possible in World of Warcraft, for example.
In Play mode you get to compete against another player, chosen randomly. There are daily quests where you have, for example, to win 2-3 games playing the Paladin, or destroy 2-3 other players who use the Warlock, and so on. As a reward for completing these quests you get gold, important if you want to pay your access in the Arena mode. To enter you must pay 150 gold.
Hearthstone will enter open beta on PC next month, shortly followed by the mobile versions for Android and iPhone in the first months of the next year.
“Our process at Blizzard always starts with, ‘can we make a great experience?’ That’s always the beginning. That’s why we only today announced the iPhone. We’ve been playing some early versions internally and it feels pretty good. So that’s how we got to where we are today, which is, yes, we think there’s a version of Hearthstone that’s awesome on phones. It will share your same collection that you have on the iPad version and the PC version. If that’s what you have, and you’d love to play the game on your iPhone, we think Hearthstone will be a great experience to play there too,” Chayes said.