I’m sure most readers have heard about Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. The game is already a year out, with two “expansions”, and even before that, it had a yearlong beta period, which was covered by many prominent online personalities.
Hearthstone was a kind of an experiment for Blizzard Entertainment. In a similar fashion to big companies like Google, Blizzard allowed its employees to try and develop side projects on their own, and this resulted in the 14-man team that originally developed the game. It was also the first microtransactions-based free-to-play game the company made (although microtransactions have appeared before in World of Warcraft and, to some extent, Diablo 3).
As a small, almost “indie” side project, Hearthstone was revealed not in Blizzard’s major event Blizzcon, but at PAX 2013. At first, reactions were not enthusiastic, but as the closed beta phase began and footage of the game flooded YouTube, it became clearer and clearer that people at Blizzard have done it again – they’ve taken familiar gameplay elements and polished them to a fine finish.
Hearthstone offers several unique takes on traditional collectible card games (or CCG). First, unlike games such as Magic: the Gathering, players don’t need to collect mana. Each turn the players get one mana crystal, up to a maximum of 10. This makes it harder for players to get stuck without mana cards (“land starved”) or with only mana cards and no other available options.
The game is designed with several mechanics to shorten match length – a Hearthstone match will rarely take more than 20 minutes. Each player has a limited amount of time to complete their turn – toward the end of your turn, a fuse will appear on the screen and start burning. If it reaches the “End Turn” button before the player acts, the turn will end. On their next turn, that player will not have the normal 90 seconds, and the fuse will appear from the beginning of the turn. This was done not only to shorten turn times but to combat online abuse such as AFK players.
Additionally, Hearthstone has a deck limit of only 30 cards, with 2 copies of a single card allowed. Once a player has drawn his entire deck, he starts suffering “fatigue damage”, at an increasing rate of +1 for each card he is supposed to draw, but can’t. This is done to force a conclusion to the match if it has dragged on. One of the players will kill himself by overdrawing his deck, losing the game.
Another anti-abuse element of the game is only allowing players to communicate via a set of 6 preset emotes, instead of a text chat. And you can even mute your opponent if you want.
Several gameplay elements are simplified ideas of other card games. For example, a Taunt card will protect your hero by forcing the enemy to attack it first. It can be seen as a simplified version of Magic’s blocking mechanic, and unlike Magic, all card effects in Hearthstone are automated. Except for choosing targets for effects, the player doesn’t need to remember to “use” an ability (other than his hero ability).
This is the main advantage of having a “digital first” game. The developers can use plenty of mechanics that would be difficult to implement in a tabletop game but are easy to do in a digital one. A good example will be the plentitude of a card with a random effect. Implementing that in a tabletop game will probably require a ludicrous amount of dice rolling, but in Hearthstone it all happens automatically. As a mental exercise, think about how to accomplish the Mad Bomber mechanic of “Deal 3 damage randomly split between all other characters” in a tabletop environment.
Speaking of a digital-first game, one of the goals of Hearthstone was to allow for cross-platform play between personal computer and mobile tablets. This goal was achieved spectacularly. The team at Blizzard managed to build a control scheme so simple, that it can be used just as easily on a PC as on a touch device.
Think about the number of horribly implemented control schemes in mobile games, trying to emulate gamepad controls. And think about all the terrible mobile games that were ported to the PC, properly altering their control scheme from using a touch screen to the keyboard and mouse.
Hearthstone doesn’t have any of those problems. The game is played using single clicks or click-and-drag. It works just as well using a mouse as a touch device. In my opinion, it’s an ingenious accomplishment, one I think no other game to date has achieved.
Hearthstone has a unique quality I can’t put my finger on – even when I lose 3 games out of all 4, I’m still having a good time. I’ve played more than 100 games (not a lot, by some standards) and I don’t remember getting frustrated with it. It might be because sometimes when I lost I knew what I did wrong, or I thought that it was the luck of the draw, and that’s okay. And sometimes, the match itself was so hilarious I simply didn’t care if I won or lost because I had so much fun playing it.
It also has something to do with the random bonuses you get from time to time, the leveling system of your hero, and many other tiny details that all come together to deliver this amazing experience.