Hearthstone is Blizzard’s upcoming online trading card game. Recently, due to me being one of the first hundred people to send Blizzard a private message on Facebook asking for a beta key during a very small window of time, I have gained a beta key and subsequently fallen in love. This game does so much right as a video game, a card game, and a free-to-play MMO that its release could seriously change the way other studios approach those genres.
What follows are not all the reasons Hearthstone stole my heart, only the top ten:
1: Rewards for your time investment
The Problem: Free-to-play games tend to stick players into a rut. Since there’s no entry cost, the only thing the players are investing is time. However, most FTP games tend to ask for too much time, sometimes asking for millions of in-game currency that must be acquired over hours of gameplay. Alternatively, you just buy the in-game money with actual money.
This principle utilizes money’s time-travel properties.
Hearthstone’s fix: Calling on its Warcraft roots, Hearthstone does something pretty genius. Each deck is based on a class from WoW. As you play the decks, they level up and unlock cards specific to their decks. These decks level up over the course of three or four games, so their rewards are still reachable, but still slowly enough that you learn the game as you go. Best of all, these cards can only be earned via leveling. They cannot be bought, which means…
2: You can’t pay to win
Drat!
The Problem: Free-to-plays base their business models off of players purchasing bonuses with real money. Playing for free is just a way to get you in the door with the expectation that dedicated players who enjoy the game will end up spending more than the game’s estimated value. Yes, it’s literally the gateway drug scenario, but that’s, somehow, not really the problem. The problem is usually what the designers decide to sell. Games like Elsword come with built-in stamina timers that limit how much you can play each day, unless you buy more time. Other games might sell free upgrades or equipment that (always) give the player a noticeable advantage. This is known as “selling power,” and it’s stupid.
Instead of buying a new game, it’s like buying a game you already finished!
Of course, these transactions are the game’s profits, so they can’t just go away, even if they’re terrible. So how does Blizzard make a game about trading cards without selling power?
Hearthstone’s fix: Randomness! Blizzard designed the game so you can’t straight-off purchase any single card like someone might do in a live card game. The only purchasable item is a pack of five randomized cards (or an Arena ticket, which is also great and I’ll get to later). So not only is it impossible for players to buy power, but players are exposed to new deck ideas along the way. The smart move is to experiment with the new cards, which expands on your knowledge of the game. It’s the first time a cash system has been designed to reward players for playing the game instead of handing the developers money.
Buy this monocle! It has the advantage of making you appear to be wearing a monocle!
3: The Arena:
The Problem: By design, online games are restrictive. After all, with such a time investment at stake it wouldn’t be fair if new players had access to the same content as experienced players (unless they buy their way in, obviously). Players shouldn’t just have access to late-game content, but without enough new content players can lose interest quickly.
Hearthstone’s fix: Blizzard realized that building a proper deck in Hearthstone can take a lot of time, and they didn’t want players to become discouraged when their random packs didn’t pay out what they wanted. he answer is the Arena, a “draft” version of the game. In the Arena, players are given access to a random selection of cards in order to draft a deck for playing other draft decks. These cards can be any cards in the game, regardless of the player’s collection. The down side is that it costs two bucks for an arena ticket, but the game is designed to make that pay off. That’s the same cost as a pack of cards, and one of the prizes for participating in the arena is a pack of cards. Plus, whatever class you pick gains experience, which can allow you to gain even more cards. It’s a risk-less endeavor that allows the player to access late-game content and get rewarded for it!
4: Mana:
The Problem: Trading card games often rely on a resource system to restrict how much power a player has per turn. In Magic the Gathering, it’s lands. In Pokemon, it’s energy cards. The problem with such resource systems is that those resource cards have to take up room in a deck. This restricts the cards in each player’s deck, but most damningly it can also cost a player the game because drawing those cards is a matter of random chance.
Hearthstone’s fix: You get one mana per turn up to a cap of ten. That’s it. No random chance, no losing games based on elements you can’t control. The players are matched in mana from the start of the game to the end.
An idea that makes up for Diablo 3′s servers… for me, anyway.
5: Being a video game:
The Problem: This isn’t redundancy. Sometimes the greatest problem an online card game can have is a live version of the same game already in existence. I’m lookin’ at you, Magic the Gathering Online 2013 and 2014. Trying to make the game too much like its real-life predecessor shatters the justification of making the game at all.
This game simulates playing the game I already spent hundreds of dollars on over the course of several years! Amazing!
Hearthstone’s fix: Since it’s not limited by previous live versions, Hearthstone uses the fact that it’s a video game to its fullest by doing things that are impossible or impractical in live card games. Cards that can randomly generate other cards would have walls of text explaining their own rules, and creating copies of an opponent’s card just doesn’t make sense in the real world.
Did you just… make that?
But Hearthstone decided to just do it. This isn’t a card game, it’s a video game card game, and so it can do so much more and in a faster, simpler way.
6: Quality
The Problem: Most card-based video games are about cards on stone slabs. Sometimes they bump into each other.
They’re gonna kiss!
Basically, this is a wasted opportunity considering the graphical power of modern computers.
Hearthstone’s fix: Hearthstone gives players quite a bit more to look at than the standard card game. The visual effects of card interactions are still limited to particle effects around card portraits, but Blizzard has made up for it by adding quality voice work and giving character to the limited setting that is a table.
Everything here is clickable, and it moves, and it’s mesmerizing.
Voice work, particle effects, and click-able table corners might not seem like much compared to triple-A titles, but it puts Hearthstone leagues ahead of even the pay-to-play digital card games.
7: Easy to learn:
The Problem: Physical card games can be nearly unplayable to the uninitiated. Complicated rules can be hard to translate into the game world, not to mention an excellent way to drive away potential new players.
Hearthstone’s fix: A blogger named Wolfshead explains this better than I can with his post about Nolan Bushnell, Atari’s co-founder and the man with credit to the idea that the best games are “Easy to learn, hard to master.” Blizzard is already famous for using this concept in all of their games, and Hearthstone might do it better than anything they’ve put out so far. Hearthstone requires nothing more than basic math skills, and events during gameplay happen one-at-a-time so the action is easy to track.
Here’s Wolfshead’s post, by the way. Credit where it’s due: http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/bushnells-theorem-easy-to-learn-difficult-to-master/#9de62
8: Hard to Master:
The Problem: If the game’s too simple it’s not going to hold anyone’s attention.
Hearthstone’s fix: The action might be easy to track, but interactions between cards are not. Hearthstone’s strategy relies upon understanding and tracking the synergy between all the cards in play. A single turn in the late game can consist of four or five interactions that have to be planned in advance, and that’s before considering your opponent’s turn. With depth like that it’s no wonder this game is picking up so much attention.
9: The Attention:
The Problem: The most popular free-to-play game right now by far is League of Legends, and it can owe its popularity in no small part to its global acceptance as an e-sport. If Hearthstone is to become successful over the long run it should get a pro scene of its own.
Hearthstone’s fix: Good thing it’s well on its way. Below is a YouTube video of Artosis, one of the greatest Starcraft 2 players of all time, playing and dominating at Hearthstone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrILVLGGSTM
WoW shoutcaster Total Biscuit and Starcraft 2 shoutcaster Husky Starcraft are also showing Hearthstone footage on their YouTube. Incidentally, they love the game as much as I do, and with enough attention combined with enough new players that bodes well for the future of the game.
10: Room for Improvement:
The Problem: No game is perfect. Hearthstone still needs some polish and its card catalog is still relatively small. Currently, it’s not unusual for text to appear jumbled or for a card effect to look off. Sometimes voices don’t trigger when they should. Also, the small card list means a player could encounter the same card every game, over and over again.
Specifically, this one.
Hearthstone’s fix: Good thing the game’s in beta. Polish and debugging are part of the beta testing process, and Blizzard is known for creating the best looking games in the industry. The card list will also expand over time, assuming the game is successful, which I’m guessing it will be. When a good game can only get better, that’s a beautiful thing.
If you can get a hold of a beta key for this game, absolutely use it. It’s a unique take on an old genre that works, and once it launches it’s going to make waves.
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