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Game Preview: Hearthstone
Collectible card games have been a prominent part of nerd gaming culture since the early '90s. Magic: the Gathering forged a compelling genre and dozens of games have followed in its footsteps. But the past two decades have been a time of technology, and Magic is a decidedly low-tech game. Like chess, it's been moved online in only the strictest emulation of real-world play. The game itself hasn't actually evolved to make use of technology. Enter Blizzard. Many of the developers at Blizzard grew up playing Magic and other CCGs, and it seemed natural that they'd want to design one of their own. But Blizzard is video game company; managing cardboard print runs and scheduling tournaments isn't exactly in their wheelhouse. Thus, we get Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, an entirely digital CCG. It's currently in closed beta test, but open beta is supposedly just around the corner. In this video (with transcript) we take a look at how the game is shaping up.
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This game was boring as heck. Two misses in a row for a company which used to be the best in the industry.
This hardly qualifies as a preview since the game is available in even its beta form
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
But Blizzard is video game company; managing cardboard print runs and scheduling tournaments isn't exactly in their wheelhouse.
Just as one example, Blizzard has run tournaments at BlizzCon for years now. You could have found this out with 10 seconds of Googling.
I'll admit it, I'm mildly surprised to hear Blizzard is still a company, outside of Panda loving, anyway.
I've been playing a bit, mostly with friends, and having a blast.
It seems like they could have done it in the browser instead of a full blown application, but it's fine.
I'm a pretty hardcore RTS gamer (StarCraft II) but holy cow HearthStone is so fun that I've mostly abandoned SC2 in favor of racking up time there instead.
I definitely want the iOS release to hurry up so I can play on my iPad.
The thing that is surprising is, even with only a handful of emotes for communication, people still find ways to BM you :D But seriously, this is a REALLY REALLY fun game, and is going to make Blizzard some ungodly sum of money.
Which I find amusing because, I stopped playing in or around 2001, and picked up the game again only in the past few weeks. It looks more like a re-statement of the rules than much of a change since I already thought of it as a stack; and it already worked like a stack...there just was no explicit "stack" reference
Under the old rules, a spell being cast could be responded to by an instant or interrupt (which I believe were slightly different but I can't remember how), and since that was a spell too, it could also be responded to....and then spells resolved in reverse order. About the only complication was that a spell on the top of the stack could invalidate the target of a lower spell causing it to fizzle instead of resolving normally....which I believe is still the case.
All that said, I can't imagine playing a video game based on MTG. Part of the reason I play MTG is that it is a physical game played with other people. Actually handling the cards and seeing the look on someone's face when you take their creature and kill them with it (That "Act of Treason" card comes in so handy in my red/black deck)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The mechanics of this game are about on par with the Pokemon TCG. The game is extremely lacking in player interaction. There are no instant effects. Attacking players choose to attack defending creatures directly, and can completely ignore the defender's board if they want. The game is like dual solitaire. Once you know the range of possible effects that a deck type can produce, it's fairly trivial to play around. Magic players I've seen streaming this game tend to win about 90% of the games they play, and most say it gets boring and repetitive fairly quickly. About the only time they lose is when they leave Arena and face someone who's invested every waking hour grinding for cards. It's pretty hilarious to watch other streamers coming from non-TCG games trying to play and clearly not planning out very far in advance.
As for the summary's criticism:
It can't, won't, and shouldn't. Magic is, first and foremost, a paper card game. WotC has stated repeatedly that the online and digital versions of the game exist to promote and supplement the paper game, not replace it. This is the same stance they've taken on D&D video games: they supplement the tabletop game. Their goal is to get players to graduate from playing online to playing the paper games. It's a good thing, too, because the client software for Magic is pretty shitty. It does the rules just fine, but the interface is consistently terrible. If the game weren't so good, it wouldn't be worthwhile. Fortunately, they've finally brought in real outside help to work on it. They brought in the Duels of the Planeswalker people for the current beta and it's terrible, but supposedly the new team consists of better programmers. Historically their problem has been paying peanuts and expecting gold. We'll see if they can get something usable by the time Hearthstone is out of beta.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
hmm I wonder if there will be a market for virtual card protectors.
At blizcon they said that 40% of the top tier players never spent a dime...
The reason why MTG keeps winning this race and other competitors don't even come close is the amount of quality playtesting. Each card goes through a rigorous design process as the sets have to appeal to multiple types of players. The level of Quality Control in WOTC is astounding.
Has the gaming industry really not yet reached the point where a female character can be portrayed without enormous breasts spilling out of her costume?
I've got nothing wrong with enormous breasts or skimpy costumes, but is the gaming industry really happy being a male-only endeavor?
Games are filled with adolescent depictions of women and male characters with enormous powerful leg muscles, indicating that the young men who play games must be pretty sexually conflicted. Actually that sounds about right.
Seriously, in Arkham Origins, for some reason Batman's legs are drawn completely out of proportion to the rest of his body. He's supposed to be a big strong guy, but I don't remember him looking like a normal athlete on the top half and Mr Universe on the bottom half.
There are lots of examples of male characters drawn as old and skinny, short and fat, strong and weak, handsome and ugly. But the female characters in those same games are all triple-E cups and dressed as if by Frederick of Hollywood.
And yet, interestingly, if you look at the characters that players design for themselves (when the games give them the opportunity), they tend to look a lot more like normal people. I've seen people playing Saints Row IV as middle-aged black women and balding Hispanic construction workers. And yet, when the developers define the look of the character, it's always the same thing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
D3 was the fastest selling PC game of all time and didn't just break PC sales records, it destroyed them. But yeah, other than that I can see why you'd think it would cause blizzard to fail...
I've played a bit of both, so here's the differences.
* There's no real way to respond on another player's turn, which lessens the strategy, but also means you're not waiting on your effects to resolve forever. Games generally take much less time (~15 minutes at most)
* Not quite as chancy. You just can't win on turn 3. The infinite and quasi-infinite combos of MTG are, as of yet, nonexistant. And there are some *good* combos, but you can't base your deck on channel/fireball as you could during MTG alphas;)
* Harder to keep permanents. All permanents are characters or attached to characters which can be damaged directly via attacking them with your creatures. As a result, utility creatures are much harder to keep alive.
Blizzard's done a great job of making a CCG that actually plays well online by designing it to be that way from the ground up. Unless MTG does a redesign, or at least designs cards specifically to be played online, it will always be a cludgy using a Windows Tablet circa 1999 (or a Windows 8 machine circa now).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.