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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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I'll admit it, I'm mildly surprised to hear Blizzard is still a company, outside of Panda loving, anyway.
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.
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.
At Blizzcon this year they revealed that 46% of players with a 3 star master rating (Highest at the time) had spend $0 on the game.
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...