14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has talked a bit more about its Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft online trading card game which, while being free-to-play, has different microtransactions, pledging to not institute any sort of paywalls that will stop gamers who don't want to pay anything for playing.
There are quite a few online trading card games out there but, with Hearthstone, Blizzard wants to add a special Warcraft twist on the genre and, of course, make it accessible to all by delivering a free-to-play experience.
While microtransactions are present to buy new card packs, for example, Blizzard's Eric Dodds confirmed to VG247 that not paying a single cent is a perfectly viable strategy.
“If you’re the kind of person who wants to come in and never put a dime in and basically accumulate the cards, try the various classes, find ways to be competitive – that’s a perfectly viable strategy in Hearthstone. You’re never going to hit a paywall that requires you to put more money in to keep playing."
For those who want to be a bit more aggressive and unlock things at a faster pace, Blizzard added quite a few microtransactions to accommodate their needs.
"If you want to get access to all the various cards faster and have a range of different strategies at an accelerated pace, if you want to keep jumping back into the [PvP] Arena at a faster pace, then those are examples of where players might want to put money down in the game and actually accumulate their options and strategies a little bit faster than the way they might be able to if they were just playing for free. It all comes down to how you want to play the game."
Hearthstone is currently in a closed beta stage and should go public in the next few months or in early 2014.