14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Blizzard working on Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft says that it has managed to add all the features for the beta stage to the project and that the fan community might get a chance to play it in a matter of months.
In an update on the official site of the game, Jason Chayes, one of the leading designers, states, “We’re not days away from launching the beta, but we’re not months away either.”
He adds, “At the Hearthstone announcement we committed to going into beta testing before the summer was over, and the team has been pulling out all the stops to make that happen.”
At the moment, Blizzard is shifting its focus away from adding new features and now wants to make sure that all major bugs are eliminated.
They are also building an infrastructure for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft that will allow the game to support a large number of concurrent players.
It seems that the coming beta stage will be offered at first in North America and that separate tests are at the moment planned for Europe, Taiwan and South Korea.
Apparently, Blizzard wants to deliver fully localized versions of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft to all markets.
The company says that a small number of fans will be able to play in the beginning, to test the core mechanics, and that gradually more players will be added to stress the infrastructure.
It seems that the game will go into beta at the same time on the PC and the Mac and an iPad version with cross-play will soon follow.
The in-game store for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft will also be implemented and gamers will be able to use real-world money to get access to rare cards.
Blizzard is compensating those who will take part by giving away a golden version of Gelbin Mekkatorque.