14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard believes that Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft will succeed because it keeps the core tenets of the collectible card gaming genre but makes key improvements, especially since it's a completely digital experience, instead of a physical one.
Blizzard surprised quite a lot of longtime fans last year when it confirmed that it was working on a free-to-play online collectible card game called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
The title, coming out of a small team from inside the studio, is now in open beta and has seen key mechanics change during a closed test phase that took place last year and in the first few months of the new one.
So far, quite a lot of fans have fallen in love with the online experience, and some of that success is due to the game's respect for the core principles of the collectible card gaming genre, according to Blizzard's Eric Dodds, who talked a bit with Gamasutra about what makes Hearthstone special.
"One of the things that I learned while working on Hearthstone is the importance of making sure that you don’t deviate too much from the genre that you’re working within. There’s a tendency to take a game and really make it your own, and I think it’s important to remember to look at the core tenets of that genre, because players already understand them, they enjoy them, and it gives new players a huge leg up when they come in and try to learn your game for the first time."
Blizzard has already admitted that Hearhstone is borrowing plenty of elements from physical card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, but Dodds emphasizes that plenty of upgrades have been added to the recipe in order to smooth things out in this digital experience.
"One of the things that was important to us was to make a game optimized for the digital space. There’s a lot of things we love about physical card games, but there are definitely some things that are, uhh, 'non-optimal' about them as well."
"It was very exciting to look at some of those troublesome areas and work out how to fix them and make the game more awesome. We can never make a physical version of Hearthstone, because we made a bunch of design choices that require it to be digital, and I love it."
Unfortunately, Dodds didn't say just what exact improvements were made and it seems that his team still has quite a few aces up its sleeve for when Hearthstone is officially rolled out later this year.