So Blizzard just doesn’t want anyone to get work done anymore.
If you’re a fan of PC gaming at all, then you already know games made by Blizzard Entertainment, like the infamously competitive StarCraft series. If you enjoy making fun of the overweight or watching South Park, then you at least know the company’s biggest title, World of WarCraft. However, except for those on the very cutting edge of the video game informational singularity (such as myself), very few people know about the company’s latest Free to Play shenanigans in the form of a game called Hearthstone: Heroes of WarCraft.
Hearthstone is a free to play, digital card game recently released for Mac and PC. In terms of gameplay, it’s pretty similar to Magic the Gathering, featuring two players with a select amount of health, disposable creatures to deploy, and crazy spells to cast. Since Hearthstone is an entirely digital affair, everything comes with flashy visuals and fun sound effects, which add a level of delight you’ll be surprised to experience from a flash and a ding noise.
The game differs from established card games in a few notable ways. Hearthstone’s players are divided into character classes from the WarCraft universe, such as Paladin, Rogue, or Mage, limiting the type of cards they’re able to use. These classes also come with innate special abilities that can be used in place of playing a card. Character abilities create an extra unique-feeling play style for each deck, and the avatars seem like are actually in combat even though all of the elements are represented through cards.
The whole thing is experience, nice on the eyes, and only eats up around 5-15 minutes to play through a game.
What’s more? Hearthstone is coming to every type of screen you could possibly imagine.
According to an interview on Twitch towards the end of last week, Blizzard announced the iPad version of the game is already in a late beta phase. This means nerds might be seeing it in the app store as soon as a few weeks from now.
Mobile versions of Hearthstone for iPhone and Android are also reportedly under way, but won’t be ready to launch for a much longer time. The designers of the game want every port to play as well as the computer versions do now, and won’t compromise quality to hasten a release.
The Hearthstone network will allow matchmaking between the various systems, so you and your friends can finally play cards while you poop.
Because we live in the future and that’s what happens here.
