Hearthstone
Hearthstone is a 2014 online digital collectible card video game produced by Blizzard Entertainment, released under the free-to-play model. Originally subtitled Heroes of Warcraft, Hearthstone builds upon the existing lore of the Warcraft series by using the same elements, characters, and relics. The game is available on the Windows, macOS, iOS and Android platforms, featuring cross-platform play. It has been a critical and commercial success, with Blizzard reporting more than 100 million Hearthstone players as of November 2018, and the game has become popular as an esport, with cash prize tournaments hosted by Blizzard and other organizers.
The game is a turn-based card game between two opponents, using constructed decks of 30 cards along with a selected hero with a unique power. Players use their limited mana crystals to play abilities or summon minions to attack the opponent, with the goal of destroying the opponent's hero. Winning matches and completing quests earn in-game gold, rewards in the form of new cards, and other in-game prizes. Players can then buy packs of new cards through gold or microtransactions to customize and improve their decks. The game features several modes of play, including casual and ranked matches, drafted arena battles, and single-player adventures. New content for the game involves the addition of new card sets and gameplay, taking the form of expansion packs.
In contrast to other games developed by Blizzard, Hearthstone was an experimental game developed by a smaller team based on the appreciation of collectible card games at the company. The game was designed to avoid the pitfalls of other digital collectible card games by eliminating any possible plays from an opponent during a player's turn and by replicating the feel of a physical card game within the game's user interface. Many of the concepts as well as art assets were based on those previously published in the physical World of Warcraft Trading Card Game.
Gameplay
Set within the Warcraft universe, Hearthstone is a digital-only, turn-based collectible card game which pits two opponents against each other. Players select a hero from one of eleven classes. All classes have unique cards and abilities, known as hero powers, which help define class archetypes. Each player uses a deck of cards from their collection with the end goal being to reduce the opponent's health to zero.There are five different types of cards: minions, spells, weapons, hero cards and locations. These cards are ordered by rarity, with Legendary cards being the rarest, followed by Epic, Rare, Common, and Free. Blizzard releases expansions of additional cards every four months, as well as smaller mini-sets between expansions, to increase the variety in the metagame. The game uses a freemium model of revenue, meaning players can play for free or pay to acquire additional card packs or content.
Unlike other card games such as Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone was designed to speed up play by eliminating any manual reactions from the opposing player during a player's turn, and setting a timer for each player's turn. During a turn, players play cards from their hand using "mana", a budget each player must abide by which increases by one each turn with a maximum of ten, and with cards having various mana costs. This invokes strategy as the player must plan ahead, taking into account what cards can and cannot be played.
Most playable cards can be classed as minions or as spells. Minions will be placed directly onto the board after being played and may carry special effects like Charge or Deathrattle, allowing the minion to attack instantly or making the minion do something special upon death, respectively. Spells have distinctive effects and affect the board in various ways.
Cards can be obtained through opening card packs or by crafting them with arcane dust, earned from destroying unwanted cards or earned in the Arena.
Game modes
The normal gameplay mode is one-on-one matches between a player and a randomly selected human opponent. Within this, the Standard format uses prepared decks limited to cards from the Core set alongside the expansions from the last two years. A separate Wild format allows all past and present cards to be used subject to deck construction rules. A third format, Twist, is a regularly adjusted format where each season can include curated card pools and special rulesets. All formats are divided into Casual and Ranked modes. Players can climb the tiered ranking system in Ranked, while Casual allows for a more relaxed play-style. At the end of each month, the Ranked season ends, rewarding players with in-game items depending on their performance.Other more specialized multiplayer modes include the following:
- Arena has the player draft a deck of thirty cards from choices of three cards over several rounds. Players continue to use this deck against other Arena decks until they win or loses a number of matches, after which the deck is retired and players gain in-game rewards based on their record.
- Tavern Brawls are challenges that change weekly and may impose unusual deck-building guidelines.
- Battlegrounds, introduced in November 2019, is based on the auto battler genre, allowing eight players to compete in each match by recruiting minions over several rounds. Players are paired off randomly in each round, with combat between minions played out automatically, with the goal of having minions remaining to damage the opponent's hero, and ultimately be the last hero standing. The top four heroes place and earn a win and increase rating points.
- Mercenaries, introduced in October 2021, is focused on a party-based combat system with roguelike mechanics. A player creates a party from six minions from a central Minion Village and uses that party to complete various quests, both as player-versus-environment and player-versus-player. Battles in this model use a color-coded system similar to rock paper scissors where minions of one color are strong against another color but weak to the third color. Players use this system and minion abilities to try to win battles. With loot gained from combat success, players can use facilities in the Minion Village to improve the attributes and abilities of individual minions or recruit new minions. Blizzard announced that Mercenaries would no longer receive content updates from the 7th of April, 2023, however it is still accessible in the game and receives occasional bug fixes and balance updates.
- Classic mode was available from March 25, 2021, until its removal on June 27, 2023, when it was replaced with the Twist format. It used a mirror of the player's library of all cards that were in the game as of the June 2014 release of the game, reverting any updates or changes to these cards in the interim, effectively representing the game's start at the time of its release.
- Duels was available from October 22, 2020, until its removal on April 16, 2024. It was a multiplayer version of Hearthstone
's singleplayer "Dungeon Run" game mode. Players would select one of several playable heroes unique to the mode, choose one of that hero's three hero powers and six uncollectable 'signature' cards, then assemble a 15-card deck, and battle other players until they win or lose a number of matches, after which the deck would be retired and players would gain in-game rewards based on their record. After each match, the player would choose between three 'buckets' of three cards each, a 'passive' effect that would alter the rest of the run, or a treasure card to add to their deck. Unlike Arena, there was also a casual mode that required no entry fee.
Expansions and Adventures
As a collectable card game, Hearthstone has been expanded with the combination of Expansions and Adventures, with roughly three new sets released each year, in addition to the core card set. Initially, Blizzard introduced an alternating series of Expansions and Adventures, with roughly three new sets released each year. Expansions are new card sets, containing between 100 and 200 new cards, that become available to buy or win, as well as introducing new mechanics to the gameplay. Adventures featured smaller number of cards, around 30, which could only be earned by completing multiple tiers of story-based challenges and boss fights in single-player mode. However, by 2017, Blizzard moved to exclusively Expansions, as cards from the Adventure series were readily used in gameplay. Starting in 2021, smaller mini-sets were released among the three yearly expansions, each set featuring a few dozen cards centered around a specific theme as a replacement for Adventures.To avoid power creep with the large number of cards, Blizzard adopted a "Year" moniker in 2018 to identify when expansions rotate and retire from Standard format, such that only cards from the current and previous year may be used for Standard format, while Wild allows all cards to be used. Since 2021, Blizzard has also modified the Core card set to rotate out older cards and bring new cards from expansions.
Development
Conception
Hearthstone was developed by Blizzard Team 5 and published by Blizzard Entertainment. The development of the game was inspired by two directions, according to developer Eric Dodds: a desire for Blizzard to develop something more experimental with a smaller team in contrast to their larger projects, and the shared love of collectible card games throughout the company. Blizzard executives, around 2008, had considered that their revenue was primarily sustained on three well-established properties, but saw the rise of small independent developers with highly successful projects, representing a shift in the traditional video game model. To explore this new direction, Blizzard brought a number of people into "Team 5", named after being the fifth development team formed at Blizzard. Initially, the team had between 12 and 15 members, in contrast to other Blizzard games with teams in excess of 60 members. By November 2015, the team had 47 members.Of the game types they explored, Team 5 soon focused on the collectible card game approach, given that many on the team and in Blizzard had played such games since their introduction. The team found it natural to build the card game around the existing Warcraft lore; according to production director Jason Chayes, Warcraft was already a well-known property, and the depth of characters and locations created for other games in that series made it easy to create cards inspired by those. They also saw that new players to Warcraft may be drawn into the other games through playing Hearthstone.
The team was able to pull concepts and art from the pre-existing World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, first published in 2006 by Upper Deck and later by Cryptozoic Entertainment; when Hearthstone was near completion, in 2013, Blizzard terminated its license with Cryptozoic as to favor their pending digital card game. The addition of heroes, an aspect from the previous trading card game, was found to help personalize the game for the player to allow players to discover useful combinations of cards for each hero.