I am a huge blizzard fanboy, Warcraft is my all time favourite series, even though i stopped playing WoW after Patch 5.2, i still stay in touch with the lore of the warcraft and keep tabs on anything that goes around WoW or Blizzard. I signed up for Hearthstone beta once the option was available, though i had to wait for 2 months or may be more, i finally got mail from blizzard with key for hearthstone beta. I got my key but the big hurdle was my ISP -_- its so lame i had to wait 20 hours for the 1.3gb file to download.
* Battle.net PC Installed
* Hearthstone Beta Updated
Now lets log in and start the game....first thing that pops out in most of the games is the trailer, blizzard never fails to give out the best trailer or cinematic, click on the video if you haven't seen yet(they are not charging for it..shhh).
Now lets jump in to the home screen,the home screen of the hearthstone is much inspired from general Warcraft Artwork, i really love the feel that bgm gives you , like you are really in some random inn of azeroth,well the setup feels much like what dwarfs or pandas or any race (except the undead) would do drink ale,play hearthstone and let deathwing destroy the world(Ohh Cata ended?).
The Tutorial pretty much teaches you the basics of the game, so don't skip the tutorial, the difficulty level of the tutorial increases with every next opponent but they are all beatable unless you are really bad.
The Game Modes:
Basically you have 3 modes
* Play - PvP , yout queued and AI does the match-making, so far i have only faced only worthy opponent"(which defines your opponent level compared to you).
* Practice - Play against AI , better play against AI first few games it really teaches a lot and Practice mode AI Opponents are much tougher than which you face in tutorial.
* Arena - I have not played arena yet.(will fill this when i do :) )
Collection Tab:
This is the most important part of the game, everything you have here in this tab gives you more chance to win against your opponents, you can create custom decks , for every hero. Every deck can have maximum of 30 cards, you can have more than one deck for every hero, maximum of 9 decks. the way you use your cards to create a deck defines your play-style.
Store and Gold:
Store can be easily compared to league of legends Store, so is the business model of how gold works in this game, you can either buy card packs using real money or play more games, do daily quest and buy the pack, its your choice. atleast 50 Gold can be earned easily, every day by spending less than two hours 40gold by doing Quest and 10 gold by winning 3 games, for casual players you can buy a pack of cards every 2 days, its not really bad, but the problem is you don't know which card might pop out, the 5 cards you get are randomly generated, what if you want a specific legendary card? well you have amazing crafting system for that.
Crafting:
Crafting tab can be accessed through Collection Menu, you can craft any card you wish to have using crafting mode, but to obtain something you have to lose something, crafting card requires Arcane Dust which can be obtained by disenchanting the expert cards, the requirement of the arcane dust increases with level of the card you wish to obtain. Tutorial never fails to teach the crafting part, it is just that it gives you only 100 arcane dust ...legendary requires 1600 arcane dust, but yeah more pain more gain..
What i think:
In previous blizzcon, the Dev's of the Heroes of the Storm(Blizzard Allstars) said they want to create HotS as a casual moba or game,which a end use(player) can play even in small breaks they get during their busy hours, they claimed that Game time of HotS ranges from 15 to 25 or 30 minutes, i don't know what they are doing with HotS, but i am sure they have pulled it out with Hearthstone , the time consumed for each game might be 5-15 minutes, i have never played a game more than 15 minutes. ITS FREE TO PLAY!!...the next thing is i would like to point out is F2P model, which they have adapted from LoL's F2P model, well it works for Hearthstone really well, but i hope they don't do the same for HotS. Warcraft is a huge franchise and ofcourse the blizzard audience will play this game the most important question , will a third person who is completely alien to warcraft will he able to adapt this? the main reason why LoL is successful compared to HoN , is because they pulled new players to the genre, while HoN just concentrated on making another DOTA map for Original DOTA players. well i think hearthstone has a good chance of pulling new players, looking at the game which doesn't require you to know warcraft. but knowing Warcraft or Classes of WoW gives you slight edge early, even if you don't know about Classes and Spells from WoW it easy to learn, playing more game gives you more knowledge about the specific class,cards and spell. Hearthstone is type of game where you only get better by playing more and choosing you moves wisely .
In my next post i will talk more about Classes,Heroes,Battlefield,Game Balance and THE E-SPORT...
The game is still in Beta, so anything you see now , might not end up when the game goes live...
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