


It’s a new window into the Warcraft universe than what anyone has seen before."

You'll see some really cool spells and minions you can play. "You don’t have to know anything about collectible card games, but you’ll be able to dive in and understand the rules of the game. "This is a game where in five minutes, you can get in and start playing," says Chayes. But I’m super into it and I can’t wait to play more.'" It was a refrain the team heard throughout the beta, and the game’s accessibility has already brought some 10 million players into the Hearthstone fold. I never would have expected that I’d love this type of a game. "Almost universally, every time a new group of players came into the game, we heard, 'Wow, that’s awesome. A few months after the announcement, once Hearthstone made its way into people's hands, players really got a sense of what was cool and different about it. "This was about a year ago, when we announced the game at PAX East 2013 some people heard about it and were like, 'Wow, that’s not what I would have expected from Blizzard.'" It seemed, perhaps, less epic than expected.įor the team, figuring out a new approach – where it didn’t have a massive team or lots of time to be able to deliver the game – meant a need to rethink what “epic” meant. "When we first announced Hearthstone, not everyone knew what to make of it and we did get some raised eyebrows," says Chayes. It's currently available on Mac, PC, and the iPad, and will be released on iOS phones and Android tablets and phones later this year. The game has been in development for several years, and was initially intended as a PC release. Could we make an incredibly physical game? When I’m interacting with the cards in the game, can they feel tangible? It was a challenge re-imagining epic so that it worked for a smaller team, and figuring out how we could hold true to what we think of when we think of a Blizzard game." "Our approach instead was to re-imagine epic to really speak to craftsmanship.

"For this game, we knew we weren’t going to be able to make big environments with tons of characters," continues Chayes. Historically, that meant something awesome and huge and with a ton of spectacle." With all of the games we’re doing, they need to deliver an epic entertainment experience. "If you walk through our patio, in the middle of our buildings there’s a giant, 12-foot statue of an orc, and at the base of the orc is a bronze plate that says, 'Dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences…ever.' We really think about that. On a cultural level it was certainly a challenge for Blizzard to bring its card game to market, as Blizzard has notoriously high expectations internally for the games it releases – and Hearthstone was no exception.
