at the start of the month, i've gotten myself back into playing Hearthstone, a digital collectible card game spinoff of the Warcraft series. which is also free for windows/mac and iphones and tablets if you wanna try it out. the microtransaction/free-to-play stuff is pretty fair, too. buy packs and adventure parts with either money or earned ingame gold which is fairly easy to get.
wasn't to say i wasn't interested in coming back to the game at some point in the future. my younger brother still plays Hearthstone as of this writing, and of course i had a ton of fun just watching him blow opponents to dust with cheeky tactics. just didn't have the proper incentive to actually play the game again myself. which, knowing me, that incentive most likely involved either more variety to cards, more cosmetic stuff, more content, or tauren. preferably tauren.
'course, we got new card set expansions and adventures and new modes, and i even followed the official Hearthstone twitter, but i wasn't coaxed into coming back until my brother let me know about the latest shaman-themed card back for the current ranked season.
as someone who played shaman in both Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, that was what got me back into the game. got myself to rank 20 now so i'm guaranteed to get the card back after this month, but now i've found myself enjoying the game even more; not solely because of the new cards and content (tavern brawl is fun as hell, i should mention!), but for more poignant reasons. not really the sappy kind of poignant, just stuff that just kinda draws me into the game in a different aspect.
it might seem silly that an online card game of all things would have meaning to someone, but that sort of thing can go for any sort of medium. movies, books, music, or in my case: games. those reasons can range from anything from nostalgia, escapism, immersion, symbolic meaning, or even just plain fun. not gonna say Hearthstone's intellectual by any deep standards (unless you're talking about metagame, in which case i'm not nearly that smart enough to understand HS's metagame), but it's got it's own special meaning to me in a few aspects.
as someone who used to play World of Warcraft during its Burning Crusade expansion, Hearthstone has a bit of a nostalgic factor to me. i'm retired from the game nowadays, partially because i lost access to my old account, but mostly because i couldn't keep myself invested in WoW long enough to make the 15-dollars-a-month subscription fee worth it. nowadays, my younger brother still plays the game and he even let me make a few characters on his account, whom i do play on on rare occasions. you can bet i'm hopping back on once Legion goes live. highmountain tauren, man.
erm, anyhow. nostalgia bollocks. taking down huge foes with a group of guildmates, wide-scale battles of the Horde against the Alliance, exploring around the world and discovering hidden secrets, finishing a legendary weapon or epic questline, acquiring a mount that's both fast and looks cool, and the journey one experiences on the path to max level. granted, those aspects have been a staple of WoW thoughout the years, but depending on who you ask, people might remember those things more fondly from a particular era of the game, be it Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, or even the classic vanilla years.
not saying i'd want to go back to the days of vanilla especially what with all the improvements that have been added over the years, but i can see why the older days of WoW still have appeal to some people. maybe the brawls against bosses were more memorable and challenging? maybe it was that there was more mystery to the world and its lore, which made exploring on foot more satisfying. can't really say for sure on my end, namely since i never played the game during its early years. i think i was spoiled by the stuff in the BC expansion.
"gen, aren't you writing about hearthstone and not WoW?" er, getting on that. while there's definitely a lot of cards representing characters and monsters from the more recent expansions, the current core heroes as of this writing all represent the classes introduced in the original vanilla WoW. the Naxxramas and Blackrock Mountain adventure packs are also based on raid dungeons that have been around since the days of vanilla WoW. those things could evoke memories for longtime WoW players, but like i've said before, i wasn't around to experience those things. to be honest, i never did all that much raid content back when i did play the game. so with that in mind, just what draws me into Hearthstone to the point where i'd write a whole lot of musings about it?
for me at least, it's the setting and atmosphere, as much as it might sound strange that a card game on computer would have either of those things. though the cards depict famous figures and fierce foes from the Warcraft world, and do battle with swords and spells like they do in WoW, the setting of Hearthstone itself takes place in a humble tavern. might seem like a mundane thing to most, but one can become immersed with the right mindset and a good imagination.
imagine you're a retired adventurer, still weary from past battles and long journeys, and you stagger into a nearby inn for a friendly game of cards and maybe a drink or two. HS has some wonderful visual and sound work to set that sort of tone. cards and decks are stored in a handcarved box, patrons cheer and gasp in awe during tense duels, and the pub's dwarven innkeeper even greets you whenever you start up the game.
this all might sound silly, but take it from the perspective of a guy who spent a good deal of his childhood collecting and playing the Pokemon trading card game with his brother. with a physical medium like trading card games, especially things like Yugioh and Magic The Gathering and the aforementioned Pokemon TGC, it's hard to really visualize battles with cards and counters unless you had a good deal of imagination. not that it detracted from the fun, but it was interesting to imagine these monsters actually fighting over the course of the duel. something of a plus, really.
for media such as video games, visuals can be fancier than static images: moving flames and sparkles, 3d characters, sound effects and animations, and a great deal of other neat things. in Hearthstone, certain cards can fire arrows or spells, characters speak whenever you summon them or do certain actions, super-rare "golden" cards have animated artwork, and so on. the game boards also represent locations in the Warcraft world, with places like the jungles of Stranglethorn, the orc city of Orgrimmar, and the Argent Tournament Grounds in snowy Icecrown.
"but if the cards are animated, wouldn't that make imagining these duels kind of pointless?" well, in some aspects, yeah, but i think that all depends on how you picture them in your head even with certain sound and graphic effects going on doing that job for you. if you're a warlock with a murloc deck and you're going up against Ragnaros, i'd take it as leading you and your murloc army into the firey depths of the firelord's lair before pummeling them with said murlocs, just as an example. the game boards can help with establishing a background for imagining all this.
i dunno. i'm speaking from my own perspective here, and besides, i'm pretty sure people don't play Hearthstone solely because of the graphics.
first and foremost, Hearthstone is a game. people play HS because it's a fun timesink and easy to get into. while good graphics and sound design are a plus and can help with attracting people to the game, in the long run all that matters is that the game is fun and can keep someone entertained for a long time. of course, this doesn't just apply to HS, but any game in general, really.
so why did i go on a long muse-ramble about Warcraft nostalgia and aesthetic stuff about a computer card game? well, bar the whole "this site doesn't follow a concrete theme so i can talk about whatever i wish" excuse.
well, simply put, it's because i enjoy the game. now that i've gotten back to it after quite some time, there's a lot more cards and content to keep my interest in playing it, plus doing the daily quests for gold doesn't nearly feel as tedious to me as it felt at launch, especially with the fun-as-heck tavern brawls every week. though, there's also the little aesthetic things about Hearthstone's design and setting that keep me absorbed into the game for hours on end. when you're playing the game during a quiet night in your room, with all the lights off save for the soft glow of a table lamp, you start noticing those little details and just immerse yourself in the humble tavern setting.
it's that setting and atmosphere during that time that makes you think about the past and present. in typical fantasy, taverns and inns are places for sharing stories, reminiscing about old friends and memories, getting you and/or your pals ready for a new adventure, and winding down after a rough day of fighting monsters. as for it's Warcraft theme and TGC aspects, it can bring longtime WoW players thoughts of facing off against rival heroes or epic foes, Warcraft 1/2/3 players memories of commanding their armies against enemies, and perhaps draw TGC fans of the past into a more modern form of collecting and battling their favorite cards.
while those things are what draw me into Hearthstone more than when i played the game at launch, i feel there's another reason i've left out. one a tad more personal, but not a sappy one by any means, hopefully. while i'll save the full details for another article in the future, i'm one of those people who are more at home in the worlds of games and fantasy media than in the real world, particularly because of the influx of so much terrible events happening in the world nowadays. my own life isn't terrible, but it pains me that a lot of awful things are becoming more and more commonplace nowadays in real life, and i can't really do much about it. that being said, it really helps to have something as a distraction from those things.
whether it's a epic journey through faraway lands or something as simple as a card game with cool monsters, just slap it into my hands and i'll likely be happy with it if it's engaging enough. for the latter type, Hearthstone does a wonderful job of it, not simply because of the gameplay, but because of the aforementioned things that i don't really need to go into much further detail than i already have.
i'd seriously recommend playing Hearthstone if it catches your interest in any way. even if you don't share the same flowery (and probably jumbled-up) musings i have about the game. it's a fun timekiller, and it's pretty easy to learn, too. not to say it can't get competitive at times, but thankfully HS has a few modes like Ranked or Arena if you're wanting to get into the more hardcore side of the game. which likely involves metagame stuff i'm still not savvy enough to understand. i dunno, i'll stick with casual play and tavern brawl stuff.
if you don't want to spend actual money in the game for card and adventure packs, you can get gold through ingame quests that happen daily, and you can even get card packs as rewards from arena matches and weekly tavern brawls. might be a bit slower than buying the packs with real money, but it's still a nice alternative for those who have the patience and don't want to drain their wallets.
the graphics and style are nicely done, the card illustrations are fantastic, and the overall presentation is incredibly solid. it's a wonderful little game to play on a coffee break, or perhaps maybe an entire afternoon if you have the time for more than several rounds of it.
it's also free for pc/mac and mobile phones and tablets, and while i'm not of the mind that anything free is automatically good, Hearthstone's still pretty dang good for what it is. i'd say give it a whirl if you're into trading card games or strategy games. you might get a kick out of it.
anyhow, that's it for today. until then, stay rad, everyone. or stay frosty in this case, since winter's coming up and all. i'll just be here lying to myself about shaman being viable for competitive play.
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