by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Hearthstone is a pretty fun game by itself, just the numbers and cool abilities, different heroes, and the ever changing metagame. Even if some might regard to it as “casual”, Hearthstone has enough meat to it to keep an avid theorycrafter busy for days. But ever since Blizzcon, I’ve become pretty interested with other side of Hearthstone, and that’s its E-Sport potential. I’ve spent plenty of hours not only watching and enjoying, but also analyzing every aspect of Hearthstone’s E-Sport aspect.

Has Blizzard designed Hearthstone to be an eSport powerhouse? The early results look promising, a lot of people have taken well to Hearthstone and will spend many hours watching both Popular Streamers and Pro’s fighting it out in the tournament scene. Hearthstone usually sits in the Top 3 of most streamed titles on Twitch, and that’s a pretty good spot. But why is Hearthstone so popular? Why are so many people watching it?

When you consider that there are a lot of Blizzard fans out there, one would speculate that any Free-to-Play game that uses the Warcraft IP was bound to have a considerable amount of success. But in my opinion, two of the most important factors are its beautifully made UI and the smart design that allows Hearthstone to be a very fluid and simple game.

Hearthstone has a very simple, yet engaging exterior, a single glance at a board will give you a lot of information on who’s winning and who’s losing a game. But Hearthstone is not only simple on the outside, it is also very dynamic. Unlike other games where you have to play one card at the time and wait for your opponent to answer your plays, here on Hearthstone you can take your full turn without interruptions, you can attack without waiting for your opponent to have to declare blockers. Your turn is all about you, which means that a viewer could theorize a sequence of plays for a turn as see how it compares with what the player actually did. That’s something that would get a lot more complicated if the plays were something like “play A, if opponent doesn’t respond then play B; but if he responds with Z, then play C; and if he responds with Y instead, then play D; if he responds with X then pass turn” and that’s just playing cards, then you have to attack with minions, imagine if the attacks were “Attack with minions 1,2, and 3, if he blocks then play card F, if not play card G”. That’s awfully complicated, turns in Hearthstone have a simple structure. “Play A, then Play B, then use this minion to attack that minion, and this other minion to attack face”. The only ifs come when your opponent has secrets that you don’t know what they are yet, and when there’s random effects to account for, such as the steal on a Mind Control Tech or Sylvanas, maybe the Rolls on Shaman Spells, or whatever comes out of Piloted Shredder.

“Simple to learn, hard to master” that’s a good way to describe Hearthstone. Unlike overly complicated card games like Magic: the Gathering, the rules of Hearthstone are super simple and easy to learn, but that doesn’t mean that Hearthstone itself is a simple game devoid of strategy. Hearthstone is a game that is super accessible for everyone to play, at least casually. The beauty is that Hearthstone is deep enough to make it viable as a competitive game aswell. And anytime a super popular game can breed serious competition, you got a good chance to turn it into a viable eSport.

A big playerbase is huge when it comes to making a sport popular. Think of the world’s most popular sport, Soccer. To play soccer casually all you need is something that can resemble a Ball and something to craft makeshift goal posts. Lots of kids just pile rocks to delimit  scoring areas, split into groups, and hope somebody has a ball. If you’ve played a sport casually, you might be more inclined to checked out the pro-scene. And that’s specially true for e-Sports these days huh? I mean, you can’t get more casual than Hearthstone and League of Legends, Kappa.

Now it is kinda obvious that Hearthstone wasn’t designed to be a successful e-sport, spectator mode came in super late and the client still doesn’t support tournaments. In fact there are a lot of features that could be added to the game client to help grow the eSport aspect of it, and after the continued success I’m sure we are going to start seeing more and more improvements to the game that furtherly cement Hearthstone as a top eSport.

I highly recommend that you watch this GDC piece on Hearthstone’s UI, it will help you understand more on the design process behind it. After you process that information, is easy to see how the UI helps Hearthstone be so popular and in turn a prime candidate for successful eSportsing.

The future of Hearthstone is bright, it has solid foundations that will allow it to be as big as Blizzard makes it to be. And oh boy they are making it grow, hopefully it doesn’t peak soon, but I’m very optimistic about what’s coming next, and I think you should be too.