This thread seems to have gone off on a magic nostalgia derail, but I'll throw out a few thoughts that occured to me after seeing this announcement.
I find this news not at all interesting as far as the game goes (don't really care about Hearthstone one way or another), but very interesting in terms of what it means for Blizzard.
Putting together a small nimble team to work on a game for the mobile space was a smart move, and I'm wondering if it was in response to their (very serious, very large) problem of agility.
As the years have gone by, Blizzard has become _slower_, not faster, and they were already a slow company. Diablo 3 has been out for almost a year now and there's fuckall for new significant content. Their response to WoW players during Cata was poor and slow, and they lost a shitload of people over it. SC2's battlenet shenanigans were kind of an embarassment.
A small team doesn't have the same problems that the huge teams behind diablo/sc/wow/bnet do, and because its naturally a lot cheaper, they can afford to be a lot riskier.
Another point of considerable interest to me is that they're finally leveraging battle.net for a new title in a meaningful way. Why Blizzard failed to deliver a dota-like for SC2 or Diablo 3 is beyond mystifying for me, but Hearthstone looks to be using their bnet infrastructure for matchmaking, and that's a very good thing.
I have a friend who started playing SC2 cold, and after playing it on and off since it released, he hovers around a 50% win rate - that's really damn good matchmaking. A similar system for HS and any other competitive game they make would be great, and if they have more small teams working on other awesome games, they can really make use of the huge knowledgebase they have built up at their bnet team in terms of infrastructure, matchmaking, connectivity, and so on.
Between this and the (inevitable) D3 console announcement, I'm slightly more optimistic about Blizzard than I have been in some time. They really, really disappointed me with Cataclysm and Diablo 3, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. Seeing them try something very different than their norm is healthy.
Now I just wonder what Titan will be...
I find this news not at all interesting as far as the game goes (don't really care about Hearthstone one way or another), but very interesting in terms of what it means for Blizzard.
Putting together a small nimble team to work on a game for the mobile space was a smart move, and I'm wondering if it was in response to their (very serious, very large) problem of agility.
As the years have gone by, Blizzard has become _slower_, not faster, and they were already a slow company. Diablo 3 has been out for almost a year now and there's fuckall for new significant content. Their response to WoW players during Cata was poor and slow, and they lost a shitload of people over it. SC2's battlenet shenanigans were kind of an embarassment.
A small team doesn't have the same problems that the huge teams behind diablo/sc/wow/bnet do, and because its naturally a lot cheaper, they can afford to be a lot riskier.
Another point of considerable interest to me is that they're finally leveraging battle.net for a new title in a meaningful way. Why Blizzard failed to deliver a dota-like for SC2 or Diablo 3 is beyond mystifying for me, but Hearthstone looks to be using their bnet infrastructure for matchmaking, and that's a very good thing.
I have a friend who started playing SC2 cold, and after playing it on and off since it released, he hovers around a 50% win rate - that's really damn good matchmaking. A similar system for HS and any other competitive game they make would be great, and if they have more small teams working on other awesome games, they can really make use of the huge knowledgebase they have built up at their bnet team in terms of infrastructure, matchmaking, connectivity, and so on.
Between this and the (inevitable) D3 console announcement, I'm slightly more optimistic about Blizzard than I have been in some time. They really, really disappointed me with Cataclysm and Diablo 3, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. Seeing them try something very different than their norm is healthy.
Now I just wonder what Titan will be...
