Two and a half years later: The missing features of Hearthstone

The last couple of weeks have been the cause of much strife. Pros and community alike have been extremely outspoken about the state of Hearthstone. Everywhere there are people protesting the inactivity of Blizzard and how they need to start acting.

In other words it is the month of September. Rather than joining the bandwagon right away, though, I would like to take this time to talk about an area where there is a lacking demand of change. And that is in everything but the gameplay of Hearthstone.

Hearthstone was officially released in March 2014, two and a half years ago. Over this period we have seen immense iteration on the gameplay of with adventures, tavern brawls and new sets to keep the game rich on fresh content, sort of. Everywhere else, however, things have remained mostly static, even though there are aspects of the game where change can be implemented rather easily.

Disclaimer: I am a programmer in learning and thus I am well aware that in the field of high-level programming is no such thing as an “easy” or “simple” task. When I use these terms it is in relation to the difficulty of implementing other features of similar demand.

With that out of the way lets talk about the non-gameplay areas where Hearthstone have room for improvement.







1. Expanded option menu



When it comes to option menus, I am a bit spoiled. I am a PC gamer at heart. I have played every Blizzard title since WarCraft 3. Outside of that I have also played a ton of high grade RPGs like TES Skyrim or the Witcher 3. I am used to a gazillion options, even though I rarely use most of them. Yes, I watch too much TotalBiscuit, too.

Hearthstone has one of the most bare-boned option menus out there. Obviously, Hearthstone would not have need of the same amounts of options but the current menu is still so empty that it ends up annoying me at times.

First off: the graphics. Nothing to complain about, Hearthstone got every graphic option that is to be expected from a game simple enough to run on a mobile phone. But the rest of the options leaves something to be desired.

When we look at the sound options, one thing that comes to my mind is that there is no controller or checkmark for ambient sound. It is locked under master volume. So there is no way to turn off the constant noise that is meant to imitate an inn without also turning off gameplay sounds. Вhile I can be a sucker for immersion this kind of restriction just comes off as forced. There are plenty of times where it would be relevant to be able to turn off those sounds.

Hearthstone has one of the most bare-boned option menus out there.



Auto-squelch has been a frequent demand by the community, and once again the response by Blizzard have been mostly forced, citing “fears of option bloat”. While I understand the reason against a full on Auto-squelch, I could still do with a “limited emotes” options that would maybe only allow a smaller number of emotes through each minute, as well as completely turning off emotes when a game is decided.

Last thing are the credits and the Cinematic playthrough. Notice how it says Cinematic. Singular, as in the first cinematic only, even though Hearthstone at present time has a total of eight different cinematic trailers. Why are the rest all restricted to YouTube? I don't get it. Blizzard clearly got the technology to let us play them in the client and it is always going to look better there.

It can't even be attributed to the mobile players as this feature is not available to them. This is presumptively to keep the size of the already humongous HS app down. But I am a PC player, I might as well get disk space from the cornflakes in this age. It shouldn't be an issue.

This is another area where I gladly admit being spoiled. WOW having each cinematic playable at the log-in screen at max resolution have left me wanting for more in Hearthstone.





2. Replays



Most esports - in fact a lot of PC games that don't call themselves esports - have a replay system of some kind, allowing games to be rewatched post completion. In competitive gaming in general this practice dates back to chess and it has always played a huge part in directing the competitive scene. The best players were those capable of analyzing past games the best and advancing their own plays through.

Analyzing games is already a huge part of the competitive Hearthstone scene, but with an integrated replay system, the pool of games to analyze would be greatly expanded, rather than just being limited to games that have been shown on streams.

Replays are in theory the simplest thing ever. You record all the actions of each player and that is all that is needed to be saved in the files. This is how it has worked in all the RTSes. Every single action, upwards of a 100 a minute for pro players, commanding hundreds of units. Comparatively, the actions that need to be recorded during a Hearthstone game would be a few ones each turn. With this being orders of magnitude below that of SC2, one would think replays in Hearthstone would be simple.

Replays are, in theory, the simplest thing ever. Truth is, I already know why they aren't.



Truth is, I already know why it is not. The answer is patches. All replay technology lives of the idea of repeating actions in the same environment as they were originally made in, but patches break this system. This was also the case back in WC3. Replays would start degrading as the stats of units got changed in the live game.

For SC2, Blizzard took the gloves off and developed a system capable of handling this. The SC2 replay system is capable of backtracking patches back to whatever patch the replay was made in. By no means a small feat, it is actually quite an amazing system. Same system was inherited by Heroes of the Storm, as the two games run on the same engine. But Hearthstone runs on Unity. They would have to redo this system all over again assuming they aren't okay with replays having an “expiration date” and I suspect they are not.

Still, such a feature would revolutionize how analysis and training is done and would be a massive aid for the competitive scene in general. I really wish we will one day see this implemented in Hearthstone.





3. Reconnect in custom games



Disconnects are the bane of all online esports. Whatever technical issues drove the player to lose connection, have now caused a game going well to often be abruptly ended and this is twice as true in Hearthstone because in custom games it is not currently possible to reconnect to a custom game you were playing.

Reconnect is something Blizzard has historically struggled with, and for good reason. It is incredibly hard to, within a timely manner, restore a game state for a player that lost it due to a disconnect. It is one of the toughest tasks to code especially given how many variables are needed to be loaded from the server, or in the case of SC2 - from the other players.

Reconnect is something Blizzard has historically struggled with, and for good reason.



For SC2 and Heroes of the Storm, this has never been a simple task, the engine is not well adjusted to this. And seemingly this feature has not been easy to implement in Hearthstone either, though it must be stated that given it is working in ladder games (somewhat), it should be possible to implement for custom games, too.

The troublesome variables that make this task a chore in games like SC2 is much less present in Hearthstone. The game state is so much simpler by nature and it is much easier to transfer it over the network. The clue is in the spectator mode and how fast it is possible to connect and observe a live game in the Hearthstone client/ For the sake of tournaments everywhere happening on bar WiFi-s, I hope we will one day see better way to reconnect.

Now that I mentioned the spectator mode...







4. A true spectator mode



When people talk about Blizzard trademark stamp of quality, they mean that Blizzard is infamous for not half-baking anything. And that is usually true. All the features in all their games are well put together.

The current Hearthstone spectator mode is the exception to that rule, if there ever was one. It feels like a feature in alpha. Only the bare minimum of implementation to deliver an observer experience is present. You are essentially just being shown what the players are seeing, with the opponents cards visible as well if you are observing both, but nothing else besides that and all of it is relentlessly bugged, to top it all off. Tournament after tournament we see the observer mode having issues when “Choose One” cards are played as well as some other occurrences. It causes issues everywhere, famously seen when the Truesilver Champion “missed the lethal” between Ekop and Fire. These things have been going on for months.

The current spectator mode feels like a feature in alpha.



Where to start? The default observer UI is basically useless for tournament use. Everything related to the player opposite to the one you are observing is completely out of place. The enemy hand is displayed in an unpractical manner. Gameplay elements are not adjusted for the observer so the hands and discoveries of the opponent are not in optimal position. You need to do extensive editing with some streaming software before it is even close to serviceable and even that usually requires an observer feed from both players, doubling the amount of PC power required.

It shouldn't be like this. Jumping into Heroes of the Storm we get to have a view of what a true observer mode means. Information, timers and tools, all well set up for the demand of the tournaments. Now once again I understand this feature inherited much of this from the years of work of putting custom observer UIs into StarCraft 2 and this UI is indeed not even made by Blizzard themselves.

It would be a ton of work to do something similar for Hearthstone, but there is still so much potential for improvement with smaller changes. To give an example: The hands of each player are currently being held in a fan to immerse the player in the idea that they are holding them, but this is useless for observers. You can't focus in on a card through a twitch stream. If the hands in observer mode were shown in a horizontal row like most digital CCG, then the cards could be more readable, which would also allow for a size increase, too. This could help improve the experience of viewers who are not that into the game and help attract new audiences.

There is also other features that could be made, like having the observer switch sides at the click of a single bottom or hotkey, but that requires Blizzard to be willing to acknowledge that the current spectator tools are in no way sufficient. And they really aren't.

Can we take the spectator mode into beta soon, Blizzard? And can we acknowledge that improvements to non-gameplay features would also be a great aid for the esports scene? I sure hope we can get to that point.

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