Returning casual player here…
I played Hearthstone pretty regularly back in the 20teens, even organizing casual tournaments for my friends and coworkers at our after hours office hangouts. Hearthstone was fresh, simple, and fun way to enjoy a no frills TCG that everyone could enjoy.
Eventually stopped playing because it was hard to keep up with if you didn’t keep investing in cards and building ever more elaborate decks based on whatever meta was currently popular. That’s neither here nor there. Overall I always thought the game was fun.
I really like that the game currently support a casual mode where you can just play the game with whatever cards you have. I have a mage deck that’s just fire spells and Murlocs. No ranked ladder and no fuss. I can just jump into the queue, get a game, and have some fun. This has really brought me back to play the game again.
All that said, there is one thing that does bother me about the game and it’s the disorganized, cluttered, and bloated UI.
- Doing anything seems to require a ton of clicks.
- The landing menu has four categories that don’t make much sense to me, one of which is just called “Hearthstone”, well duh, yes I’m playing Hearthstone.
- Modes is vague and seems to include some game modes but not others.
- Battlegrounds and Mercenaries seem to be more Modes that don’t live in the Modes menu.
- And finally, there’s too much pop up spam.
All this contributes to a feeling that the game UI is disorganized and cluttered to me.
Anyway, just some observations of things that feel a bit irritating but I’m sure I’d get used to them after a while.
2 Likes
I’m hoping they remove Mercenaries from the front menu and replace it with Solo Adventures.
3 Likes
That does make more sense.
The seemingly multi-faceted game mode has caused difficulties in maintenance and development, costing a lot of time and money for the game, and losing the original intention of the game to be simple and in-depth.
- The standard mode and battlefield mode are seriously unbalanced.
- Paid props affect victory conditions.
- Insufficient manpower for development and maintenance.
I don’t really mind that the game has many modes which many different kinds of players can enjoy it. I do agree, however, that it does turn what was a fun singular experience into a muddied, confusing one for new players. Where do they start?
But that’s not really the issue I was trying to highlight in this topic. With a UI designed properly Hearthstone could easily compartmentalize those game modes into logical categories that become self evident. As it currently stands, I don’t feel that is the case.
Additionally, the game is a busy body presenting the player with too much engagement spam. Play this! Look at me! Go here! Buy NOW! It make a bad situation even worse. Blizzard is trying to drive engagement with what amounts to stimulation overload.
Another example of a poorly designed UX is the booster pack opening UI. Sure, it’s fun to drag a new booster pack over to what I’m going to call the “opening table”. The fanfare animation can be a fun and enjoyable experience as the player watches as it explodes into a particle shower and the cards are slowly reviled with an additional flip over animation. Cool!
The first several times you do this, or when it happens every now and then when the player buys a bunch of booster packs. When you log in after a long hiatus, however, and you have 200 or so packs to open in this fashion, with no clearly visible way to by pass the process, it become a tedious exercise and a waste of time.
I expect a higher quality experience from Blizzard.
they changed it a while ago so you can just hold down the space bar to open all your packs in a row
i dunno how it works on phones though
I’m playing mostly on my iPad.
1 Like