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Load up a game of Hearthstone, Blizzard's exquisite collectable card battler, and you suddenly feel at home. Maybe it's the cold weather outside, the dreary January mornings or the dark winter nights. Whatever it is, there are few more welcoming sights on your PC screen than Hearthstone's warm ember-filled glow, or the sound of its genial dwarvish inn-keep welcoming you in.It's all deliberate, of course, calculated and reasoned with Blizzard's usual laser eye for detail and knack for polishing game systems until they shine. But knowing the work that's gone in behind the scenes, the story of Hearthstone's two-year (and counting) development is no less impressive. Still only just in open beta, Hearthstone is a gem of an idea that has been slowly filtered until crystal clear - and Blizzard is still tinkering to make it purer. But with the studio's history and talents - and clearly with plenty of time - surely success was pre-ordained?
"You never really know," Hearthstone's production director Jason Chayes tells Eurogamer. "We have a lot of love for the genre and Warcraft IP, but I think the first indication we were on to something really special was when we released our first internal alpha. We had people from within Blizzard crowded into our little internal theatre and cheering. It was a rowdy audience," he recalls. "That was a really good sign."
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