The wait for Blizzard Entertainment’s highly anticipated card battle game on Android, called Hearthstone: Heroes Of Warcraft, continues to keep us salivating and chomping at the bit to get a taste. It appears however that we won’t have to wait too much longer, another couple of months at the most it sounds like. At least, that’s the goal Blizzard has set for themselves. They want to have Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft ready for Android tablets by the end of the year. It’s nearly November,(just 8 days away)so that would leave just over two months for Blizzard to release the game to Android tablets if they want to hit their projected target. After waiting this long(Hearthstone launched on iPad back in March)I can deal with a couple more months.
That isn’t the end of the news either, Blizzard is toiling away with the fury of the Horde getting Hearthstone ready for a launch onto iPhone and Android too, ever expanding the mobile reach of this game. The sad part about that is we’ll have to wait a little longer for the smartphone compatible release, as Blizzard states they don’t have the game quite where they want it yet for those platforms. According to the “Hearthside Chat” thread on the Hearthstone blog, we’re looking at a launch onto Android smartphones sometime in the beginning of next year. Blizzard is keen to point out that they want the game on smartphones to be just as accessible as the tablet and PC versions of the game, which includes overhauling the user interface to provide the same intuitive experience that players get on those other platforms.
Blizzard is extremely excited about releasing the Android smartphone version of Hearthstone, but they make no attempt to hide the fact that they have no qualms with taking a little longer to prepare the game for a launch on smartphones. They want to take into account the issues that people could run into if they were playing Hearthstone on a smaller screen, which in their case means attacking those issues head on by customizing and optimizing the user interface and the game for smaller sized displays as opposed to just porting it over. That’s OK with us, we’d rather they do it right than rush something out. The good news is that the tablet version for Android is very, very close, so now is as good of a time as any to start thinking about a brand new Android tablet to play Hearthstone on.