HEX is not Hearthstone: A look at HEX's closed beta
It's been a while, HEX. Last time I saw you was E3 2013. I hadn't yet started to play Hearthstone, and truthfully, I doubted it could hold a candle to you. In a lot of ways, I was right. It's so much simpler, it's less complex, and at the time, it felt less imaginative. But my card game days are behind me. I don't have the kind of time I used to, so Hearthstone's faster games and accessible drafts (called "arenas" in HS) reminded me of the things I love about the genre while allowing me to keep my grown-up schedule intact and being easy on my wallet.
Just the same, HEX, when I got the closed beta invite to see you again, my heart skipped a beat. I was ready to drop some big money on you, but I've been burned a few times. While I've been in betas and alphas for other games, there's been a trend of letting people pay to play unfinished products. I've been burned, and while I don't regret the experience, I do regret the purchases at the moment. I mean, when a game suddenly disappears from the market, it does make you question your decisions, so I decided we should go out a few times first before I really invest in you.
HEX has been embroiled in a Wizard of the Coast lawsuit, which might color this first comparison: If you want something that feels like Magic the Gathering online with vanguard cards required for each deck and maybe some extra humor, go to the HEX Kickstarter site and buy into it (Update: Oops! Too late for that folks, you'll have to just sign up for beta). As in offline MtG, you'll want to buy a starter deck (the game only gives one free one) and some boosters first (unless your Kickstarter tier includes them), but from what I can tell, it's pretty much an online version of MtG with some neat extra stuff available only to an online TCG. It isn't the same game, though. Mechanics are similar (phases, the stack, first-strike, etc), and there are similarly themed and colored cards, but the lore is totally original and pretty cool. The races associated with each color makes for a nice theme, and it's funny to see the black, death-inspired magic dominated by the cute shin'hare faction (Japanese bunnies with a mean streak). The game is totally playable as a Magic substitute, or at least what I remember from 7th edition, and if Cryptozoic can add the PvE stuff, it'll really be a good online TCG for people who like offline TCGs. Add to it the things that can only be done online, like cards permanently changing form, and you've really got something special right now.
But I should warn newcomers to the genre that HEX is not Hearthstone. That'd be like comparing The Crew to Mario Kart. While I'd be a fool to say that there's no skill involved in Hearthstone, HEX is much more involved, both in terms of strategy and monetary commitment. The games usually last about 30-40 minutes and max out at an hour it seems, since each player's turns eat away at her time, which is 30 minutes. Games can be shorter when someone quits, and this does happen frequently for me (more on that later), but for the most part, it's going to be long.
Unlike HS, HEX allows you to do things during your opponent's turns. You can cast spells, use abilities, and choose whom to block with, and there's even a visually represented order for ability and spell resolution. Of course, that also means you need to keep track of all these, be aware of how much spare "mana" your opponent is keeping for your turn, etc.
Being more hardcore naturally means HEX isn't as newbie-friendly. The community is pretty nice; chat is mostly hidden in that you only see it if you want to, and generally, the people I've encountered have been helpful. The worst I see is people who are impatient about getting their turn, but most people are willing to answer the same stupid newbie questions over and over again in the general chat. That's a really good sign to me.
What makes it hard on newbies is that at the moment, it's almost completely PvP-based despite the fact that many of the Kickstarter rewards are PvE items. You're going to need to pay a bit for decks and cards (more on that later), you'll need to pay for currencies, and cards that aren't so great can't just be turned into a "dust" to let you make any card you want. You'll have to play the auction house, much as you would an MMO, which means sitting back and watching prices for a few days at the very least. And as a heads up, you might not want to open you booster packs. It may sound counter-intuitive, but it's actually better to wisely join a draft based on what you want. All this makes the game feel like it can punish you monetarily for not knowing how to optimally play the game.
Let's look at the starter experience. When you start the game, you choose a starter deck, but you don't get a description other than a racial theme. No test drive, no earning another deck later; you just get one. Also, you create a name for your "kingdom" (which becomes your name, so be careful when you choose it). Then you hop into the tutorial. Hearthstone players may feel like the game is slower, more clunky, or possibly more complicated because... well, it is! It's played more like a classic TCG but still has computer advantages (like keeping tabs on cards that've seen tournament play or allowing for cards to level through the game). Just the same, you'll need to learn the phases in the game and what they mean and try to avoid making stupid mistakes like clicking through your own turn (ahem). The tutorial's a bit slow and wordy compared to Hearthstone, but it explains the basic mechanics quite well.
HEX has lots more champions than Hearthstone "heroes." The difference is that HEX doesn't restrict the cards you can use and they have their own resource for activating their powers. For example, one hero requires a red resource and a total of 5 available "hero resources" (I'm simplifying here) in order for you to give 3 attack to a minion permanently. You can mix your deck with the red resource or the black resource and use this power on either of them. It doesn't matter, so in this sense, even though there are factions, champions, and races, they aren't hugely important for the moment in the PvP game, though card types are (shin'hare, for example, have many cards that benefit other of their race).
Now, about phases. There's a lot of them. Draw phase, main phase, pre-attack, attack, pre-defense, defense, etc. Lots of clicking through phases you might not be able to do anything about, so it's certainly not as streamlined at Hearthstone, which could be good or bad. It's bad in that I've gotten lazy and sometimes make bad mistakes like forgetting to declare an attacker while skipping phases I can't do anything with, but it's good because you simply have more options! In HEX, unlike HS, you have something to do during your opponent's turn other than watch him play and think of what you'll do after he hits "end turn." I do think it'd be nice if the game recognized when a player has no options and simply moved forward without requiring anyone to allow the next phase in the game to unfold.
Once you're done with the tutorial, there's not a lot to do as a player who isn't looking to spend any money. Though branded as an MMOTCG and rich with PvE rewards, HEX currently offers no dungeons or raids. PvE is minimal after your three starter trials, and there's no more getting rewards from the computer unless you buy another starter deck.
In that sense, the game feels pay-to-play at the moment. The "PvE" side of the game is severely underdeveloped (just the tutorial and the three "trials" for your deck), so the only way to get gold is playing against other players. You can earn only one booster pack from the current, one-time trial, and from there you're stuck going out and playing other people. At first, for me, that meant getting slaughtered by people who've at least bought a few packs, but later, new testers came along to even the field. It's been a big wave, and a lot of people seem discouraged since at least half my opponents quit before our fifth turn (and since I'm using the starter deck, I am not very powerful).
People using real money get platinum, which has a lot of purchasing power, while the rest of us get gold. Gold doesn't buy packs directly from Crytpozoic but might help you get some singles or boosters through the auction house. Other players suggested that buying cheap cards to help your deck is a viable strategy, as is playing the AH to make money. This might eventually work, but as it is, a new player has no real means of getting new packs/cards in what I'd consider a reasonable amount of time-to-effort. There are no dailies, no free arena ticket for a one-time trial, and the game's PvE mode isn't implemented. As it stands, you pretty much have to buy cards or fight other players for a meager 100 gold per win (and nothing for a loss). Keep in mind, this is more like a full-blown TCG, so these aren't the quick little 10-20 minute Hearthstone games. I say "meager" because most people want a few hundred gold at the least for a single card, and you'll need to win thousands of games to be able to purchase a single booster pack.
Playing the auction house, as in an MMO, is a game within itself. I've spent some time going through the lists, trying to buy low and sell high, but buying alone is rough. Cards that newbies can afford tend to be snatched up as soon as they hit the market, so right when I think I've found a cheap card, I hit buy only to find out it's already been purchased. This not only makes playing the AH at my range difficult but makes improving my deck quite difficult as well.
These also aren't super-powerful cards for the most part. These are cards found in the starter decks. You'll find yourself in bidding wars for cards you want only because you can afford them, but since the shortest length time left on an auction that the AH shows is "less than 12 hours," you won't be swooping in at the last minute to make any good purchases. It's rather ridiculous.
In short, as a free-to-play player and tester, I'm not really feeling motivated to play aside from the fact that I literally have a job to do. Again, it's not that the game itself isn't fun. It has promise! But the current game I can play demands I pay money or grind out for ages with the same cards for what seems like a very long time. The alternative is beyond slow. An MMOTCG in which I have essentially only one deck to play with at the start isn't fun.
Granted, the game is in beta, but it's also taking money now, so... well, we know this debate. Everyone knows Landmark, for example, lacked combat for a very long time. However, it had building, and that was the feature the game was going to be built around; the combat wasn't its core. HEX, on the other hand, is billing itself as an MMOTCG. It's put a lot of stock into PvE as its core, so much that anyone purchasing the $20 or higher tier on Kickstarter is seeing PvE rewards. I'd love to know why PvE has been left out and why the developers won't be wiping the servers before testing such a key feature.
Update: We've got a response about PvE from Cory Jones,President and CEO of HEX Entertainment: "The PVP part of the game is furthest along in development and it didn't feel right to hold back a core system of the game that fans could play. So, we released PVP instead of holding everything back and releasing everything at once. We're working very hard to complete PVE; it's important to remember that PVP and back-bone TCG systems had to come first. It's the foundation of HEX. We are building amazing PVE systems that take our core tech and reimagines how you play a TCG; players have never seen anything like it and hopefully we will be able to launch the first wave of this content soon."
I really want to enjoy HEX. I still think it can be a winner, and if I were still a teenager addicted to TCGs with lots of spare time and cash, I'd be all over the game. However, after experiencing the casual pace of Hearthstone and noticing the glaring absence of what was telegraphed as the key feature for HEX, I think I'll just have to sit on the sidelines once again and watch what unfolds as the game emerges from closed beta.
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