Hearthstone Mercenaries reveal stream raises many more questions than answers

Sep 1, 2021

▲ There was a lot to take in during Tuesday's stream. *Image via Blizzard*

After months and months of anticipation, Blizzard Entertainment's take on a roguelike experience within their massively popular collectible card game, Hearthstone, made its' debut in a live stream event on Tuesday in front of tens of thousands of players. Once the reveal ended, you'd be hard pressed to find a single person outside of the game's development team who understood what they had just watched.

During the hourlong stream, new and familiar faces on the development team spoke about the inner workings of Hearthstone Mercenaries and what players can expect when it goes live on October 12.

Between the Mercenaries themselves, the hub where players make their home in the game mode, brief gameplay highlights, upgrades on top of upgrades, a pack system specific to the roguelike, and much, much more, it didn't take long for social media and Twitch chat to be filled with "???" due to information overload.

▲ One of the presentation slides that shows a lot of features. *Image via Blizzard*

During the event and shortly after it concluded, the game's official subReddit saw tens of thousands of individuals pour onto it to express their confusion (and anger) and try to figure out if there was something they had missed that others caught to make sense of what they just experienced.

In addition to the structure of the stream baragging viewers with information and terms they were not accustmed to, players took particular offense to how the game mode appeared to be heavily monetized prior to it even being released.

With pre-order bundles featured on the stream that showed Mercenaries-exclusive packs and characters, players were being asked to open their wallets for a game mode they barely learned anything about after an hour of sitting in bewilderment.

The confusion extended far beyond the echo chamber that social forums tend to create, even long-time Hearthstone personalities had little idea what was going on.

With nearly six weeks to go until Mercenaries is scheduled to go live, there's no indication as of the time of this story going live that the Hearthstone team is looking to put out more information regarding the game mode prior to release. But with most of the game's development team on social media, and many receiving tweets from players, it's hard to imagine a world in where another guide or tutorial aren't put out.