Like it or not, battle.net is the backbone of every Blizzard game released in the last ten years – a hugely important chunk of PC gaming we’d be loath to miss out on. It’s enabled every fireball we’ve ever lobbed into an opponent’s face across the board, but it’s also made the business of scaling Hearthstone down to tablets extra tricky.
Don’t worry though, the PC version is super lovely if our Hearthstone review is anything to go by.
Blizzard have had several battle.net engineers embedded with Hearthstone’s development team, working on bringing over the game’s “authentication flow” and limited social features like the friends list.
Reworking the battle.net inferface for the iPad has necessitated an entire redesign, it turns out.
“On the PC we have the Battle.net app that handles things like storing your login credentials, letting you know if there are any important server updates to communicate, and choosing which language you want for Hearthstone,” said lead designer Eric Dodds.
“Since there is currently not a Battle.net app for iOS, we had to find ways to integrate that same information and those same settings into the iPad UI without adding too much clutter.”
But the result is a version of the game that lets players use their PC card collection against the usual player pool – and that should handle cross-platform play whenever that decides to show up.
“I will say we’ve done it – a PC has played with an iPad in the studio, it has happened,” Blizzard director of special projects Hamilton Chu told PCGamesN last year. “But we’re not promising it for launch necessarily.”
Do you think you’ll make use of that when it rolls up?