Don your tin foil hats, because it’s speculation time.
Blizzard announced its free-to-play, deck-building game at PAX East today, titled Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft for PC, Mac, and iPad. The announcement falls in line with an unconfirmed, leaked Blizzard product schedule from 2010 that lists a “WoW TGC,” to release in 2012. TGC stands for trading card game, or as SideQuesting’s Steven Strom speculates “The Card Game.” While the date is wrong, and most of them are, the project name could mean they are the same thing.
Blizzard does have an officially licensed trading card game, developed by Cryptozoic Entertainment. It’s possible Hearthstone changed from a game based off of its existing TGC, to a digital CCG.
Also listed in the leaked document are expansions for Diablo 3 (denoted by an “X” we believe to mean expansion), a fifth World of Warcraft expansion, something called, “SC2 Phoenix,” and Blizzard’s next MMO codenamed Titan.
Some have speculated that “SC2 Phoenix,” is Blizzard All-Stars, the now-standalone DotA game. Considering All-Stars began as a Starcraft 2 custom map and was reborn into a standalone game, lengthening its development time from the listed Q4 2012 release, it’s not a bad guess.
Other games have pulled from the document’s project names. “WoW X4,” if the “X” is believed to signify an expansion, was probably World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. “Starcraft 2 X1,” and “X2,” likely signify both Starcraft 2 expansions Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void.
We may never know if the document is legitimate, but every announcement seems to fall in line with the project titles. And who knows, maybe we’ll hear about a Diablo 3 expansion soon.
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