Hearthstone Closing Down for Some

November 5, 2022 5:44 PM

The Hearthstone Access Project, posted previously, is winding down after a little over a year.

The news has lead to a variety of petitions, such as this one, and a post on the game's subreddit among other places.

This is not the first time access has been lost, as documented here, but it seems a more significant decline.

posted by Alensin (5 comments total)

This illustrates the perils of depending on a single person for accessibility support, or indeed any other complex problem. Blizzard has the resources to fix this and clearly has decided they just don't want to. It's kind of heartbreaking even though I didn't actually end up playing the game as much as I thought I might.
posted by Alensin at 5:46 PM on November 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

I have no dogs in this race in any direction, but it seems like a terrible sadness that it falls apart. Is the dev throwing open the code for others to continue with or is it closed source? Is there anywhere to tweet or similar to raise some assistance for this?
posted by Iteki at 9:36 AM on November 6, 2022

The code is apparently available on Github, though for some reason distributed in the form of a diff against the Hearthstone decompilation. A document on internals is available.

I can't think of much else to be done other than ensuring the word is spread as widely as possible, unfortunately.
posted by Alensin at 2:30 PM on November 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

though for some reason distributed in the form of a diff against the Hearthstone decompilation.

Isn’t that pretty much what Hearthstone Access is- a patch on top of regular Hearthstone? GuideDev discusses it in the Under the hood article:

As pretty much any other commercial game, however, Hearthstone is not open source - and just to be clear, it wouldn't make any sense for it to be. I've often faced complaints from developers who seem to believe the (maintainability) issue with Hearthstone Access is that it isn't open source in the sense that you can't just fetch the code from somewhere (e.g. clone a GitHub repository) and run a command to compile everything.

As I've already said countless times, Hearthstone Access is open source and the source code for it (i.e. every single line of code it changes in a decompiled version of Hearthstone) is always made available on GitHub at the exact moment a new version is released. It is, however, a patch on top of something which isn't open source - and I'm certainly not the one to ask for the original source code (hint: I don't have it either!) nor do I intend on ever publishing decompiled versions of a proprietary game online.

posted by zamboni at 5:36 PM on November 6, 2022

That's a fair point which I hadn't really carefully considered until just now. I guess it really is a ridiculously elaborate patch :) Regardless, I do hope someone can step in until Blizzard decides to act, though I know it won't be me.
posted by Alensin at 6:45 AM on November 7, 2022