Expansion Leak From China - Knights of the Frozen Throne
Disclaimer: Everything below is from the official Chinese website for Hearthstone. The name may be different in English. This has technically not been official unveiled, however, with an official host of Hearthstone having this up on their servers, it's legit.
Well, it finally happened. Blizzard was keeping a great secret and then less than a day before the reveal, the official Chinese Hearthstone website run by Netease managed to leak assets.
It looks like our Heroes have all died and become.. Death Knights! At least from the image below that's what it looks like. Whether or not that's actually the case, we'll soon learn.
Spotted in the image:
- Top of Icecrown Citadel, home of The Lich King.
- Frostmourne.
- The Heroes of Warcraft as Death Knights. Note the skin tones and blue glow in their eyes.
Domain
knightsofthefrozenthrone.com was registered on GoDaddy on April 26, 2017 - quite some time before today's leak. Seems excessive for a promotional link when compared to ungoro.com or gadgetzan.com, but it could just be brand protection. Currently it has a GoDaddy landing page for the url, but if it changes to point towards Blizzard DNS later today, this would further confirm the name of the expansion.
Animated Banner
You can see in the middle card at the bottom a glimpse of the cinematic.
More Images
Source
- Wreyrwy on reddit found the update on the site.
- LiriX on reddit translated the logo.
- SHIT_PROGRAMMER on reddit found extra assets.
Wrong. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Why would they punish an entire region of customers? That's just moronic.
That's not an argument for punishing the customers who did nothing wrong. You punish the perpetrator of a crime, not the nation they came from. When an American journalist breaks an NDA, do they delay a game for the US? Absolutely not - it's a laughable idea completely divorced from reality.
DUDE. NDAs in the software development world, just like NDAs in every other business, ONLY APPLY TO THE PEOPLE WHO SIGN THEM. You don't punish an entire region for the actions of any one company, person, club, or political party in that region, because to do so REDUCES PROFITS. Why would they accept lower profits over this? What is the point of that?
If you can find an example of a company delaying a game release over a broken NDA, then we can talk. But I can't imagine it's ever happened even once.
I don't know what the "=>" symbol is standing for here. You're not making any kind of cogent argument. Yes, I'm aware that NetEase is their Chinese partner. So what? What incentive does either company have to put profits at risk over leaking some art assets 12 hours before an announcement? You're not explaining why that has utility or provides profit for either party.
You've read SO MUCH into such a tiny, minor leak. "the necessary financial information" - what does that even mean? And how does leaking the name have anything to do with all this secret business information you think they've put at risk? You're just pulling this stuff out of thin air.
And let's recall that you began this "obvious" business discussion by suggesting that they entirely remove Chinese support from the game client. How does THAT brilliant idea make anyone money? This is a business plan only Donald Trump could come up with: take an insanely profitable game and block a giant section of your customer-base because someone leaked a couple of .jpgs 12 hours early. Yeah, sounds like "business 101 stuff," dude. "How to Lose Millions Without Even Trying"
When you leak stuff because you got hacked (which IIRC is how this leak occurred), it raises questions on what else got leaked that people aren't saying.
A business partner with a history of getting hacked isn't a good business partner. It's why Blizzard should get a subsidiary in China and kill off the NetEase client for one that's pure Blizzard.
Okay, you finally hit on a rational argument. And it only took you seven tries. Well done!
God chinese website leak before Global release xD
Warlock, Rogue and Priest are purple/blood, Warrior, Shaman and Paladin are blue and the only ones with ice in their gear, so they are frost, Hunter and Mage are green/unholy, Druid is just a head so it must be also unholy.
For the record, Blood (red runes), Frost (blue runes) and Unholy (green runes) are the three specializations of the Death Knight class in WoW, maybe the theme of the expansion is something like the triclass mechanic in MSoG.
That would be the perfect way of giving us a Death Knight class like we always wanted, by giving any class the ability to become a Death Knight with these Tri-Class cards. I'm sad we don't get a true Death Knight class played by Arthas, but this is okay nonetheless. Arthas better be available as a Warrior portrait though. He's too big of a lore character not to be a hero portrait.
Thinking of it that way, I'd assume that the Frost classes are all going to be getting heavy control support (Shaman, Warrior and Paladin are by far the 3 most tank based classes in Hearthstone, though Frost is a DPS spec in WoW), the Blood classes are probably going to be more combo focused and have a lot of spells and probably some healing, (Blood is the tank spec in WoW, but swapping Blood and Frost kind of makes more sense in this format, since the Frost focus is probably more about preventing damage, while Blood is more about dealing and taking damage and healing back up, which works for the 3 classes here) and the Unholy classes are probably going to be more minion-based and aggressive. (Unholy is a pet spec in WoW, which would translate to more minions and summoning based stuff, though it doesn't make much sense not to have Mage be frost based imo, it can be pretty defensive and has a lot of stall, unless that's why Blizz is trying to have Mage focus on non-Freeze effects here.)
Arthas was a paladin though, not a warrior.
Leave it to the Chinese to ruin my T-shirt giveaway
Well there goes that T-shirt giveaway. XD
winter is coming!