Seems that Hearthstone’s rather appealing and generous free-to-play setup wasn’t done by accident. It’s recently been revealed that the structure was planned out by Blizzard with the game’s long life in mind.

We’re here for the long run,” said producer Yong Woo. “We’re not here to make a quick buck. I want to be playing and working on Hearthstone 10 years from now… Instead of focusing on maximising immediate profit, Hearthstone is really about being able to play it how you want to.”

Production director Jason Chayes echoed the same ideals while elaborating “When Blizzard approaches a game it’s with the intention of making something that’s going to be around not for a month or two or a year or two but something that we’re really into for the long haul. A game that we plan to support for many many years to come, and that’s certainly the case with Hearthstone.”

Recently Blizzard also announced that they’d expansions planned for their other game World of Warcraft that would also hopefully carry the game forward until 2024.

One of the announcements coming out of PAX this year has been that of an upcoming Super Meat Boy game, due to release next year. It’s surprising for two reasons, the first being that no one saw it coming and the second? Well Team Meat have said that the new game will capture the feeling of the original but without the use of “multiple buttons”.

Quite what this means isn’t yet clear, but given that the game will release on Steam and also mobiles and tablets it seems to suggest that the game will support touch controls upon release and that’s a bit confusing given that Super Meat Boy was all about timing and precision and such things are a lot harder to do with touch control.

Otherwise the game will feature randomly generated levels over six chapters, twice as many bosses as the original game and an ‘endless’ mode, whatever that entails. There’s no concrete release date, but they aim to have it out “sometimes next year”.

When we heard that Volition was kicking off PAX this weekend and would be announcing their new project, we knew there was a good chance it was going to be related to the Saints Row franchise. Especially when the voice of one of its characters was there to help present the panel and then later artwork surfaced of a ouija board that contained the prominent fleur-de-lis image of the games’ titular gang.

So it comes as no surprise that the project turns out to be a new standalone expansion to the Saints Row 4 game – Saints Row 4: Gat Out of Hell has gone from the superheroics of the last main game to the supernatural. The two-player co-op sees Johnny Gat and Kinzie of the Saints sucked to Hell by ouija board to battle demons and eventually face Satan himself to rescue the Boss.

The game’s version of Hell will be half the size of SR4’s Steelport and will feature some new weapons which in true Saints style, are just plain bonkers. For example one of them is called Arm Chairmageddon and is basically a La-Z-Boy recliner with guns. Others draw more from the ‘hell and damnation’ side of the game’s style, including the Locust Gun.

Gat Out of Hell will be sold separately for $19.95 in North America and will be released for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One on Jan. 27, 2015. The expansion will also be part of an upcoming re-release of Saints Row 4 called Saints Row 4: Re-Elected for PS4 and Xbox One. No word yet about prices or release dates for European versions.

The final wing of Naxxramas opened on Wednesday and many eager players jumped straight in, hoping to complete the final stretch of Hearthstone’s first expansion. I was among them, taking on the two final bosses live on the station’s Twitch channel.

As if to make up for last week’s four bosses, the Frostwyrm Lair has only two bosses in it; Sapphiron and Kel’thuzad himself. And both of them can be fairly challenging, even if Kel’Thuzad is the more challenging battle of the two as the final boss of the entire thing.

Sapphiron’s Hero Power is a 0 mana cost ability called Frost Breath, which destroys all minions who aren’t Frozen on your side of the field and he will use at the start of every turn. Sounds bad, but you do have a lifeline. A 2/10 minion who you start with on your side of the field called Frozen Champion. As his name suggests, he is forever Frozen but also shelters minions placed on either side of him from Frost Breath’s power. So this is a battle of consideration and careful placement and perfectly doable in a few battles if you play your cards right.

Kel’Thuzad though… well, Kel’Thuzad cheats and I’m not just saying that because he’s difficult: he literally does cheat. He starts off with 30 HP, 10 armour and has another 0-cost ability that causes your Hero 2 damage and freezes it. He’s also programmed with different responses to each Hero’s entering phrase as well as all 6 of the emotes, which can be quite amusing if you’re bored. When you’ve removed all his armour as well, that is when he will cheat. He will end your turn automatically and then summon two 3/3 Guardian of Icecrowns with Taunt and change his ability to Chains, an 8-cost ability that allows him to take control of one of your minions for the turn. He will also do this if you let him carry on too long beating you down without removing all his armour. My advice is to smack down his armour quickly, being aware of the auto turn-end when it’s all gone (try to do more than 10 damage during the ‘armour’ phase to give you a little headstart on his health), then just play cards and deal with him. Eventually you will win.

The final Class challenge is that of the Paladin against Kel’Thuzad with all his tricks. Use the Echoing Oozes in a similar way to how Grobbulus did last week – they help enormously.

Also, I discovered an Easter Egg. Play a Hunter deck, and use Animal Companion against Kel’Thuzad – see who you summon. 😀

As an ending the Frostwyrm Lair was certainly good enough, but maybe lacked some little touch that made it perfect. Not that I cared when I finally beat Kel’Thuzad (that NPC misplay! He had fatal on me and missed it!) and then saw the rundown of all the boss coins being counted to confirm that yes – I had entered Naxxramas and made it out the other side the victor, many cards richer and with new skills and experiences.

I entered Curse of Naxx excited but doubting whether I’d be able to actually beat it. I am a skilled Hunter player, but not so much the other classes. But the expansion made me sit down, play with the mechanics of cards both old and new, learn new tricks, made me stop to consider the best ways to exploit a weakness in my computer opponent or how to best to use their abilities to my own advantage. I’ve also been frustrated to great heights and shouted “That was bullshit!” once or twice during livestreams when usually I just stew. The class challenges have let me learn a little of how to play other classes, even if only in certain circumstances and I’ve learned that if you know a deck well enough and have a great amount of drive and determination, eventually you can win. I entered a decent, if slightly doubting card player and left knowing that Hearthstone is a game that I can play well, that has earned its place high up on my mental top games list.

GG Blizzard. Can’t wait for the next expansion.

About a week ago, a site bearing the name and logo of the old Sierra brand appeared on the Internet. Thing is, Sierra was bought by Activision and shut down a while ago, so its return was a bit of a surprise. But as the site mention Activision on it, people instead turned to asking what purpose Activision had in mind. Now it seems that they want a slice of the indie gaming pie that’s grown so huge in the past few years.

“The indie movement is happening, and for Activision not to be involved in that… it has the big brands sure, but I think it would be a miss if we didn’t look at the indie movement as well.” said Sierra’s MacLean Marshall in an interview.

It was announced at Gamescom last week that Sierra already have two game projects to handle – a new King’s Quest game and Geometry Wars 3. There will also be more projects, based on what catches the eye of the people at Activision or Sierra.

For around half a decade Activision has been narrowing down their IPs to a handful, but it seems now that they wish to broaden their reach once more to fill the gaps in their catalog and target audiences that maybe they aren’t hitting right now.

Senior director of external development Bob Loya said of the decision to move into indie, “We wanted to do this stuff for a long time, and unfortunately there wasn’t a path in Activision to do it because we were focused on the big blockbusters… With digitally distributed games becoming bigger every year, we were able to make a compelling business argument that we could be financially successful doing this, while working with really cool indie talent on great IP.”

So that’s why Sierra has returned – Activision want to start taking on indie talent. Think this’ll turn out well for the indie developers? Tell us below.