The new Hearthstone expansion, Goblins vs Gnomes, is being released on Monday and in preparation, Blizzard's released a flood of info on the new cards and allowed them for play in Arena mode. It's been an exciting time in Hearthstone to see how the new cards measure up to the old, how they work in play, and the discovery of new strategic combos. Bear and I are so excited to start collecting the new cards! XD It'll be like being a kid on Christmas! XD

World of Warcraft's new expansion, Warlords of Draenor, has been getting a lot of attention in gaming news and among our friends; it's been said to be WoW's best expansion since Burning Crusade. I'm not really sure how you can compare the expansions since WoW is a very different game today than how it was back then, but Bear and I were surprised and impressed with many changes and additions to WoW's Pandaria expansion, leaving us curious and itching to check out Draenor too.

When Bear and I last played during Pandaria, we loved the world and story, but since the gap to level cap was so small, there was near nil character progression. We got gear upgrades through quest lines, but the amount of additional stats didn't seem to add much to the experience. Bear eventually mentioned to me that he doesn't really see playing WoW as playing an RPG anymore; it's more like an action adventure game with minimal character growth like Zelda or Soul Blazer. Even with that though, we still couldn't help yearning for the struggles and joys of reaching milestones in character growth, something I suppose we shouldn't expect from continuing our once level-capped characters into a new expansion without much more room to grow.

I'm really happy to hear that WoW's new expansion is doing so great; Bear and I hope the best for Blizzard, but I can't help but to wonder how long will it be able to keep peoples' attention, especially since we're at a time when most gamers seem to be in a mad rush to consume content and get to the end game ASAP. Will WoW, being more story-based and less heavy on the “leveling” aspect, have enough alternate variations of progression to hold the audience? At least I suppose since WoW had seven million subscribers during a time of a year-long major update drought before the Draenor expansion, things will probably be pretty good for awhile. XD