Savage

Artifact.

The only multiplayer games I've played this year have been co-op games: Monster Hunter World, Metal Gear Survive, and Dragon's Crown Pro. I put around 100 hours into each of them, and I hope Artifact is good enough to put even more into it.

One more significant upcoming game is Artifact on Nov 28. It'll be the first Valve game released in five and a half years.

The 3-boards idea actually originated with Richard Garfield, not the Dota IP. Garfield wanted to create a card game where winning a game was like winning a best of 3 series, hence playing 3 boards at once and you must win 2 of them. He approached Valve, Valve liked his ideas, so they teamed up and that's when they decided that the Dota universe would suit the game well (3 lanes, rich yet extremely open-ended canon, huge number of existing heroes/items/abilities, etc.). They've said that if neither Dota nor any of Valve's other existing IPs happened to be suitable for the kind of card game they wanted to make, then they would have created a new IP for it.

Also, Valve and Garfield started making Artifact before Hearthstone came out. So although they have since looked at Hearthstone to learn positive and negative lessons, Hearthstone was not the inspiration for Artifact.

How do we know that there are webcams being involved here? The article at the top only mentions "live chat" with no further clarification. I read "chat" to mean text or voice and "live" to mean enabled or on-by-default. This is not uncommon in multiplayer games, while cam sharing is extremely rare. I don't see any reason to think this game is going to be a 'webcam service'.

@bson: Normal is pretty easy. There's a higher difficulty mode called Draconian Quest, which comprises six independent difficulty options: stronger monsters, less XP from weak monsters, no purchasing from shops, no fleeing from battle, no using armor, and no talking to NPCs. You can pick any combination of these options you want at the start of the game. You can disable any option at any time, but once disabled, it cannot be re-enabled. I'd recommend at least starting with stronger monsters, as well as as any other options you think would give you an interesting challenge. You can always shed options later on if the weight is too much.

I think Artifact's monetization model sounds significantly more player-friendly and less expensive than Hearthstone's.

Facts of comparison:

• Hearthstone's card packs, containing 5 cards each, at the maximum bulk discount rate of 60 packs for $70, come to $0.23/card. Every pack includes at least 1 card of third-highest rarity (tier 3 out of 4).
• Artifact's card packs, containing 12 cards each, at the sole price of 1 pack for $2, come to $0.16/card. Every pack includes at least 1 card of maximum rarity (tier 1 out of 3).

Conclusions:

• Artifact's cards are cheaper on a generic 1-to-1 basis.
• Artifact's packs come with at least one maximum rarity card every time, so each pack is more valuable.
• Artifact doesn't use bulk pricing ("best value!"), which is nothing but a manipulative anti-consumer practice when it comes to digital goods.

Biggest of all, Artifact is the first digital card game to replicate what all physical card games enjoy: players being able to freely trade their cards. This enables your cards to hold value as a commodity. If you want to try a new deck, but don't have all the cards to make it, you can trade some of your existing cards from your old deck to get the new cards you want. When you receive duplicate cards in your card packs, you can take advantage of their inherent value by trading them with other players for exactly which cards you do want. Your cards are not a sunk cost once they enter your possession. If you decide to quit playing Artifact one day, you can cash out by selling all your cards to retrieve value from them.

Hearthstone (and all other digital card games) only permit you to acquire cards directly from the company, which obviously has zero interest in ever giving you back money for your cards, since your cards are worth nothing to them. Your cards have no redeemable value. If you decide to quit Hearthstone one day, you can do nothing but try your best not to thinking about the hundreds of dollars you sank.

These are supposed to be irrational irritations, not perfectly reasonable and common ones!

For me, I seethe with anger when a PC game bars the player from being able to expediently escape from an interface system. For a recent example, in Overload there's an inter-mission upgrade interface during which you can't abort or pull up the main menu, so you have to pick/confirm upgrades you don't care about, then wait for the next mission to fully load in before you can finally pull up the menu and quit out. One of the most egregious examples is character creators that, once started, you can't get out of, forcing you to finish creating the character whose very existence you now instantly hate, then load into the game before you can finally quit out. This stuff is probably just a trivial thing to others (and it only bothers me in PC games, not console games), but it gets under my skin like little else--I goddamn hate it so much.

I've also got a spare years-old copy of FTL to contribute to the cause. Same rules: PM me your email and it's yours.

There sure are a lot of games coming out. The five September games I'm most looking forward to are:

• 428: Shibuya Scramble
• ZeroRanger
• The Bard's Tale IV: Barrow's Deep
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker
• Insomnia: The Ark

The Giant Bomb review covers the story mode pretty well (3/5 stars). But I really enjoyed the ultimate challenge levels after the story. Your team has nearly maxed out capabilities at that point and those levels hold nothing back, so you get to fully explore what's possible with the game's clever gameplay systems. You have to very carefully think through your team composition and each move you make in battle. At first glance, some of those challenge levels look completely crazy and impossible. But then you start trying out some team compositions, working out combo chains, and the possibility of success gradually comes into focus. Finishing those levels really made me appreciate how well designed the combat gameplay was. That was easily my favorite part of the game (5/5 stars).