New Valve Game, and Valve critique

I know there is a games thread specifically for this, but I feel like this warrants its own thread because I really want to talk about the craaaazy community reaction in depth. Plus VALVE.


So Artifact is a new Valve game based on the Dota 2 IP, it's a card game prooobably in a similar vein to Hearthstone. Right now this video is increeeedibly disliked.


The crowd reaction is hilarious you can tell the specific point everyone's hopes and dreams were crushed...

I want to bring up my thoughts a little and ask of yours. I can definitely understand some disappointment from people that THIS is Valve's new game, but I can't help but think it's a teeny bit of an over reaction from everyone. I'm definitely not excited for a card game about Dota 2 but daaamn people hate it! I feel like the level of expectations just set Valve up for failure. I have a reddit post referencing the reaction to Dota 2 when it initially was released and I feel like it's pretty damn uncanny how similar some people were reacting. So yeah- New Valve game Artifact, card game, passionately hated by everyone before any game play has been shared, thoughts? ;P

First post in a long time, hopefully decent enough~

@squishypon3 naaah it's deserved. the world has seen it's fair share of flippin card-game video games.

they were only "passable" as hearthstone while people were waiting for the new big thing to transition into and there was an ongoing released games lull. but now that released games are back up and that interest for fully engaging games is back up this comes at a terrible time and in a form that nobody wants (seriously it was a one-time possibility now card-game video games are forever uncool)

I don't know. Hearthstone is still rather popular and even toward the end of high school for me I was able to see people playing it on their phones and things. I am really uninterested in card games but I feel like the general consensus that this was unneeded will go away once it's released. I guarantee you it will be top 5 on Steam!

I guess I just see this as history repeating itself. If you look at the releases of the Orange Box and Dota 2 people sung the exact same tune. No innovation! Unnecessary! Cash-grab! etc...

uuhh nnno.

if you factor in it's previous player count. no not at all. It died out HARD.

I actually really like digital card games. Elements was/is awesome, Duelyst was pretty good, Faeria was awesome till it veered away from pulling inspiration from Netrunner and towards modern MtG/Hearthstone.

I just have unrealistic standards for them, and as a result hate most of them as soon as I grok their flow. I'm willing to bet I'll hate Valve's because Valve has a solid history of reading what's out there and making similar things of higher quality. And most of what's out there for digital card games is garbage, so I'm expecting high quality garbage.

There's also my burning hatred for all things derived from Warcraft 3, but that's not a big factor because it won't be inheriting any of the things I hate about them.

I'm really interested in how it will be handled. There will just have to be trading right? STEAM and all that. I'm 90% sure it'll be free to play where you buy card packs and can trade or buy specific cards if you'd like. Pretty close to a traditional trading card gsme.

8000th post!

I'm not a big fan of the trading aspect of most card games. While it enables draft formats to thrive, it means constructed is usually shafted with the barrier to entry and junk cards.

On that note, really I need to give Smash Up a try.

And then broke its own records in May.

Saying Heathstone isn't popular is the same as saying World of Warcraft isn't popular. They're huge games.

As someone who's developed quite the history of criticising Valve, I feel like I should put in a reasonable argument (well, hopefully, haha) explaining a bit more around the disappointment.

Firstly, I have no doubt that some of the reaction is incredibly overblown. This is a video game; people forget that. Entirely too often, in my opinion. A lot of my posting about PA involved criticising low-effort arguments about how Uber shot the player in question's family pet or similar. I have absolutely no doubt that there are similar reactions here.

Secondly, I've never actually gotten into digital card games, but I love the physical ones, and I have nothing against them as a genre. They've been a good tie-in for various games (Gwent and Hearthstone are direct examples of leveraging IP, in a good way I feel). I have no doubt Artifact will be polished and smooth in terms of the gameplay experience. Well. We'll see on that, but since Valve finally realised that Source was getting a bit old, they've done good work to really update how DotA 2 feels (on Source2).

Thirdly. The actual argument, haha. You all should know how my posts go by now

It's sometimes hard to separate this out, you see. I have a personal dislike of all the people that stick up for Valve as a "good" company. They exist to turn a profit. It's that simple. The pushback I have experienced by simply trying to hold Valve to the same standards everybody holds other publisher houses to is, to me, really quite surprising. Being pro-consumer, apparently, only works if there's a group of disgruntled people willing to champion you for your negative takes. I could write a lot more on that, but I just wanted to explain that I have a personal dislike there and it's difficult for me sometimes to separate this from criticism of the actual company itself.

Now, onto Valve. They make games. Well, they made games.

They make hardware. Well, they made hardware.

They make and maintain Steam. Well, kinda, if it's Big Picture mode or a Steam Controller issue.

They make an unimaginable amount of money. People have done the maths on the kind of raw revenue things like Steam Sales provide (30% of all purchases, or thereabouts, go to Valve, and this is before crafting badges and Trading Cards). On the Workshop integrations for the popular tiles like DotA 2. There's a lot of incoming.

Now, in this age, developers are being crucified for a lot of reasons. Arguably silly reasons, in my opinion. But something that's risen up, understandably, is a call for transparency. "show us your internal developer roadmap" like this is a fair or even achievable request for most developers (your publisher / legal will laugh you out of the room). But outside of that kind of demand, generally, consumers value interaction with the companies they spend money on.

Except Valve. Or rather, they've been able to put out the content they want without the kind of backlash that have affected other companies. See how people perceive EA's track record with Battlefield for example (even if it's been alright, really). Or Bioware with pretty much anything.

They have one of the things that limits every other developer under the sun. Money. They've cultivated an image that lets them get away with sharing basically nothing about what they're working on. Another incredibly important advantage. I don't begrudge them this - I'd prefer if all developers were given this kind of leeway (regardless of personal opinions on how terrible those developers are, I can absolutely go down that hole with Valve's post-release support if you'd like. They're not perfect). But it't still something they have in their favour.

And then their first new game announcement in however long is a tie-in to one of their most lucrative IPs. Bearing in mind that they didn't even create this IP in the first place (a collaborative effort between various WC3 modders).

See, I'm personally annoyed because the state of their Steam ecosystem is a shambles. There are so many parts of it that haven't been updated in years. They have all this money, and they've literally had years. It is entirely possible to expect some kind of modern design refresh on the client that doesn't revolve around the Store, which functions solely to get people to spend money on it. They have the expertise. They have the payroll. They have the time.

At this point, I just have to assume they've chosen not to. Which makes tie-in announcements like this all the more galling. It's quite obvious they're chasing their bottom line. Which would be fine, if people actually held them to this like people hold other developers and publishers. Which is also an example of my issue with people giving them slack as much as it is criticism of Valve. Of course they're going to go for what makes them money. I just wish they actually acted like the "good guy Valve" people praise them for being.

Other people have other issues. But I just wanted to get a little bit of perspective on this disappointment, and why people could feasibly see Valve as taking liberties with peoples' expectations.

I think it's important to note though that it's not as if Valve is one team working on one game or project. I doubt the team working on this card game is taking away from that of the steam devs, tf2 team, counter-strike, etc...

I definitely agree though that Valve has a lot of problems. They have absolutely terrible communication and their updates often clash with the community. I don't think Valve is as universally praised as people kind of perceive. Take a moment to visit r/globaloffensive r/tf2 etc and see a LOT of passionate disagreements. The tf2 community especially does not like Valve for essentially killing off competitive with their horrible recent updates.

Sorry for how brief this is, busy at the moment.

Oh, I do get there are disagreements - especially when it comes to how they manage their games. But all developers get that, to a greater or lesser extent. You don't read about their issues in articles, you don't have people predicting the failures of their games months in advance.

I mean, sometimes you do, but it's kinda silly. Valve are making a card game. I could hate the concept (I don't) and it'd still sell like theoretical hot cakes.

The big problem is we don't know what Valve are working on. CS:GO is on . . . some kind of support cycle? They're obviously putting a lot of resources into DotA 2 . . . maybe that's why everything else is suffering?

But they've built this platform, and it feels like they put the bare minimum of effort into keeping it working. The Steam Inventory is still a mess. Even the Marketplace functions better. Who's responsible for maintaining that core product upon which all of their consumer-facing infrastructure sits?

We get new gimmicks in Steam Sales, we get Trading Cards and Badges for all new games . . . but these are the only "improvements". Stuff directly-related to getting Valve more money.

So, a trading card game can be seen as an extension of that. We have no other visible evidence of their work, and their existing IPs are not only discontinued, but arguably abandoned with no reason as to why. Other developers are literally sent death threats over questionable design decisions, and people defend that (general trends, anecdotal from me), but Valve? Valve doesn't see that kind of pushback, and the people that do push back against them are dismissed as some kind of an overreacting minority.

Videogame activism is one of the most stupid thing of rich kids of this century. Death threats because of a game? c'mon do you really wanna follow the path of sport mindless hooligans?

They make a product, buy it if you want but they don't own you an explanation about anything. Go to the parliament and protest there for transparency, don't waste your time whining over a hobby.
I don't like card videogames, I've always thought that using cards for games was due to a limitation in the physical world that doesn't exist in virtual worlds. But people seem to like it, so who cares about my opinion

Right, but those people are ******* morons.

hey @squishypon3 mind renaming this the steam thread? and we'll post all steam related stuff here? or I could make my own thread for my steam controller review. I dunno if it warrants it though.

Haha, unquestionably.

It was an extreme example, more to demonstrate the things some companies get more than others. I feel Valve gets far more of a pass for a lot of things, despite not actually delivering anything beyond, say, DotA 2 (which is a freemium product designed to generate Valve money). I mean, DotA 2 is solid. I've played it quite a bit (still too slow-paced for my liking; it's why I stopped playing original DotA), but it's one game (that isn't even their own creation) over years of getting a metric tonne of money through Steam.

Many other companies are held to far higher standards despite having a less obvious revenue stream. And don't get me started on Steam service reliability, haha. I did say I was kinda critical of them. I use Steam, I couldn't imagine gaming without it these days. But that's out of necessity more than any devotion to the company or its platform.

well **** it I'll just post it here :

my Steam Controller review :
Hard to give this product a straight-up recommendation This is a very mixed review so I'll make it two parter. The Negatives. Then the Positives.

Though let me get this out of the way first :

I think the upsides of this controller are such that as a whole it outclasses both xbox and ps2 as well as middle-market alternatives.

BUT (The NEGATIVES) :

As of hitting the shelves the steam controller was outdated.

"How is this possible?" you might ask. Well first and foremost Valve chooses to require Double-A batteries to power the wireless mode in the age of L-ion batteries and ecology.

It's a pretty awful move and if you're going to go that route why ship it with Duracell? Not only non-rechargeable but by far the most pollutant of any non-rechargeable batteries (and with famously misleading ads).

This doesn't seem like the Valve I think I know. The whole Double A thing deserves a freaking paragraph, nay a book with how much it's weighing the Steam Controller down but let's get through introducing all the points first.

Second the plastic is the lowest quality I've since mechanical keyboard keycaps. I'll be straight up : pulling the joystick left during Rocket League with just my thumb (so not alot of strength and I would imagine this is the sort of use one would *expect*) broke part of the plastic off of the shell on the ring around the joystick.

Now the joystick is fully functional I'm not saying the controller broke.

I'm saying that thing is a freaking hazard because how would you expect plastic to break? clean off right?
Nope. Not this mix. IT SHATTERED. Into really tiny freaking splinters that went straight up under my thumb's nail.

That really hurt like a bittch you have no idea. And it was a nightmare to get out.

But that didn't stop me using it so I've a lot more to go into.

The two underside buttons (which I love to use, I'll go into that) make the bottom battery cover pop off constantly.

It just doesn't lock into place and it *really* makes no sense to me how it dual-purposes covering the batteries and materialising two buttons (another issue that would be solved had the battery been an unremovable L-ion).

Which lets just hop back into for a sec. The batteries are a terrible choice. their locking/eject mechanism doesn't work for anything other than the packaged Duracell, the rechargeable batteries are a bit bigger so they aren't kicked out by the eject and you have to pry them out by using something as a lever. The Duracell are ejected fine but the extra room means any light shock (sometime including it's own vibration mechanism) will cause loss of power and you have to power the controller back up but won't do so successfully until a battery has been completely removed and put back in which led me to play cap-less (without the back cap which falls out remember) while I was emptying out the Duracell at first.

Also The batteries once in make the controller weigh quite alot where I know L-ion wouldn't weigh as much and where the controller on cable is surprisingly lightweight which you might think isn't to your taste but I really insist it just feels natural.

So what about playing with cable? well first I need to get this out of the way : not having the cable plugged in does not charge the double-A chargeable batteries you've inserted. bummer.

Playing with cable was overall worse (I personally always prefer cable over wireless for mouse and keyboard). I think there's two reasons for this :
1.) I cannot for the life of me find a latency difference between cable and dongle connection. the dongle is lightning fast. mark
2.) The cable has terrible port orientation and positioning.

If you like to sometimes reach over to the opposite side for whatever reason with one of your hands you'll never succeed in doing so without your hand catching the cable in the process destroying it progressively.

The make of the cable was note-worthily bad and same goes for the micro-usb port which stopped communicating with anything after awhile. The cable just ripped open at the plastic encasing of the micro-usb side.

That about wraps it up for my downside hardware side and software side I'm really mostly happy except for the "steam account" bullllshit Valve clearly hasn't play-tested. So you get your steam controller right? you link it to your steam account right? you pimp it to your preference? what happens when you go to a friend's who has one and it's plugged into their computer or even another computer with steam?

steam automatically opens up a sort of segway between steam big-picture mode and steam that's pretty much unfinished because throughout the steps it bugs out between not letting you use mouse and not letting you use the controller (make up your mind!) All this for what? To ask you who's config to load. How about WHO CARES! it's lights and vibrations! I was playing why did you open that up and lock controller input when I had it before? Also here's a suggestion : if you're going to ask how about making it count? Because if you pause the game for a bathroom break and one of the two controllers go to sleep in that time and you turn it back on when you're ready to resume ....YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENS. yeah it opens up and you have to do the whole thing again.

The whole thing was an infuriating experience for me and my sister who were trying to play towerfall with my brother's and my own Steam controllers because either my brother's vibration setting or a Steam Controller-Towerfall related bug made it so that the controller made the loudest most hideous vibration sound. And towerfall triggers alot of vibrations. My controller is set to have vibrations off. I plug it in I have the choice between my brother's config or my own. What happens if I choose my own? I get my brother's. What happens if I choose his? I get my brother's. What about configuring the other controller? NOPE the menu's THERE but once you open the menu the same button for configuration's missing since this is not his steam account.

OK so recap : This entire time awfulness was tasked with giving us the choice of no choice at all? that was the point of force-opening this up in the middle of gameplay? F off!

Another couple of software-related gripes I have :
The on-screen keyboard thing never has worked and still doesn't. To this day it's still unclear how to trigger it so the result is always that it's never there when you want it and sometimes appears when you've not summoned it. and it cannot focus a text field to save it's life.

So I'm in youtube's search bar I open up (with much tribulation) the on-screen keyboard then I type one letter and then the next the first letter makes it to the input field but by the second the input field has lost focus. This is not a miss-characterization this sums up and represents what your experience of using the steam controller on-screen keyboard will be 100% of the time.

also the steam controller grabs (and this happens on a frequency the likes of "Florida Man"s) System inputs. Sound. Windows menu. Alt menu. ANYTHING to send you to desktop during mutiplayer online. My logitec keyboard has a button to disable the windows keys but that button's pretty much garbage when my steam controller is plugged in 'cause the menu is guaranteed to open up anyways. Hey here's an idea : how about *NOT* sending media key commands via a controller? who the flying turkey trucks would want that anyways? why does it do that? why is the triggering entirely inconsistent? my guess is that it's the bugged-up driver.

And lastly the supported games list is atrociously atrophied. sure any game you can play with an xbox controller on you can play with the steam controller on because the steam controller has the one joystick and that saves it's aasss.

but playable doesn't mean satisfactory. Alot of the features of the controller you wanna just have the freedom to map yourself and toy with (hell to *use* at all), much like you can on supported games.
and some REALLY controller-focused REALLY popular games are not supported. I mean what in the helll why isn't Rocket League a priority enough port-choice?

The steam controller was released TWO YEARS ago, Rocket League almost *three* years now! Common now Chop Chop!

So what makes me say that I still prefer to trawl through all this rather then use the more established Xbox 360 controller or the PS4 controller or Xbox One or Xbox 360 lookalike all of which I've playtested? That's a *looooot* of upstream swimming on all I just unloaded to get back to that. well stick with me (The POSITIVE) :

Steam Support as usual but in particular for the controller (on the software side) is absolutely top-notch. I run linux. Steam controller on linux wasn't out-of-the-box (should really be the case for Ubuntu though. Food For Thought) they showed me how to fix it in no time on two occasions. so that's a plus.

The in-hand feel of this controller is the best out of all out there IMO. the plastic mix could really be taking notes from Xbox but the size and ergonomy of the Steam controller is something Playstation Xbox and even Nintendo should be taking hints from. plus as I've pointed out when I'm playing wireless I absolutely dig its weightlessness.

some of the layout is an instant love-story. the positioning of the joystick is perfect. The buttons on the underside is one of those things you just have to go "why did we never think of this before!". it's just there and in your face about being so natural and I just starting using it instantly and now I find it cruelly lacking in every other controller I try. I'm not even ashamed this is really my favorite thing about the Steam controller.

The track-pad thing is instantly fluid and natural (left for scrolling right for pointer). you'll be shocked at how well what is effectively a trackpad satisfies your from-the-couch desktop navigation. click-and-drag resize you name it it just works in a field where anything even *daring* to lay a finger on the keyboard and mouse has crashed and burned.

but really I come for the in-game experience. And bottom line for me are competitive results. and mine are just better with the steam controller and this applies to any game. the in-hand feel and the button layout is just that much better.

(CONCLUSION)

My controller now is in it's dying days and I don't think I'll be able to get much use out of it. the make really is woeful and it broke down on me in a number of ways.

And that's really a shame because I can't stomach buying a new one for it to last only 7 months once again. I'm sorry to disagree with those out there who think that's a reasonable lifespan for a controller. My xbox 360 controller probably would still work if a steamroller were to roll over it.

Here's what I would do though : work with steam providing them a free design for the steam controller 2.0 and or buy a steam controller 2.0 in a heartbeat if and when they release it. here would be it's traits and selling points :
+no detachable parts
+L-ion battery or superior (so obviously charge while gaming possible)
+a half decent plastic mix (yes my expectations and thus my bar for satisfaction is as low as it can get here. The current plastic mix really is that atrociously appalling) F you selling me 55 bucks what probably took 2$ and twelve cents to build.
+Dongle-Cable combo. your cable IS your dongle and your dongle IS your cable. HALFED chance for BOTH of loss. Less space, and most importantly for those on their last unoccupied usb port. *No more of that unplug one replug the other hassle* just leave it plugged in at all times and yank to go wireless plug-in to charge! genius or what? ok yeah everyone though of it ....... but not Valve!
+USB port needs to come DOWN from front of controller not straight outwards form the middle-to-top to protect the port from damage there'd be a plastic casing leaving only the rubber thickened part of the micro-usb end to deal with torsion (like it's supposed to. Note the packaged cable did not have a decent rubber torsion protection and the plastic casing stuck out way too far)
+a serious investment when it comes to driver. Valve markets linux. It wants to sell us on SteamOS fine. fukin support linux out-of-the-box for your own goddamn controller then and don't include gadgets (this applies to windows) if they don't work (looking at you on-screen keyboard and user settings popup).
+a serious investment on making finding the uses of the steam controller in games a pleasure and not a chore. not all games are ported? FINE! an in-house steam-overlay accessible steam-controller mapper that accounts for any possible awaited inputs for an xbox controller that you can map any of the steam controller *actions* to. YES I want to be able to use the trackpad as a joystick. you did this partways for Rocket League (the trackpad equates to the second xbox controller) so there does any chance of "that's wouldn't map well".
+part two of this really serious investment in making finding the uses of the steam controller in games a pleasure and not a chore. GET MORE SUPPORTED GAMES. do what it takes. sell your body I dunno. ask feral games. they always pull through on porting. oh wait this doesn't even concern porting. You can ask the studios directly. more features on their games equals more sales. you can propose to do it for them. heck encourage it with a shiny icon like you do for VR and linux ports.

I think that's enough. these are sorted by priority. even the first three would be a sale for me. but yeah. I'm not buying the steam controller 1.0 again.

What kind of changes should be done to the platform?
I don't see myself as a Valve fanboy, I barely played any of their titles, but I don't see what there is to change about steam? It's a store. It sells games. It is really good at that and is pretty easy to use from a consumer standpoint.
Why change a running system that yields them a gigantic income?

Why do we need to know what any games company is working on? Let them do their work and share it when they feel like it. They owe us nothing after all.

I also don't get why people can't just move on when presented a product they probably won't like.
Fine Valve makes some nonsense card game. If you don't like it, ignore it. Why get all enraged and demand Valve do something "better"?

Nobody owes anyone anything, neither the company, nor the customer.

That being said, if a company knows a common reaction toward a card game, by history of Bethesda doing the same, is "Openly Booing", then why the heavens would they invest their resources in it? Dumb move.

They owe customers nothing, but if they continued development, and ended up selling 5 copies, that's entirely on them. They'll probably refuse to develop games any more because of it, citing customer hostility toward it, but they're drawing similarities for "a card game" and "Half Life 3" or something.

Art-i-fact.

Art - Half Life has it.

I - Like Half Life 2.

Fact- HL3 Confirmed.