SolForge News — November 11, 2014
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
With Hearthstone dominating the digital collectible card game scene like some sort of giant card-discarding dragon, it must be daunting trying to compete with Blizzard s barely limited resources. But I like a lot of what SolForge is trying to do to stand out in the CCG space. The game s sci-fi setting is interesting and the lane-based system used to battle your AI or human opponents is smart and deep. These things alone probably aren t going to be enough to distract Murloc fanciers for long, but a new feature being added to the game today might: unlike Hearthstone, SolForge is going to allow its users to share almost any card.
The servers go down around 1pm PST today to apply a patch that will enable the free Imprisoned Heralds update, which includes 60 new cards. (You can read the full notes here.) Once that s live, the majority of cards which can be purchased using in-game gold will also be shareable. Effectively what that means is you can share each card once with a friend, who will be notified when they next log-in and then be able to add it to their collection. Significantly, you don t lose your own copy of the card.
The upshot is you re effectively getting two copies of each card you buy, one for you, and one to send to a pal, which should make it much faster for groups of friends to build a viable collection. Card-trading without losing cards is certainly an interesting idea, and one clearly designed to bolster the game s audience. It also gives SolForge at least one selling point which Hearthstone doesn t have. Whether that s enough time will tell, but I ll be dipping back in to to check out what else the expansion brings soon.
