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[Artifact] Call to Arms set released. Give mid or feed!
Spawnbroker
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Registered User regular
Hey Spawn, what is this?
Artifact is the upcoming card game to be released by Valve software. It is a digital card game similar to Hearthstone.
I already play (Hearthstone/Eternal/Shadowverse/Faeria/Duelyst), why should I care?
Artifact is designed by Richard Garfield, aka the creator of Magic: the Gathering. You will be able to trade cards, so it won't be a CCG (collectible card game), it will be more along the lines of a TCG (trading card game). It will not be Free To Play, there will be a buy-in cost. Valve seems to want to integrate the Steam marketplace to allow people to trade cards.
Wait, is this a...Dota card game?
Yes, this is using the existing Dota 2 IP. This has a lot of people concerned that Valve is just jumping on the digital card game bandwagon. Valve has assured everyone in press events that they are not, it just made the most sense to leverage the Dota IP for this game.
How do you know so much about this game?
Glad you asked, there was a press event recently where they unveiled some of the first hints about the game.
Gabe Newell talking about Artifact for 20 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mERhtoD21rUFull match in 4K:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od5XamlmNxQPCGamer
PC Gamer wrote:The sense from Valve is threefold. 1) Trading will take the sting out of hoping to pull the card you want from a pack, but only getting filler. 2) Each player's collection will retain value in the same way that binders of Magic cards do in real life. In contrast, if I stopped playing Hearthstone tomorrow, I couldn't sell my cards. Hell, Blizzard's small print means I can't even leave the account to someone in my will. 3) Valve knows how to do trading. It already has the tech to make it safe and secure, and it's learned a lot of lessons from CS:GO and Dota 2.
Ars Technica
Ars Technica wrote:Garfield admitted that Artifact's basic concepts, of hero cards impacting what can be played in which lane, had existed in a digital game concept he'd been toying with before allying with Valve. It began as a "trading object game" prototype concept that he pitched to Valve roughly four years ago, he said, though his desire to make a robust, "open" TCG for computers and game systems had picked up in earnest roughly 10 years ago. When asked about comparisons to more modern digital TCGs, the game's development team doubled down by claiming Artifact development began in earnest "before Hearthstone existed."
When asked how his prototype and the Dota 2 universe came together, Garfield says the process was similar to his work on King of Tokyo, a board game that began as a "generic fantasy game" before evolving with the theme of kaiju destruction. "The basic concepts we were working with [on Artifact] were very flexible. There's a lot of art and science in matching up an IP to a game mechanic and having it feel correct. If it wasn’t related to Dota, maybe it'd be six heroes per side. It's just a few constraints."
Game Informer
Game Informer wrote:Like I said, it’s a lot to take in. Like in any good card game, turns only get more complicated as you gain access to more mana, start unleashing intricate spell combos, and turn every round into that much more of a minefield. Do you abandon one lane entirely for a couple of turns by blinking a hero out of it and pray you can destroy the two surrounding towers before they destroy your unprotected ancient? Do you clear an entire lane using the Annihilation spell now, or try to bait your opponent into investing more heavily into it before blowing it all up? Do you save your gold for a card that will make future purchases much cheaper, or spend what you have The Blink Dagger and Healing Salve that could save your Legion Commander from certain doom? The combination of more reactive turns, lane distribution, and hero variety make certain answers hard to come by, and it makes Artifact feel like a more open-ended card game.
IGN Q&A session on Twitch.tv, 03/12/2018
Okay everyone, discuss!
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I love it when card games get weird. The sheer grand scale of it and how it's not really something you would want to do in a physical game is definitely points in it's favor, even if the DOTA trappings do nothing normally for me.
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https://twitch.tv/videos/238108656##
http://toucharcade.com/2018/03/13/artifact-hands-on-preview-valves-dota-2-card-game-is-amazing/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/583950/Artifact/
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I'm not sure if all the video games I play combined work out to more than $400 a year, at least if you set aside hardware costs. So as much as my brain craves new systems to puzzle out, I guess there's just no possible scenario where I get anything out of Artifact.
They are, like everyone else in the digital CCG space, neglecting that the reason MtG can get away with its costs are a) you will have the physical cards forever, not just until they turn the servers off and b) the ENORMOUS SECONDARY MARKET that lets people sell cards or get specific cards for cheap, which so far none of these games have.
Making a brand new CCG in this day and age and expecting it to do Magic numbers is a bit like making a brand new MMO and expecting it to do World of Warcraft numbers.
But if Valve was actually looking to capture those burnouts, they'd be trying something like a Netrunner-esque format where you just pay for complete sets and there's no RNG involved. What they really want is to spawn a digital secondary market that spirals out of control which they can leech off of via transaction fees. I mean, people pay $600 for hats and gun skins in PUBG and CS:Go, and that stuff is purely cosmetic. Imagine what you can get for the rarest card in the most popular netdeck when you're whispering in players' ears, "it's fine, it's an investment, it'll totally retain its value when you stop playing in a few years".
Plus you get the compulsive gamblers who don't even necessarily play the game. $10 a pack, the typical pack produces like 75 cents of resellable value, but who knows, maybe the next pack will be the one that has a $500 Black Lotus!
Not sure if I agree with this. Nobody has actually tried to implement a trading system in a digital card game outside of Magic Online. Magic Online isn't popular outside of MtG nerds because the user interface is straight out of the early 2000s.
I'm fairly excited about the game from what we've seen so far, but I am like...the target market for this sort of thing, I play all card games and enjoy all of them for different reasons.
It might do well, sure. I have zero interest in DotA, but I've heard of it and it seems popular? So that might hook people.
On the other hand, I play The Elder Scrolls: Legends and that seems to be doing fairly OK at best, even though quite a few people appear to have enjoyed Skyrim.
Also also, Artifact seems to want you to pay money up front. I don't know if a trading system is enough to make people willing to make that investment when there are so many other Free to Play card games out there.
Artifact may become a good game and it may do perfectly fine. But I am skeptical of the idea that it'll do as well as a Magic or a Hearthstone. For one thing, I seriously doubt a lot of people are going to dump 400 dollars a year into it.
I'm genuinely unsure if you're serious or making a joke. Are you trying to say that the last game Valve made was Half Life 2 or something?
You guys seem awfully certain that a game we've seen 5 minutes of is going to be bad. From a company that is known in the industry for not releasing products that they don't think live up to a high standard.
I...haven't said shit about the game? My post literally only talked about monetization.
And with the kind of money it looks like they're expecting of players, it's not enough for the game to just be "good", or "not bad". It needs to be massively better than all the competition. It needs to attract a playerbase such that Artifact is virtually the only game they play, because those are the only types of people who invest that much money into a single ecosystem. Some games really do attract a playerbase that's that obsessive, and Dota 2 and Counterstrike are among them, but it's not an easy thing to do, especially when you're starting from scratch. People were already obsessed with Dota and Counterstrike for years before they were monetized the way they are now. Artifact wont have that head start.
Everyone is making a lot of assumptions and seems to be looking for reasons to say the game will fail. As someone who is cautiously optimistic about the game, I'm just curious why that is.
I only see one possible outcome here in terms of what the monetization will look like. What could possibly happen that would prevent it from going out of control, given what we know?
I don't know. Sounds like an untestable hypothesis to me until we know more information. You seem pretty convinced, though!
(I imagine there will be something to let people try it out for free, like letting you play with unmodified starter decks. Will that be enough to get people to actually buy in? Who knows!)
Are people stoked on the mechanics? Or at least on what we know so far.
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Press Release
August 1, 2018 -- Artifact, the digital card game from legendary designer Richard Garfield and Valve (Dota 2, Steam), will be playable by attendees of this year’s PAX West in Seattle, WA (Aug 31 – Sept 3) in the game’s first public showing.
Players will battle each other in a continuous single elimination gauntlet for the right to challenge a champion on the main stage. Everyone who plays will earn Artifact merchandise, including signed prints of artwork and two keys for free copies of the game when it is released.
Targeted for release on Steam on November 28th 2018, Artifact is designed to give Trading Card Game (TCG) enthusiasts the deepest gameplay and highest fidelity experience ever in a fantasy card game. Offering more than 280 cards in the shipping set, players will be able to buy and sell cards on the Steam Community Marketplace.
Release Information:
Desktop - Windows/Mac/Linux: November 28th, 2018
Mobile - Android/IOS: 2019
Price: $20 (US)
Artifact will be at PAX West in a public showing, release date is November 28th, initial price of $20.
No idea what the pack pricing will be or how many cards you get for that 20 dollars, but I imagine it will be like Magic the Gathering where you get some starter decks and have to pay/trade for more cards.
That Newell's first line of thinking is how much money the game will make Valve clearly shows a company that has loooooong stopped caring about their craft.
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I don't really mind paying $20 for a partial collection, but if there's no way to earn new cards with some kind of free currency I'm not interested.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/valves-first-new-game-in-5-years-artifact-coming-in-november-starting-at-20/
I'm intrigued, though a bit bummed the mobile version of the game won't be out until 2019.
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Good job, Valve. I'm sure this will be more successful than Hex.
I'm especially tickled that this impending garbage pile is coming out before a VR game for their flagship hardware headset.
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It might be okay if the core set is robust enough as a stand-alone product... but this quote from March makes me dubious: