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Artifact - a Valve card game based on DotA

Sentinel

Arcane
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Ommadawn
I'll be very impressed if Valve actually manages to turn Artifact around.
I'll be doubly impressed if they make it a free to play game where every card is free like Dota.
 
Joined
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The biggest change is zooming out to allow players access to all three lanes at once.

yeah I don't know if that's quite gonna fix it uhh
That sounds like a pointless change since you could scroll between the lanes to look at them already. Unless they're outright changing how the game plays. Got my fingers crossed since I do/did really like Artifact like I've ranted about in here, but they might end up lobotomizing it because people think it's too RNG-heavy even though skilled players still would wring higher win-rates out than stuff like MTG.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://steamcommunity.com/games/583950/announcements/detail/3487417872003751630

Single Player
A lot of you recognized the potential for telling stories about the DOTA world through Artifact and loved what we'd already done through comics and flavor text. We are doubling down on that effort through a single-player campaign which will both teach new players the game and continue the story that began with A Call To Arms. Tying in to our progressions systems, we want people to feel rewarded no matter which way they choose to play the game, whether it be in competitive play or the campaign.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
I see they are still failing to understand that the primary problem is having to wait for your opponent after every action. Legends of Runeterra has the same flaw.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


Video recorded on 05-01-2020.

We are excited to announce the kickoff of Artifact Beta 2.0! We’ve decided to approach things a bit differently this time around by gradually inviting people to join us while we are still “Under Construction”.

The gameplay has progressed enough that we’d like to start testing with a wider group: We’ve streamlined the game, removed the old monetization, and added many Quality of Life features.

As we begin to invite people to join us, here are some works-in-progress you’ll notice:

· Placeholder art and temporary effects in places
· Changing cards, art, and even game rules as we go
· Play modes that are currently disabled for testing will gradually be enabled as we add more players
· Card collections and stats may be reset during the Beta
· We’re still working on the ability to do observed playtests during this time, so expect some usability issues as we work out those kinks

Click here to opt-in to the Beta
https://playartifact.com/betasignup/

See you in the game!
 

RolePlayer

Augur
Joined
Oct 3, 2009
Messages
203
Location
Portland, Oregon
Artifact is a super underrated strategy/card game ... really hoping they don't make too many changes that impact the depth of the original game design while making it friendly enough for broader appeal.
 

Farewell young Prince into the night

Guest
Signed up for the beta. My expectations are lower than Lewinsky's knees.
 
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Signed up for the beta. Can't really tell from that video if they ruined what was good about Artifact or not, but things are absolutely different. Having a global mana pool rather than per-lane is a major change, and having combat initiate from alternating sides shakes things up too. All this on top of majorly reworking all the cards... Guess we'll see. As disappointing as it'll be if they whittle it down to be like every other card game, I guess since it's stone cold dead at the moment it doesn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
 

Nathir

Liturgist
Joined
Aug 3, 2017
Messages
1,090
Valve has no idea what they are doing anyomre, or why Artifact failed.

Your millions od Dota players won't come play it. This will go to 10k daily players on relaunch and drop to 1000 players after 2 months.
 

Frusciante

Cipher
Joined
Aug 24, 2012
Messages
716
Project: Eternity
The original game was great, still only card game I liked. Not for everyone though and lack of features (no leaderboard) and monetisation sucked.
 

Sentinel

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
6,633
Location
Ommadawn
RIP in Piss
TLDR: Game is now divided into Artifact classic and Artifact Foundry (aka 2.0). Both games are free to play now, no monetization, released as abandonware for the foreseeable future. Foundry isn't complete in terms of art, but all the 2.0 gameplay mechanics are implemented.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/583950/view/3047218819080842820
The Future of Artifact
Artifact, the Dota 2 card game, shipped in November of 2018. Despite good initial sales, our player count fell off pretty dramatically. This warranted a shift from the service/update development model we'd planned to a full reevaluation of the game's mechanics and economy.

It's now been about a year and a half since the current Artifact team began work on a reboot in earnest. While we're reasonably satisfied we accomplished most of our game-side goals, we haven't managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time. As such, we've made the tough decision to stop development on the Artifact 2.0 Beta.

However, we recognize that both versions of Artifact still have players and still have value to the community. For this reason, we're opening both games up to make them available for free to everyone. Final releases of both Artifact Classic and Artifact 2.0 Beta (renamed Artifact Foundry) are now available. Technically Artifact Foundry remains an unfinished product, but most of what's missing is polish and art - the core gameplay is all there. While both games will remain playable, we don’t plan to ship any further gameplay updates.

Here's an overview of our final changes to Artifact Classic:
  • The game is free for everyone to play.
  • All players get every card for free. You will no longer be able to buy card packs.
  • Paid players' existing cards have been converted into special Collector's Edition versions, which will remain marketable. Marketplace integration has been removed from the game.
  • Paid event tickets have been removed.
  • Customers who paid for the game will still earn packs of Collector's Edition cards for playing; players who got the game for free will not.

The final release of Artifact Foundry looks like this:
  • The game is free for everyone to play.
  • Players gain access to cards by playing the game. All cards are earned this way; no cards or packs will be for sale and Artifact Foundry cards are not marketable.
  • All final card art that was in the pipeline is now in the game.

(In short, when we say "free", we really mean "free.")

For a detailed explanation of how Artifact Foundry differs from the Artifact Classic, see this page.

We're grateful to all Artifact players, and particularly to those who were able to help us tune and refine what would become Artifact Foundry. The team feels this is the approach that best serves the community. We're proud of the work we've done on both games and excited about delivering them to a much larger audience of gamers.

To install and play now, head over to the store page.

Thanks,
The Artifact Team
 
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On one hand, sure sucks for me for having spent money on Artifact and it sucks since it's a well made game. On the other hand, Artifact 1.0 being completely free and everyone getting a full card collection is damn good. I doubt it'll get enough of a playerbase now to make pick up games easy (People bitched about Artifact not having ranking/progression at launch so only playing a game for the sake of playing a game will no doubt scare people) but for card game fetishists at least it's playable. And Valve is unlikely to collapse as a company in the near future and is highly unlikely to pull the plug on it so that's cool. I suppose the worst part is that they have two different versions of Artifact available which makes things difficult for a small playerbase as it is.

Even weirder that Artifact 1.0 has a full draft mode, but Artifact 2.0 has baby-draft where you just pick your heroes and get precon stacks of cards based on your hero choices. In fact in their page detailing the differences between the version they basically say Artifact 2.0 was made because tards got angry at 1.0. Oh well.
 

Baron Dupek

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338-2c5adbed-b565-41a3-90ff-ccb0e2b48e7f.png

338-beabb58c-904c-4660-8942-72d26e68129f.png



yeah, rip
 
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Played a bit with a buddy, both regular version and the "Foundry" version. Regular version's good as normal, but buddy was thrown for a loop because of Artifact's wild mechanics and he had never played it before. Foundry version is noticeably simplified (And the quality control is much, MUCH lower than regular. Not just the placeholder card art, board animations, UI responsiveness, everything) but still feels pretty Artifact. Didn't get completely fucking lobotomized like Gwent, for example. Biggest change that surprised me was the lanes have a unit cap now, had some grand plans for a hard push that that cockblocked when I realized that.

Overall, good stuff. Since it's never going to get new cards it's obviously not a game to sit down and poopsock day-in day-out, but as basically a board game (Especially if you play hero-draft or 2 color random) it's good fun with a bro. Incidentally, even though "Foundry" doesn't give you a full collection of cards, if you DO want to play constructed with a friend your card collection doesn't matter for friend matches so you can go wild. I have no damn idea why they didn't just give everyone a full collection in Foundry too but eh. Maybe it's to try to encourage playing the regular version.
 
Self-Ejected

MajorMace

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I have no damn idea why they didn't just give everyone a full collection in Foundry too but eh.
That's the weird part here, also the fact that Foundry is still tied to the original game and won't appear in the shoplist, yet is supposed to be the sped up version and therefore the one you'd want normies to check out

Artifact had good ideas, but was ultimately non-fun to play once figured out. The pay-to-do-anything "respectful" (sic) approach didn't help either.

yeah, rip

The hype was real actually. This reaction followed the host of the event hyping the trailer as "Valve's next big game, something they never did before ! It's nothing like CSGO or DOTA !!" and then dota card game popped on the big screen.
But the hype before the release was real and people were ready to play the game. Don't be fooled by this 'reception' footage.
It's the very game design and economic model that killed it, way after this reveal.

It's hilarious because I've rarely seen Valve advertise a game like they did for Artifact before. I suspect this massive failure probably impacted their morale much more than we can imagine.
I mean, since then they're literally losing on every front. Epic Game Store challenging Steam, Valorant challenging CS, other dota-related stuff failing hard like their auto chess (while Riot's card game and auto chess work very well). Hell, even dota at this rate is dead in 5 years.
Dota, a game which arguably has no actual competition since HoN died, is actually bleeding players and recent demographic surveys show that its population is getting super old for this type of game.

I hope half life Alyx did well but since it's VR I suspect they couldn't really expect very high sales anyway.

I really don't see much success from them in the near future. I don't really understand how you can fail so hard from their position but it's quite fantastic to behold.
 
Last edited:

Nathir

Liturgist
Joined
Aug 3, 2017
Messages
1,090
Valve has no idea what they are doing anyomre, or why Artifact failed.

Your millions od Dota players won't come play it. This will go to 10k daily players on relaunch and drop to 1000 players after 2 months.

I was right in that Valve have no idea what they are doing. But I was wrong about the second part because the relaunch never came.

Honestly this is pretty embarassing. They made a big deal about saving this failure, only to unceremoniously abandon it all of a sudden. They still don't have card artworks for cards in 2.0., err... I mean "Artifact foundry". And they are just gonna leave it unfinished like this? How lazy can you get? The biggest joke were all the self-proclaimed long-haulers on reddit getting hyped about every blog post, like something big is coming with 2.0.
 
Self-Ejected

MajorMace

Self-Ejected
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Valorant challenging CS,
CS has more monthly users now than before Valorant launched according to steamcharts
CSGO playerbase grew before Valorant was even announced. Dota started to lose players around 2016 and I remember that a few months later, articles were pointing out the coming inversion of playercount between both games.
They now have to deal with a competition that didn't exist two years ago. On the short term, it's always beneficial, as both games advertise each other. I mean, dota would have never been so popular if League didn't exist. On the long run though, considering CSGO "artstyle" and Valve's habits of communication, their future doesn't look bright.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
I have no damn idea why they didn't just give everyone a full collection in Foundry too but eh.
That's the weird part here, also the fact that Foundry is still tied to the original game and won't appear in the shoplist, yet is supposed to be the sped up version and therefore the one you'd want normies to check out

Artifact had good ideas, but was ultimately non-fun to play once figured out. The pay-to-do-anything "respectful" (sic) approach didn't help either.

yeah, rip

The hype was real actually. This reaction followed the host of the event hyping the trailer as "Valve's next big game, something they never did before ! It's nothing like CSGO or DOTA !!" and then dota card game popped on the big screen.
But the hype before the release was real and people were ready to play the game. Don't be fooled by this 'reception' footage.
It's the very game design and economic model that killed it, way after this reveal.

It's hilarious because I've rarely seen Valve advertise a game like they did for Artifact before. I suspect this massive failure probably impacted their morale much more than we can imagine.
I mean, since then they're literally losing on every front. Epic Game Store challenging Steam, Valorant challenging CS, other dota-related stuff failing hard like their auto chess (while Riot's card game and auto chess work very well). Hell, even dota at this rate is dead in 5 years.
Dota, a game which arguably has no actual competition since HoN died, is actually bleeding players and recent demographic surveys show that its population is getting super old for this type of game.

I hope half life Alyx did well but since it's VR I suspect they couldn't really expect very high sales anyway.

I really don't see much success from them in the near future. I don't really understand how you can fail so hard from their position but it's quite fantastic to behold.

At the end of the day, whether you make a store, a console, or an abomination like Stadia, content is king. To survive long-term they need Steam-exclusive content people care about.
 

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