Well here is something new today. I don’t usually comment on social media and, outside this blog, fairly disconnect from the industry in general. But today I’m going to be commenting on someone else’s interview. Because that is a thing which people do, right?

So the fine folks over at win.gg were able to get a brief interview with some ex-Artifact developers. For those of you who don’t know, Artifact is a digital card game developed by Valve, skinned with Dota and one of my biggest disappointments of last year. You can check my full thoughts on that in an old blog post.

I have, for a long time, had an interest in the nuts and bolts of productions – whether that being what goes behind putting together a successful play or the efforts and testing needed to complete a game design. It’s a peek into the creative process and I like seeing how other artists face the struggles of their chosen medium.

For this interview, win.gg spoke with Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias. These were the, for lack of a better descriptor, the outside consultation for Artifact. Garfield and Elias are the minds behind Magic: The Gathering – possibly one of the largest games in the world. That they partnered up with Valve to create a card game was exciting for many since their pedigree has dominated the card game genre nearly since its inception.

The game has been, to put bluntly, a disaster. As of this writing, there’s only a hundred or so concurrent players in the game. Valve has posted that they’ve practically gone back to the drawing board and doing a deep recalibration to the game in order to bring it in line.

Consequently, everyone and their mother has an opinion about why Artifact failed. I’m going to unironically share mine. But first let’s see what Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias think.

Largely, the first question is about the monetization of the game which is possibly Garfield’s more controversial answers but also cuts to the heart of the Artifact story.

When asked about the game’s “pay-to-win” component, Garfield says this:

“Pay-to-win is a sloppy term leveled at any game where you can buy components. You will see it leveled at any game in which a player, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to engage… I am an OK player and a mediocre deck constructor in Artifact, and access to all of the cards won’t change that. I might be able to overcome the mediocre deck construction by copying someone else’s deck but it won’t make me an excellent player. Likewise, I can spend thousands on golf clubs, but it won’t make me a golf champion.”

And, honestly, he’s right: to a point. Had Artifact actually taken off and there was a million dollar tournament like they promised, I would not win it if I owned all the cards. You can see this with really anyone that gets into a hobby. Owning all the gear won’t make you the best of the field. This is true.

It also completely sidesteps the issue of pay-to-win. For it ignores the fundamental problem which Garfield only barely acknowledges: if two equally skilled players face each other, the one who spent the most money will win.

For Garfield, this seems acceptable. He does say that netdecking (copying someone else’s deck, usually from a list online) will cover his flaws of being a poor deck constructor. He might not be able to pilot the deck like a champion but he will do better than if he were to face a theoretical mirror of himself who doesn’t netdeck.

At a competitive level, this is inconsequential. All players who want to be contenders are prepared to drop the money necessary to own all the cards – or at least the cards necessary to win tournaments.

But successful games aren’t made on their professional players. For a game to thrive, it needs a fanbase. And the average player is the one that baulks at the enormous entry cost of the game. It doesn’t matter that it lacks the ludicrously expense of Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall or Mox loxes or whatever is the newest overpriced piece of cardboard they have nowadays. That Garfield thinks it’s a winning argument to dismiss concerns over Artifact’s price by saying “Hey, at least you don’t have to spend $900 on a single card!” kind of strikes the head of the nail.

That Valve failed this is outstanding if only because Dota 2 literally built its entire game on this understanding.

I don’t know where things went so wrong. Maybe no one felt they could say no to Garfield. Maybe they just assumed Garfield knew more than them? I struggle to think that the developers at Valve are so out of touch with their own company that they couldn’t see the huge financial success of Dota 2 and think “No, that’s not how we’re going to do it… but we’ll try to convince these players otherwise by wallpapering everything with their favourite stuff.” Like… Dota 2 players don’t play Dota 2 because Axe is in it. They play it for the game (and, frankly, because it’s actually free otherwise they’d probably just be in League of Legends).

And I’m not certain the Dota 2 brand is interesting enough for someone to take a look at it and go “I have no idea what that is but hey, I really want to play the game with the big shirtless red guy with the weird mutton chops!” I think you pull in new people by word getting around that the game is really good. Good luck getting them through the door with the addendum, “Oh but it’ll cost you an arm and a leg to play. But hey, if you want to win a tournament, you don’t also have to sell your kidneys as well!”

So I’m fully unconvinced with the detractors who argue it wasn’t the price that sunk Artifact. There’s numerous people I’ve seen comment on Artifact being “not fun.” I hate this criticism. Largely because it’s empty. You know what I find “not fun?” Magic: The Gathering. Hasn’t stopped Wizards of the Coast making billions of dollars from the damn thing. At the very least, try to pinpoint what you don’t like about the game.

But most people, when pressed, complain that Artifact is “too random.” That or they complain that it isn’t fun to watch on twitch. As if that matters at all. For the latter… have they seen Fortnight? Or League of Legends? Or ducking Dota 2? If you have no idea what is going on in the game, it makes no damn sense and it doesn’t look fun in the least. People aren’t browsing Twitch for random game streams. They’re either a) looking at the most watched streams or b) looking up a game they’ve heard about. You don’t window shop on Twitch. As such, it doesn’t matter if it is understandable in five minutes of viewing. Someone will either say “Oh it’s a card game. I like card games. This is really popular, it must be good and maybe I’ll sit and figure it out.” Or they’ll say, “Why the hell are a bunch of people playing chess with Dota pieces? This nonsense is stupid and I’m going back to watching people try to build impromptu tree houses and shoot each other in the face.”

As for the randomness, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Actually, the RNG (random number generator – used as a shorthand for randomness) fulfils two purposes. One, it actually makes the game more watchable. If you don’t have some manner of randomness, you actually have a boring game. No, change that. You have a puzzle. Like, if you played Solitaire but the deck was always set up in a specific way, you wouldn’t play Solitaire for very long. You might enjoy figuring out the puzzle but once it’s solved, you’re done. You shelve it because there’s nothing else from that constructed deck for you.

I mean, all card games have a large portion of RNG built right into them. The deck is RNG! You shuffle the deck at the start of every game. You get kicked out of tournaments for stacking your deck. You have to have a randomized pile from which all of your actions are drawn. This is inherent to the genre. Begging for a mulligan is basically arguing that you don’t want to play the game at all.

Course, this isn’t an invitation to descend into arguments about mulligans. Mulligans, in-of-themselves, are a whole other conversation. Suffice to say, Artifact gives you two card draw at the start of your turn which is more than enough to make up for a lack of a mulligan. It works for Artifact. You don’t need a mulligan at the start.

Second, and most importantly, those damn arrows in Artifact give you something on which to blame your losses.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from the average player, is they want above all to protect the ego. They will say otherwise, but it is really the only explanation I can make for the constant complaining around the direction arrows in Artifact. Frankly, if you don’t like the arrows, then maybe you simply don’t like the game. That’s fine. I don’t like Magic. Not everything is made for you. You can go back to Hearthstone or Magic or whatever. You will be missed.

But seriously, the arrows are perhaps one of the most ingenious mechanisms I’ve seen offered in a card game and really set the distinction for Artifact. It makes Artifact not a “digital adaptation of a tabletop game” but something that literally could only exist in a digital space. This opens up really interesting avenues of design and even impacts the skill level of the players. Fighting for initiative is an important layer in Artifact and having a card like Apprentice Assassin who can “waste” an action trying to force your opponent to play before you is a moment of beautiful clarity in Artifact. Possibly because Apprentice Assassin is a good card for more than just durdling and it’s just yet another application of an ability that is inherently good. It also impacts the decision on where to play cards.

And this, I think, is what turns off more players than are willing to admit. Artifact isn’t an “autopilot” game. I’d argue, it’s possibly the most intensive card game to play. For constructed card games, there are two important skills for a player to develop: building a deck and playing the deck. If you’ve watched League of Legends or Dota, the closest equivalent would be playing the game and drafting the game. And the two skills are wholly different. Some card games really emphasize deck building. I’ve been told that Magic is about 90% deck building and the rest is just playing what you draw. Most of my friends who love Magic keep telling me that constructing a deck and realizing your construction is the heart of the game. Course, the colours in Magic allow some leeway in this push and pull of piloting and building but I’d argue that Artifact is somewhere in the realm of 80-90% about playing a deck and not building it.

There are so many decision points in Artifact that entirely revolve around the flow of play that you really have to consider your choices. The better you get at the game, the more difficult choices you discover in the course of a match. For instance, when you first pick up Artifact, you try and keep your heroes alive as much as you can. Death is the most discouraging fate for your heroes and you bemoan every single stray arrow that leads a minion curving into your poor Luna and away from that fat, twenty health tower.

Course, once you realize that dying gives you a “free” teleport in that you can now position Luna into a more advantageous lane and that losing one tower doesn’t end the game, you start to purposefully kill your own heroes. Stranding your opponent’s Bristleback, Axe and Centaur to a lane they’ve already won as you redeploy into the last two lanes and destroy them before you opponent can reposition is such a great feeling when you pull it off. And this is why I consider the complaints of the arrows to be utter nonsense. Not only are you aware of arrow placements for all units already on the board at the start of every round, but there are so many decisions and plays you can make that there is never a game where you lost “because of that one stupid arrow.” An Ogre Conscript may have curved into that dumb Crystal Maiden instead of whacking off the last four health of that second lane tower right before your opponent takes throne in the third, but to get to that position required so many other branching options that I can guarantee the losing player could have done something different at an earlier point in the match to have avoided that fate.

And that’s what I love so much about Artifact. Despite appearing to be more “chaotic” the design actually gives the player more control than almost any other card game I’ve played. It’s in the Netrunner category of high strategy without relying so heavily on asymmetrical knowledge.

Now, I do understand some people finding the base game boring. Which is fair if they’re coming from those games years of maturation and iteration on their game mechanics. Play the first release of Magic or Hearthstone and you’ll also find a rather straightforward game. If you just want a mature scene, that’s fair. But if given the opportunity, I’d argue Artifact has far greater depth to explore than either of those games because it is free of their design limitations. Valve even introduced some new mechanics when rebalancing several of the cards right before they entered radio silence. Lion got the Quicken ability which reduces the cooldown of a skill every time it gets used. I can easily envision some sort of ability or card that would allow a free use or a faster use of an ability that could combo with Quicken and make Finger of Death a real reckoning force.

Since the game is designed around a computer doing much of the computation, there is a great deal of directions that the game could take. After its release, I was enthralled with following communities who created their own custom cards. Some of them were really smart and if Valve took even half of their ideas, they would rival Magic and Hearthstone combined.

Unfortunately, there is a final component to Artifact’s failing that I must touch upon. I don’t quite know if its the gaming community at large or just those specifically with Valve. However, there’s a concerted group who want to see Artifact fail. It is… unhealthy. I don’t like Keyforge. You wouldn’t know this because I wouldn’t bring it up other than to make a point. I don’t go to the Keyforge subreddit and bitch about it constantly. I don’t make an active effort to deride Keyforge, mock its failing numbers (I honestly don’t know nor care about its numbers) and I don’t insult and belittle the people who do like Keyforge.

The same can’t be said for Artifact. There is a hate brigand the likes of which I have never seen – and I saw the Gib Diretide nonsense. This might be something that Valve has to consider going forward. Whatever they do, there is a large and active community that wants to see it fail. I can’t imagine that Artifact by its lonesome stirred up such ire. I don’t want Valve to address it directly. But I hope they consider it when proposing more experimental approaches to releases. Hell, they may even have to break down and do some proper marketing to overcome it.

I still think there’s a fantastic product available. But Valve really has some hard decisions to make. I think revoking some of their earlier stances – stances I see echoed in Garfield and Elias’ answers – which really held the game back. Abandon this nonsense of “perceived value.” It’s ludicrous how overpriced and artificially inflated Magic cards are. We don’t need to go down that exploitative road. I’ve said it before, but Artifact could really benefit from the Dota treatment. Give it free (or at the very least dirt cheap) then offer alternate art, hats, imps, boards, loading screens, card effects and whatever other cosmetic nonsense to the players to jazz up their game. No one is going to place the same value on a couple lines of code as they would a physical piece of paper.

And it was ridiculous for them to even think that people would. Whatever they do, they have a lot of work ahead of them. The stink on Artifact will last a long time and Valve can’t rely on their goodwill anymore to overlook it. But they have the talent, skill and game itself to make the wait worthwhile.

So I’ll see you all again when Artifact 2.0 launches.