Tag Archives: Artifact

Digging Up Old Wounds

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.

Accessed from https://sm.ign.com/ign_za/news/a/artifact-r/artifact-review-in-progress_tjy5.jpg — Artifact and all its associated images and mistakes belong to Valve.

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.

The Rose Weeps

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Most places do a year in review at the end of December or beginning of January. I’m not one of those people but there were two things that released last year that I do want to discuss. These are, regrettably, my biggest disappointments. Both have a similar trajectory, however, so while I’m making a more positive push on content and such this year, we’re going to start on shaky ground.

The first game I want to discuss (and both my disappointments are games) is Valve’s Artifact. It was one of those few games that I’ve been anticipating because it frankly sounded exactly what I wanted. Kait and I both enjoy Dota 2 but are simply too busy to really play the game as much as we like. It is unfortunately a rather lengthy experience. It is also unfortunately a team game that involves relying on four other players to coordinate and cooperate in order to achieve success.

Dota 2 is also a complicated game so you’re very reliant on your compatriots to perform well. Thus, there’s a bit of a negative feedback loop for the game as you get older. The more work makes you busy, the less you play. The less you play the worst you do. The worst you do, the more your teammates get angry at your performance. So while Kait and I like to watch the International every year, we’re simply incapable of committing to the game itself anymore.

But a two player card game that plays very similar to Dota 2 is exactly what we needed! Kait even had rudimentary design documents on her own homebrew Dota 2 board game. And since we play each other there isn’t any worry about meeting grumpy people who have no interest in being patient with lapsed players who have no idea what the strategies for the newest big update are.

So despite the lukewarm reception of Artifact’s initial reveal, I had been steadily growing interested as information dripped out over the year leading up to Artifact’s release. The game does, indeed, have a very familiar framework: players build a deck including five heroes. These heroes, when killed, are returned to the “fountain” and can return to the lanes two turns later. They each have signature cards and abilities often reflective of their characters in Dota 2. The goal of the game is to push down your opponent’s towers to get access to their ancient. Either you destroy towers in two lanes or you destroy one tower then the ancient in one.

In order to help destroy these towers, you can play the cards in your deck. Now, all the heroes have been split between four different colours and the cards each have a corresponding colour as well. Thus you may only play cards in a lane with a colour matching a hero in that same lane. So if you want to play your Bronze Legionnaire (which is red) then you will need a red hero (like Legion Commander) in the lane you want that Bronze Legionnaire. The colours naturally represent game archetypes with red focusing on strong heroes, green highlights powerful creeps and buffs for those creeps, blue is focused on destructive and controlling spells while black is all about making gold and murdering heroes.

You can have any mixture of colours in your deck but since you’re limited to exactly five heroes, that creates a natural focus for your deck. I am far from good at the game so have mostly kept myself to two coloured decks. You have a primary focus (say strong heroes in red) and pick two supports for those heroes (like two black to make lots of money to buy those red heroes game winning items).

There’s another element in Artifact that is reminiscent of Dota 2. At the end of each round – a round ends once both players have passed in all three lanes – there is a shopping phase. Also included in your deck construction is an item deck. It must consist of at least nine items and these are, essentially, a baked in sideboard. During the shopping phase you get one random card from your item deck, one from the consumable deck (which has the same items for all players) and one item from the secret shop (a random item from all the possible items in the game). Your item deck has the benefit that if you purchase the item from it, you draw a new item from your deck to replace it. For the secret shop and consumable deck, you need to wait for the end of the next round to have them replenish.

Now, I may not be the most devoted card game player but there’s a few modern updates to the game that make me really enjoy it. For one, your economy is automatically managed. You have a mana pool for each lane that you use for your spells (but not your items, they’re free to play after you purchase them). This pool increases every turn so you don’t have to worry about being mana screwed like a certain other game. You also get to draw two cards at the start of your turn so your card draw isn’t as unforgiving especially since deck sizes are forty (or more) cards. Also, rounds are shared. So one player (who has initiative) will get the first chance to play a card in a lane. Then, their opponent gets to go. This continues until both players pass.

This sharing of actions is really neat for a couple of reasons. For one, it cuts down on the ability for “degenerate combo” gameplay. Netrunner had a few decks that, once the player got the necessary pieces, they could win the game without their opponent getting any chance to react (with the sole exception of trying to close out the game before their enemy got their combo assembled). The problem, of course, was that it was difficult to tell if you were playing against a combo deck sometimes so you may not even know you were in danger until it was too late. But in Artifact, your opponent gets a chance to respond after piece of your combo gets played and allows more interactivity between the players.

This core game element also means that sometimes playing nothing is the more strategic play. And that’s what I really love about Artifact. It’s a fairly simple game to understand, and the cards themselves are rather straightforward, but the actual strategy is insanely deep. I haven’t really lost any games where I felt I couldn’t do anything but mostly made really poor choices. And that’s where the difficulty of the game lies. There are so many choices to make in the game that it is hard to know exactly what you should do.

It’s an exciting game that’s deliciously complicated and I love.

So how is this game a big disappointment for me? Well, the game simply is not doing well. And while the Internet is full of personal theories for this, I have my own. There are a large number of factors that have led to Artifact’s dwindling numbers. Some are rather unpleasant. There is a certain amount of negativity in the gaming space that has, unfortunately, only seemed to have grown over the years. Unfortunately, there’s a rather vocal population that would like to see anything Valve creates fails. Plus, there’s a strange brand loyalty amongst gamers and many see competing games against their favourites as a threat against themselves. Course, this sort of brand loyalty has been cultivated by companies and I am concerned what this will mean for the future.

But I don’t believe this hostility is the only reason Artifact is floundering. And I would rather focus on causes that can be addressed.

I honestly believe that there’s a fantastic game in Artifact and, while it isn’t going to interest everyone, I think it’s got more appeal than some would argue. It’s first couple of days also saw a huge amount of interest and players that have been steadily dropping off since launch. So, how did that happen? I don’t think so many players bought into the game thinking it would be something else. It’s not the gameplay that’s pushing them away.

No, unfortunately I think Valve misread the market. Artifact has a rather novel monetization scheme compared to its competitors. The game is $20 to play. But that just gets you a couple of packs and two starter decks that don’t include any of the best cards. The idea was to copy the marketplace for games like Magic: the Gathering. And I’ve expressed my distaste for Magic: the Gathering’s pricing before. One of the reasons I like Netrunner was its living card game format felt more approachable to me. Plus, Artifact’s rivals in the digital card game space are all free.

Now, most consumers these days are savvy enough to know that “free” games aren’t truly free. The closest would be Dota 2 as its only paid options are strictly for cosmetic items. Thus, by branding Artifact as a Dota card game, I think it created the expectation that it too would be free. Granted, the first adopters clearly saw that it had a $20 buy-in but I feel that Valve did a really poor job of selling their pricing scheme.

This is perhaps the most egregious mistake from Valve. They knowingly bucked the market trends in order to adopt a pricing scheme that has a fairly established history of criticism. Now, I’ve read people actually compare price between Artifact and, say, Hearthstone at a competitive level and Artifact is actually cheaper unless you devoted half a year or more grinding out wins to “earn” free cards that can be recycled into what you need in those free games. Valve also mentioned in earlier interviews that they wanted a more traditional price scheme because they wanted players to retain the value of their purchased cards.

Which I think is a poorly considered tactic. When Artifact launched, it may have been cheaper to play competitively compared to other games immediately, but everywhere you looked in the client there was a price tag. Packs cost money ($2 each with a random assortment that could easily be doubles). Individual cards cost money (Axe himself was $40 at launch!). Game modes cost money ($1 for tickets to enter ones with packs as prizes). Within the first few days, Valve made a free Draft mode available but its first launch had only games against bots or constructed play as free for players. And constructed play would pit you against players who had sunk over a hundred dollars to get the best cards.

This did feel exploitative, even if the numbers “crunched” better. It was also increasingly demotivating because players had just dropped $20 dollars to load the game up and they were immediately with a overwhelming cacophony of prices and transactions to extract more from their wallets.

So I don’t fault anyone for dropping the game at that point. I had only intentions of playing with my sister so us being restricted to our starter decks was fine. But even I felt that I could get my $20 worth of game by playing with those decks alone and then waiting for months to see if I could pick anything else up for a more reasonable price.

Thus I believe that Valve chased off its consumers by coming across as far too greedy. Their competitors offer their games for free, so it was already going to be a challenge convincing players to drop $20 upfront. Then, Valve themed the game on their premier free game ostensibly expecting them to come over while now “nickle and diming” them like Dota’s competitors do. Finally, the justification for this expensive route was to compare Artifact to traditional physical card games without acknowledging that Artifact is a digital card game with no physical product to produce.

Naturally, people are going to value a digital product where they have nothing to show for their purchase as being less valuable than something than can physically give to their children or sell at garage sales or burn to heat their homes in the dead of winter.

So, is Artifact dead? I don’t think so. I think Valve needs to recalculate their price for the game. At this point, they need to demonstrate to players that Artifact is worth the price to enter. I don’t agree that it needs to go free to play as that will just introduce the predatory grinding components that free to play subsists on. No, Artifact needs to go “dirt cheap” to play.

I’d say make Artifact’s base purchase $5 or $10 dollars. Packs should be fifty cents. Cards should sell for pennies on the marketplace with the sole exception of really rare cards maybe fetching several dollars. Valve makes money off every marketplace purchase, after all (two cents for your one at the lowest listed price). Then, Artifact should instead push cosmetics as its primary source of income – just like Dota 2!

There’s a wealth of ways that Valve could sell digital hats for this game. Animated or alternate art cards are a very common and very successful option used in traditional card games! You can sell card backs, different boards, different imps (animated mascots that are pretty adorable), different animations and environmental effects! Some of these cosmetics can be tucked into your card packs as a rare chance to drop for those that want an equivalent to loot boxes.

To compensate for players that initially bought in at a higher price point, Valve should offer them three custom hero art cards: Rix, Legion Commander and Sorla Khan to represent the Call to Arms story arc. I don’t believe it should be free to play Artifact since that leaves the game open to cheaters and scammers. Having an initial price point means that account bans actually carry some weight to them. But it should be very cheap to buy in to the game.

Accessed from https://playartifact.com/ — Artifact and all associated images and whatnot belong to Valve.

With these alternative, cosmetic options as your primary source, you can market the game as actually being competitively priced to the others on the market. I think most people will be far more forgiving of the difference between free to play and long to grind versus pay to play but $20 to get everything in the game.

I think this will bring back a lot more players who won’t mind investing a little more of their time into the game. Then the tournament circuit and pro scene can keep interest along with variable game modes and future releases. At any rate, something has to change or else the game won’t be around by the end of 2019.

Which is unfortunate because it is a really fun, well designed game that really resonated with a lot of people at one time. I’m really hoping we get to see where these game systems can go because the foundations leave open a game that has a lot of potential. And Dota 2 provides a number of fantastic heroes that still need to see representation here. Valve is always going to face an uphill battle with any of their new releases but there’s no reason for them to abandon their old methods of pro-consumer decisions which had garnered so much goodwill. People don’t want to see a price breakdown between four different games to understand that what they’re playing is somewhat cost effective despite all the price tags attached to everything.

They just want to play.