I liked Artifact. Definitely closer to MTG than Hearthstone though, both in terms of gameplay complexity and monetization. I understand they hired Richard Garfield, so I suppose that's to be expected. 11:04 "The rules aren't specified at all" – They were, you just didn't read them. I get it, streamerbrain, gotta read chat and be entertaining, still.
Ok is it just me…or did brode basicly take a look at arcane and said…i can do that better and simplified it to snap? Feels like some of the ideas were reused in snap.
I'm realizing the game is in a Schrodinger's game dilemma: It has lots of ways to win by random chance which makes it so professional players won't play it. But it's also so complicated and has so many things to remember that casual players won't play it
I played this game for about 3 days after release. It wasn't that complicated, the combat was intense and complex enough to make every match interesting. Deckbuilding was amazing because each color had different personalities. Then I wanted to build a specific deck, so I pulled up the shop. The card I wanted was on auction for about 40 EUR, and it wasn't the most expensive by far. After running into more and more fully optimised decks my enthusiasm dropped, and realising I can actually make some money by selling some of my cards, I've sold off my deck, profited off the game then uninstalled it. I honestly miss it, it was really fun
I think what Artefact does pretty bad is to explain a lot of its mechanics if you don't know DotA 2 or any Moba at all. Having 5 heroes per deck is the team you play in a moba. Having them die and return with a round cooldown is basically getting killed and to respawn. Getting gold from killing creeps and heroes to buy items is one of the core mechanics. So asking why summoning a hero back to the fountain is good or not is answered that they come back fully healed and you deny the enemy the bounty.
As I played enough Mobas in my life and I started playing card games with Magic, I basically grasped the fundemental idea they tried with this game and it was actually intriguing, but I never touched it for buying a game and buying card packs afterwards
Long Hauler here. Artifact was amazing. And the monetization wasn't horrible it was just horribly communicated. For example you listed a Kripp video talking about spending 300 on packs but that was never intended to be the way to get all your cards. You could buy singles from other people. I played hundreds of hours of it and came out on top money wise. I was able to sell big rare cards I didn't care about for more than the money I spent on the game and the drafts I played.
Artifact was never going to be a HS killer. Same reason DOTA2 is not a LOL killer. Making the game more complex, means less people will play it , regardless of monetization.
Loved watching beta gameplay. Most games simplified to fighting over a 3rd lane after easily winning 1 lane each, but the mindgames found in the exceptions were incredible. Just throw everything in one lane to rush the ancient, or bait your opponent into stranding unkillable heroes in a lane you don't need to win…could've been really interesting, too bad money exists
ngl, i see why Rarran only likes Simple, Easy and straightforward games, he just doesnt read, or pay attention to anything… sure, he's good at what he does, but looking at him not pay attention to stuff and only complain does let me know he is not build for anything other than Heartstone, also "complexity" doesnt mean "fun" FOR YOU and many others but it does Mean FUN for ME and many others too, Artifact failed cuz it wasnt Free to play, and it had horrible monetization practices, thats all.
Hey, I won money playing tournaments of that game, but probably lost more money buying all the packs and all the cards I needed to win those tournaments haha. I had fun while it lasted!
As much as artifact's monetization was bad, the $20 buy in did give you infinite phantom drafts, which I loved. Honestly it was better for me than having to F2P daily quest my way into being able to draft in other games.
I miss what Artifact couldve been… I like the Dota2 characters a lot, especially a lot more than LoL's characters. Sure, its monetization was definitely gonna doom any true competitive scene, but we thought that if anyone is poor and has incomplete decks then everyone is equally rich and has equally completed decks, that wasn't the problem…
…The problem came in one of the dumbest design decisions they could've made. Creeps! The fact that your creeps spawn randomly is what absolutely gigafucked the game so hard… Too many mechanics and plays rely on your creeps, but they are completely random, meaning it's just a coinflipping simulator, and you could say, isn't Hearthstone a coinflip simulator as well? Yes, but too a lesser degree and at least the coinflips can result in fun or exciting plays, in Artifact every single coinflip RNG moment could just result in frustration. Just differing between mild frustration, a lot of frustration or hairpulling psychosis inducing madness frustration.
IMO Richard Garfield missed both of VALVE's target audiences. He designed a card game too complex for DOTA players to pick up (they barely understand Hearthstone) and also too abstract and viewer unfriendly for TCG players to follow (Too many unfamiliar MOBA shorthands and mechanics, RNG, boards out of view, unintuitive interactions).
This is what all TCGs look like to people who don't play them. Conceptually Artifact should've been great. I'm convinced if they didn't mishadle it on basically ever step of the way it would've been a huge success. They could even expand it to other valve games later on and have like Half-Life and TF2 cards and such. It's amazing just how much they sabotaged this game, I guess valve decided if they were gonna mess up a game they may as well go all in on every possible bad decision. Between insanely convoluted gameplay and awful monetization i fail to see how anyone would think this a game that would do well on launch.
I have a strong bias towards overly complicated CCGs, but damn did I love Artifact.
Of course, the business model on the game was absolute garbage. Pay to play, pay for all cards with no freebees, and pay to draft (play arena) was absolutely insane has was rightfully rejected by the gaming community.
But the game itself was truly wonderful. I know they tried to fix things with an experimental beta but i just didnt like the gameplay changes they made, and those changes took time away from fixing the most fundamental issues, namely the game economy.
Seeing this really made me want to boot up the game again to try it out but sadly I already sold off all my cards. Oh well.
Having 3 boards is insane…. if i was designing it i would make it so each 'lane' is just one game (e.g. its a best of 3 like Magic is… Of course the most popular way to play is just best of 1 game/lane haha). If you want to have each lane affect each other id just have effects that carry on to the next game/lane and stop one cards being used in both lanes.
I've been playing it for the past few days now. I've got to say: -The combat is not even that complicated (sure there is a lot of stuff happening on the screen at once and the tutorial did not do a good job explaining all of those). Taking damage and dealing it is both rewarding and punishing, so you would have to either rush kill heroes for early game item tempo or sacrifice them to defend and wait for a big board swing. Still, the feeling of outplaying the opponent with a big swing feels REALLY good, especially with a blue deck when they have a lot of mana-cheating and burn spells that help you burst towers. – The UI is a bit clustered, some icons are a bit small and the game requires you to click on pretty much everything to see what's gonna happen, but you do get the hang of it later and they do provide tons of info for the board state. – The items sometimes are lackluster (like a random +1 armor or +2 attack but it costs too much for any impact), but there are some outplays you can do with a lot of the items and it opens up many ways either reaching your Wincon or generally stabilizing the board. – The heroes are an essential part of the game, you would have to think very hard about whether they should be deploying to which lane so that they can be best used, but it's a bit too harsh since "no heroes = nothing to play". It's pretty boring and also tremendously punishing when all your heroes are dead. The worst thing about this game is the RNG, sometimes your heroes were placed in such a bad spot that they'd die right away with no counter-play in some of the earlier rounds. But you can always swing back real hard if you know what you're doing. The monetization at launch killed this game – a greedy business decision that destroyed a great, if not the most unique card game mechanics out there. All of the cards are free now and if you guys liked what I've said above, give it a try, maybe it would grow on you guys like it did on mine.
I played artifact when it came out I mainly just played the draft mode because I didn't want to buy cards, I actually had a lot of fun but the game was losing a couple thousand players every day and I could see the writing on the wall, so I sold all my cards and actually made 25$ from all the cards you get for buying the $20 base game and the cards I won from draft so I was sad it died but also I made five bucks and had some fun so not that sad (I was like 14 at the time and had a hard time getting money into my steam wallet and 5 bucks could actually buy you a lot of games on indie sells so this was actually a very good profit for me)
My biggest gripe with artifact was with 3 lanes if a game lasted too long it would last a crazy long time so to counteract this the developers made the turn 7,8, and 9 cards really OP so games were pretty much scripted to end then so what you did in first like 5 turns didn't matter very much and it was just whether you could predict your opponent in the turns when the super powerful cards came out so despites all its complication in the end it felt like paper, rock, scissors
The actual gameplay was so good, while overwhelming at first it was more interesting than what later on LOR was but just as complex. You could always do big brain plays focusing a single lane down or going for multi-board supremacy. It was such a unique and well designed game. However the terrible monetization single handedly killed it. All they had to do was release it F2P with basic card pack gacha style lootboxes and an arena mode. The main games even remotely competing with HS at the time were always based around how they are the "More F2P" version, why someone thought yes lets make the more expensive version would ever be remotely acceptable.
I genuinely believe if they didn't greed as insanely hard as they did this game could've actually been a real contender. Riot prob were laughing behind the scenes and celebrating they didnt have an unexpected competitor. Until they realized a few years later that being entirely F2P doesn't work fundamentally as a business for card games though…
Another huge problem that came with artifact not many talked about was that there was no ladder system on release. You could only play through community set up events or purely arena. WHICH YOU HAD TO PAY REAL MONEY TO EVEN PLAY. The game had no content to grind early.
Then they promised a circuit for a road to worlds for $1 mill but then the only events that popped up were purely for content creators and already pro HS players…. So no real competitive scene existed because it was just a big circle jerk….
As a guy who plays games across a lot of genres and has played likely thousands of hours of each of DotA, LoL, and MTG this was a game I conceptually loved. But as someone playing one of the most streamlined card games (hearthstone) I can understand that the mapping of DotA onto a card game really ups the complexity and can be overwhelming to a newcomer, even conceptually.
Does anyone else feel like we're in the timeline where Artifact failed, but there's another one out there where Artifact is the most popular online TCG?
Ironically, their unique idea was to have three lanes, and it seems the game would have been ten times better by just having one. They already even have something line lanes because of the line up. The rest could probably have been improved with play.
The feeling was like playing chess. The matches were long and exhausting, the opponents' builds could be too cumbersome to handle, and the fact that we couldn't obtain cards for free discouraged the desire to play. They attempted to revive it with another version of Artifact, "Artifact Foundry" is the name, which seemed to be more enjoyable and simplified, but it's a shame they killed the game during development.
Should've called the game "Wallet Warriors", whoever's wallet is bigger wins.
I liked Artifact. Definitely closer to MTG than Hearthstone though, both in terms of gameplay complexity and monetization. I understand they hired Richard Garfield, so I suppose that's to be expected.
11:04 "The rules aren't specified at all" – They were, you just didn't read them. I get it, streamerbrain, gotta read chat and be entertaining, still.
this game looks like it could of been pretty good but I dislike how much rng is in the game and the locking cards ability seems kinda op
Ok is it just me…or did brode basicly take a look at arcane and said…i can do that better and simplified it to snap?
Feels like some of the ideas were reused in snap.
Hearthstone is pretty dead rn, matchmaking takes pretty long at least on eu. I think its worse than it was 1-2 years ago.
I'm realizing the game is in a Schrodinger's game dilemma:
It has lots of ways to win by random chance which makes it so professional players won't play it.
But it's also so complicated and has so many things to remember that casual players won't play it
artifact was king of the world for about 48 hours
I played this game for about 3 days after release. It wasn't that complicated, the combat was intense and complex enough to make every match interesting. Deckbuilding was amazing because each color had different personalities. Then I wanted to build a specific deck, so I pulled up the shop. The card I wanted was on auction for about 40 EUR, and it wasn't the most expensive by far. After running into more and more fully optimised decks my enthusiasm dropped, and realising I can actually make some money by selling some of my cards, I've sold off my deck, profited off the game then uninstalled it. I honestly miss it, it was really fun
I think what Artefact does pretty bad is to explain a lot of its mechanics if you don't know DotA 2 or any Moba at all. Having 5 heroes per deck is the team you play in a moba. Having them die and return with a round cooldown is basically getting killed and to respawn. Getting gold from killing creeps and heroes to buy items is one of the core mechanics. So asking why summoning a hero back to the fountain is good or not is answered that they come back fully healed and you deny the enemy the bounty.
As I played enough Mobas in my life and I started playing card games with Magic, I basically grasped the fundemental idea they tried with this game and it was actually intriguing, but I never touched it for buying a game and buying card packs afterwards
Long Hauler here. Artifact was amazing. And the monetization wasn't horrible it was just horribly communicated. For example you listed a Kripp video talking about spending 300 on packs but that was never intended to be the way to get all your cards. You could buy singles from other people. I played hundreds of hours of it and came out on top money wise. I was able to sell big rare cards I didn't care about for more than the money I spent on the game and the drafts I played.
Being someone who bought into Artifact at launch and played for a few weeks, I dropped it because it felt like a game of Imp-losion style designs.
Marvel snap is what artifact couldve been
Artifact was never going to be a HS killer. Same reason DOTA2 is not a LOL killer. Making the game more complex, means less people will play it , regardless of monetization.
It used to be Moonday, my dudes.
Hope you'll try Genius Invokation TCG in the future rarran
Loved watching beta gameplay. Most games simplified to fighting over a 3rd lane after easily winning 1 lane each, but the mindgames found in the exceptions were incredible. Just throw everything in one lane to rush the ancient, or bait your opponent into stranding unkillable heroes in a lane you don't need to win…could've been really interesting, too bad money exists
"Tried a dead card game."
You mean you went back to Chaotic?! XDD
ngl, i see why Rarran only likes Simple, Easy and straightforward games, he just doesnt read, or pay attention to anything… sure, he's good at what he does, but looking at him not pay attention to stuff and only complain does let me know he is not build for anything other than Heartstone, also "complexity" doesnt mean "fun" FOR YOU and many others but it does Mean FUN for ME and many others too, Artifact failed cuz it wasnt Free to play, and it had horrible monetization practices, thats all.
There had to be a better approach to this than a 15 minute tutorial match.
Hey, I won money playing tournaments of that game, but probably lost more money buying all the packs and all the cards I needed to win those tournaments haha. I had fun while it lasted!
As much as artifact's monetization was bad, the $20 buy in did give you infinite phantom drafts, which I loved. Honestly it was better for me than having to F2P daily quest my way into being able to draft in other games.
If it was f2p it would be great
I miss what Artifact couldve been… I like the Dota2 characters a lot, especially a lot more than LoL's characters. Sure, its monetization was definitely gonna doom any true competitive scene, but we thought that if anyone is poor and has incomplete decks then everyone is equally rich and has equally completed decks, that wasn't the problem…
…The problem came in one of the dumbest design decisions they could've made. Creeps! The fact that your creeps spawn randomly is what absolutely gigafucked the game so hard… Too many mechanics and plays rely on your creeps, but they are completely random, meaning it's just a coinflipping simulator, and you could say, isn't Hearthstone a coinflip simulator as well? Yes, but too a lesser degree and at least the coinflips can result in fun or exciting plays, in Artifact every single coinflip RNG moment could just result in frustration. Just differing between mild frustration, a lot of frustration or hairpulling psychosis inducing madness frustration.
I thought you played Hearthstone?
IMO Richard Garfield missed both of VALVE's target audiences. He designed a card game too complex for DOTA players to pick up (they barely understand Hearthstone) and also too abstract and viewer unfriendly for TCG players to follow (Too many unfamiliar MOBA shorthands and mechanics, RNG, boards out of view, unintuitive interactions).
hmm how about artifact foundry 🙂 its simpler
This is what all TCGs look like to people who don't play them.
Conceptually Artifact should've been great. I'm convinced if they didn't mishadle it on basically ever step of the way it would've been a huge success.
They could even expand it to other valve games later on and have like Half-Life and TF2 cards and such.
It's amazing just how much they sabotaged this game, I guess valve decided if they were gonna mess up a game they may as well go all in on every possible bad decision. Between insanely convoluted gameplay and awful monetization i fail to see how anyone would think this a game that would do well on launch.
I feel like the problem here is that the game is way to complex at all times. Magic can get complex, but usually builds up to it that complexity.
I have a strong bias towards overly complicated CCGs, but damn did I love Artifact.
Of course, the business model on the game was absolute garbage. Pay to play, pay for all cards with no freebees, and pay to draft (play arena) was absolutely insane has was rightfully rejected by the gaming community.
But the game itself was truly wonderful. I know they tried to fix things with an experimental beta but i just didnt like the gameplay changes they made, and those changes took time away from fixing the most fundamental issues, namely the game economy.
Seeing this really made me want to boot up the game again to try it out but sadly I already sold off all my cards. Oh well.
Having 3 boards is insane…. if i was designing it i would make it so each 'lane' is just one game (e.g. its a best of 3 like Magic is… Of course the most popular way to play is just best of 1 game/lane haha). If you want to have each lane affect each other id just have effects that carry on to the next game/lane and stop one cards being used in both lanes.
if you want to try a great card game that died try duelyst (you can play the 2 now but i dont know if it's good )
The game sure was complex, but let's be honest, what actually killed the game is the "pay to play" + "play to win" combo
Boy is it not a good sign when your tutorial game is already incredibly confusing
I've been playing it for the past few days now. I've got to say:
-The combat is not even that complicated (sure there is a lot of stuff happening on the screen at once and the tutorial did not do a good job explaining all of those). Taking damage and dealing it is both rewarding and punishing, so you would have to either rush kill heroes for early game item tempo or sacrifice them to defend and wait for a big board swing.
Still, the feeling of outplaying the opponent with a big swing feels REALLY good, especially with a blue deck when they have a lot of mana-cheating and burn spells that help you burst towers.
– The UI is a bit clustered, some icons are a bit small and the game requires you to click on pretty much everything to see what's gonna happen, but you do get the hang of it later and they do provide tons of info for the board state.
– The items sometimes are lackluster (like a random +1 armor or +2 attack but it costs too much for any impact), but there are some outplays you can do with a lot of the items and it opens up many ways either reaching your Wincon or generally stabilizing the board.
– The heroes are an essential part of the game, you would have to think very hard about whether they should be deploying to which lane so that they can be best used, but it's a bit too harsh since "no heroes = nothing to play". It's pretty boring and also tremendously punishing when all your heroes are dead.
The worst thing about this game is the RNG, sometimes your heroes were placed in such a bad spot that they'd die right away with no counter-play in some of the earlier rounds. But you can always swing back real hard if you know what you're doing.
The monetization at launch killed this game – a greedy business decision that destroyed a great, if not the most unique card game mechanics out there.
All of the cards are free now and if you guys liked what I've said above, give it a try, maybe it would grow on you guys like it did on mine.
I played artifact when it came out I mainly just played the draft mode because I didn't want to buy cards, I actually had a lot of fun but the game was losing a couple thousand players every day and I could see the writing on the wall, so I sold all my cards and actually made 25$ from all the cards you get for buying the $20 base game and the cards I won from draft so I was sad it died but also I made five bucks and had some fun so not that sad (I was like 14 at the time and had a hard time getting money into my steam wallet and 5 bucks could actually buy you a lot of games on indie sells so this was actually a very good profit for me)
My biggest gripe with artifact was with 3 lanes if a game lasted too long it would last a crazy long time so to counteract this the developers made the turn 7,8, and 9 cards really OP so games were pretty much scripted to end then so what you did in first like 5 turns didn't matter very much and it was just whether you could predict your opponent in the turns when the super powerful cards came out so despites all its complication in the end it felt like paper, rock, scissors
the tutorial of this card game seems more complicated than playing Dota !
lol, he could have dueled the creep in front of sven and probably won.
Artifact didnt kill hearthstone, hearthstone killed itself
they think they're selling mtg cards, they weren't.
The actual gameplay was so good, while overwhelming at first it was more interesting than what later on LOR was but just as complex. You could always do big brain plays focusing a single lane down or going for multi-board supremacy. It was such a unique and well designed game. However the terrible monetization single handedly killed it. All they had to do was release it F2P with basic card pack gacha style lootboxes and an arena mode. The main games even remotely competing with HS at the time were always based around how they are the "More F2P" version, why someone thought yes lets make the more expensive version would ever be remotely acceptable.
I genuinely believe if they didn't greed as insanely hard as they did this game could've actually been a real contender. Riot prob were laughing behind the scenes and celebrating they didnt have an unexpected competitor. Until they realized a few years later that being entirely F2P doesn't work fundamentally as a business for card games though…
Another huge problem that came with artifact not many talked about was that there was no ladder system on release. You could only play through community set up events or purely arena. WHICH YOU HAD TO PAY REAL MONEY TO EVEN PLAY. The game had no content to grind early.
Then they promised a circuit for a road to worlds for $1 mill but then the only events that popped up were purely for content creators and already pro HS players…. So no real competitive scene existed because it was just a big circle jerk….
Hey, new viewer here, loving these you play X card game series. You got a new sub from me, keep up the great work. Also, man does this game suck lol
Omg I totally forgot about Artifact…despite it being such a big, new card game when it dropped…
Couldn't go a day without it showing up in my feed
As a guy who plays games across a lot of genres and has played likely thousands of hours of each of DotA, LoL, and MTG this was a game I conceptually loved. But as someone playing one of the most streamlined card games (hearthstone) I can understand that the mapping of DotA onto a card game really ups the complexity and can be overwhelming to a newcomer, even conceptually.
It didnt gail because it was hard. That eas actually the Appele to a lot of players.
Iz fauld because of monetization
Does anyone else feel like we're in the timeline where Artifact failed, but there's another one out there where Artifact is the most popular online TCG?
Ironically, their unique idea was to have three lanes, and it seems the game would have been ten times better by just having one. They already even have something line lanes because of the line up. The rest could probably have been improved with play.
U could have won in lane 1. The secind lane was blocken by creeps. No matter how much damage u would have done zo them
And a TP acroll is good. It lets u deploy a hero to an other lane
Heartstone is easy.
Artifact is complex whichbis good for a certain audiance
The feeling was like playing chess. The matches were long and exhausting, the opponents' builds could be too cumbersome to handle, and the fact that we couldn't obtain cards for free discouraged the desire to play.
They attempted to revive it with another version of Artifact, "Artifact Foundry" is the name, which seemed to be more enjoyable and simplified, but it's a shame they killed the game during development.