Artifact: everything you need to know

After two parts of Artifact, I still have a headache and an exhausted smile. Before tonight, all we really knew about Valve's Dota 2 theme card game was that it would use three channels and that the ad had received a famous message. bad reception at the international last year. After tonight it seems to me that I have more information that I can not fit in my skull, but I'm sure Artifact will be the new hot spot of the card game when it comes out completely this year.

The simplest way I can describe playing is to imagine playing three Hearthstone games at once, each of which can affect the other in many ways, which change from moment to moment. Or, to put it another way, if conventional card games are like failures (which I know so Artifact is the 3D version that Spock plays on the Enterprise. Which, I suppose, is exactly what I should waited for Valve.

One of the things I really want to know about being at his new, lavish Seattle office is the kind of talent that Valve hired to work on Artifact. The answer appears almost immediately as part of Gabe Newell's introductory presentation: they work with Richard Garfield, the legendary creator of Magic: The Gathering, and the undisputed OG of collectible card games. Newell compares Garfield to IceFrog, the mysterious surmental behind Dota 2, claiming that the chance to work with this kind of talent is like having "the most brilliant saw or pickaxe imaginable … the things I can build with that will be incredible". Garfield told me later that he had come aboard in 2014, after spending years wondering how to create an electronic game that solves Magic's problems.

Both Newell and Garfield are struggling to point out that the idea of ​​creating a killer card game has preceded – and matters more than – the idea of ​​placing it in the Dota 2 universe. If Team Fortress 2 or Half-Life had offered a better fit, it's the world that would have been chosen. It is also worth noting that Artifact will not be a younger brother subordinate to Dota 2. Most of the heroes of the current card game are existing champions of Dota 2, but others are original creations. And as the game develops, Valve expects some characters to start life in Artifact before appearing later in Dota 2. There's a lot more context to tackle, but you want to to know how it works, let me outline some basics as clearly as possible. I can. Be warned, here are bullet points.

How does the artifact work?

• Each deck contains 40 cards and includes 5 heroes (which is identical to a Dota 2 team). There will be more than 280 cards in the base game. There are 44 heroes. You can include three copies of each card in your deck.
• Your cards and heroes are selected from four possible colors: red, green, black and blue. As if by magic, each color has its own personality which thematizes what its cards do accordingly.
• At the beginning of the game, your first three heroes will be deployed equally in the three lanes (which are essentially game boards), as well as randomly-generated melee spells. After each turn, two other creeps will appear in random lanes on each player's side.
• Each lane contains a tower that has 40 health points that you must protect. Lose two rounds and the game is over. Once a tower is destroyed, it is replaced by the old one, which has 80 life points. Destroy an elder and you also win the game.
• The heroes who are killed have not left for good, they just have to go through a complete turn, after which you can choose the path in which they must be redeployed. (An exception is a green hero who has a "quick deployment" ability and can be fired back into the fray on the next turn.)
• Each track also has its own mana pool, which starts at 3 and increases by 1 each turn – although you can also use Ramp cards to speed up your mana pool. Hey, it's a Richard Garfield game.
• To play a card, you must place a hero of the corresponding color in the track where you are spending mana. However, Mana has gone down a path can to be used to launch some cards in other ways.

• Each time you play a card, the initiative moves to your opponent. Once you have both finished playing a card in a particular hallway, the battles are fought with heroes and enemies who attack everything in front of them. If they do not face another unit, they will attack the opposing tower.
• After the fight, the action then moves to the next path. The initiative idea of ​​the players is postponed to the next round, which ends when you finish the third and last track.
• When enemy cards are destroyed, you will get gold. Some cards may also affect the generation of gold, such as Black's "Day on the Trail" which doubles your total gold. Gold is spent on equipment between rounds during the shopping phase.
• Only heroes can use material and each hero has three locations: weapon, armor and accessory. If you want to use a different weapon, it will be overwritten.
• The equipment ranges from simple cheap buffs, like a cloak that gives +1 to your hero, to powerful and expensive items, such as the Apotheosis Dagger, which adds +8 attack, +4 seat (damage to the tower that can not be blocked), and condemns kills) all enemy he hits.
• Importantly, the equipment on the characters is persistent. The improved heroes will continue to come back with their stats and improved skills.

Do you still follow? As I said earlier, there is a flood of information to assimilate, and at first I had the impression of wading. Each of us willingly had a member of the Valve brain trust group who helped us discuss the plays and explain the mechanisms, some familiar, others less so. In my first game, I used an aggressive black-red deck, I slaughtered my heroes early and hard, and I was able to crush my slower opponent, Blue-Green, in all -in two lanes before his big bomb cards look like a symmetrical board. called, accurately, Annihilation came online.

For the second game, we changed deck, and the game was much more stretched and harder. This time, I had to stall on several tracks, trying to save time for my power spells. My favorite piece probably involved changing the position of two heroes, triggering a Zeus ping effect that erased a creep and also applied a contiguity buff with my other hero. This gesture radically changed the calculations in my fight, transforming a path that seemed lost into a path in which I now dominated. I'd like to pretend to have spotted this master shot by myself, but Kyle Davis from Valve must take some credit. Those of you at home will not have the chance to have it on hand, and make no mistake, it is a fiercely and uncomplicated interpretation of the genre. .

Before we sat down to play, Newell said that it was possible to have 100 units in a track and I assumed that he was exaggerating. He was not. You can block as many units as you can in one channel. They will disappear from view, but you can drag them with the mouse wheel to see them. You can also double-click to zoom out and simultaneously display all three channels, which is essential to keep a clear idea of ​​the overall state of the game. While we are talking about scale, I should also mention that There is no limit to the number of cards your hand can hold. At each turn, you will draw two new cards, in addition to the material you have made in the store. So you will rarely feel like you have nothing to do anymore.

Fight on three fronts

There is a lot going on here. If, like me, you enter Artifact of the Hearthstone World, you will feel like you are diving headlong into a liquid nitrogen lake. A small part of me wonders if the fact that Valve is entirely composed of genius means that it may overestimate the appetite for such complexity. I do not think Blizzard makes Hearthstone games so simple and (especially) short, just because it's the easiest thing to do: he honestly believes that's what time-pressed players want. amuse. But then Artifact is probably not for "most players" in the same way that Dota 2's insane skill cap is not. Newell told us that he had spent 10,000 hours in Dota 2. "I'm still trying to convince myself – though some people here may not agree with me – that I'm getting better player."

This kind of ceiling is what Valve seems to want for Artifact. And let's face it, this depth, as preparatory as it is, will also excite many people, especially those who grew up on Magic or who are tired of the linear strategies of other digital card games. make the same games as tiring. Artifact is not a collectible card game at all, it's a trade card game. This is arguably the most important deal for Artifact: you will be able to trade and sell individual cards in the Steam market, while trading is something that Hearthstone has always strongly opposed.

Artifact pricing system

Valve's pricing structure has caused controversy. The basic game costs $ 20 and comes with a starting card game. To get more cards, you can buy $ 2 boosters, buy specific cards in the market. You can also purchase tickets for gauntlets that will reward you with more packs of cards if you can build a winning streak. Here's how it breaks down.

Built project / expert ghost – 1 paid entry
3 wins: 1 event ticket reward
4 wins: 1 event ticket + 1 reward pack
5 wins: 1 event ticket + 2 reward packs

Keeper draft – 2 event tickets + 5 entry fees for packs
3 wins: 2 event tickets + 1 pack
4 wins: 2 event tickets + 2 packs
5 wins: 2 event tickets + 3 packs

Before starting, the community is concerned that card packs will contain duplicate cards that will have no value in the market. Valve responded by saying that in an upcoming update, players will be able to recycle unwanted cards for event tickets. You can not trade cards, so in the current state of play, players will still have to pay to access the new cards.

Before the market is open to the public and live, we can not know how many cards will cost in the end, giving the game the appearance of a bottomless spending pit for some. Systems are subject to change as Valve takes into account community feedback.

The importance of trading

The meaning of Valve is threefold. 1) Trading will avoid you hoping to remove the card you want from a package, but only to get a fill. 2) Each player's collection will retain its value in the same way as the Magic card binders. On the other hand, if I did not play at Hearthstone tomorrow, I could not sell my cards. Hell, the fine print of Blizzard means that I can not even leave the account to anyone in my will. 3) Valve knows how to do trading. It already has the technology to make it safe and secure and has learned many lessons from CS: GO and Dota 2.

I wonder, though, if an unstable market is going to pose its own problems. After all, CS: GO has some crazy expensive skins. Valon Brandon Reinhart is not worried. "If a card has a [top pro’s] his signature, and there is only one, and this player has won a major tournament, so he might have some value, and that's fine. But with regard to unsigned normal versions of this card, over the years we have developed many tools to ensure we keep these prices within a reasonable range. Reinhart also recalled an argument advanced by Newell about the power level of the cards not being correlated with their rarity, and noted that the community cards will cost "cents".

From a very high level perspective, we really want to stay away from the win-win principle

Here is exactly what Newell had to say about the relationship between card rarity and power: "From a very high-level perspective, we really want to avoid the payout-we think it has a pernicious impact on game design. and the evolution of the community over time … There are a lot of very common cards that are going to be super powerful.The essential is to avoid paying to win and that kind of. Approach We always want to reward As a player, you always want to feel that the more time you spend there, the better you get and the more you enjoy, we all played a lot of games where you spent a hundred hours and you really have finished. "

As for the costs, Artifact will not be free to play either. Newell explains why: "If the time is free, if an account is free or if the cards are free, everything that has a mathematical relationship with these elements ends up becoming devalued over time, whether the player's time and Thousands of hours for minor and trivial improvements, or for the value of the resources of the cards, or something else.This is a consequence.You therefore do not want to create this stream of free content that destroys it. economy and the value of people's time. "Lest all this be perceived as an attack on Hearthstone, this should not be the case. Newell recognizes that the giant of Blizzard is the current reference and says "they do a lot of smart things". But it is also clear that Valve is going in a very different direction with Artifact.

You do not want to create this stream of free stuff that destroys the economy and the value of people's time – Newell

What Valve does not do are numbers, but if we talk to the event staff, it looks like there will be some kind of entry editing that will give you a bunch of cards and more content, much like Overwatch asks you. the basic game to enter the door. Beyond that, you can buy and crack packages as usual, which, according to Newell, is determined to make Valve a spectable event. The money you pay in a pack will be used in part to fund major tournaments in the same way that the sales of The Compendium and Battle Pass each year inflate the prize pool of The International. Talking about esports, Valve is already aligning a big house with a $ 1 million prize pool.

It remains to be seen how easy Artifact will be for spectators. After my game test, we had a tournament between well-known card game professionals that I do not have the right to name. Without knowing Valve's closed beta test meta, it was hard to follow the back and forth without detailed explanations from the developers. But their enthusiasm was contagious. The last series included zany games in which the designers shouted extremely divergent lines of play, the only way for the pro to choose something else. It is this potential for heated debate that, in my opinion, suggests that Artifact could have a reach as a sport. If this happens, I expect the visualization in the client is the solution, so that Valve can expose all kinds of interesting statistics on each deck. Something that Hearthstone fans have been begging for forever.

The good kind of chance?

Of course, any mention of esports and card games will please some readers in the aisles. And look, I understand. I have lived the meta of Hearthstone, Yogg-Saron. I asked Garfield about the role that RNG should play in Artifact, and his answer was as expected: yes, the game is random, because it's a card game and that luck can create exciting moments, but he talked about the kind of effects RNG The artifacts used are those that can be controlled and mitigated by skilled players. In his opinion, it's the right kind of RNG. What he would say, but keep in mind that he is literally Richard Garfield, and Magic does not tend to be slaughtered by high flying randomly in the same way that Hearthstone.

Also, do not forget that I base my observations on a sample of two games, but none of the cards I encountered seemed insignificant in terms of GNA. The most notable is a spell called Eclipse, which triggers a 3 damage round, the number of which depends on the number of turns that the blue card of the hero Luna spent on board. So it 's pretty random, but also the type of hazard that you can navigate when trying to create a chart state that will probably give you the best chance of landing the bolts where you want it. The other type of chance comes from the fact that the creep eventually breed and the items you receive during each phase of shopping. But so brilliant as the Blink Dagger (it gives a +2 hero attack and allows you to teleport another way), in terms of impact do not being offered a Blink Dagger will not be what will cost you the game. Your ability to steer the heroes and cards you have chosen on three lines, pivoting as needed into strategies, will be the most determining factor in determining whether you win or lose.

Playful design

There is so much more to say, but I have the impression of having a little emptied my skull. I must note that this looks fabulous, thanks to the Source 2 engine. Each piece of game art is new, and the style is bold and consistent, as evidenced by the right click on a map for the Enlarge to the size of the screen. Similarly, spot effects and animations for large spells are already impressive. I especially liked Zeus's spell, which sees the camera tilt down and sneak on all three lanes as lightning explodes and gives the heroes goose bumps. The most popular piece of visual design, however, is undoubtedly the brazen devils who sit on each player's deck, slipping between the hallways with you and gesturing wildly as the clock turns. I imagine that Valve will add a considerable pile to her fortune similar to Smaug when she will start selling alternative versions of these.

That said, I'm not part of Valve with the slightest idea that Artifact is the puncture of the money I've already seen predicting. Far from there. At first, Newell said Valve wanted Artifact to make card games what Half-Life 2 did for solo action games. It's an incredible claim to make. Scandalous, almost. Unless you are Valve and you actually have made do Half-Life 2 and now you create a digital card game with Richard freaking Garfield. This is just the first shot of this brilliant pick. There are a lot of things to clean up, especially with regard to the parsability of the user interface, but I can not wait to see and play more at Artifact. My headache is already toned down, but not the smile.