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So what actually happened to this game? I feel CCG like this are usually a license to print money
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Apr 19, 2023 02:22
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR4jPtrDCLo
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Apr 19, 2023 02:23
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Alctel posted:So what actually happened to this game? I feel CCG like this are usually a license to print money It required too much thought while being too simple. Also 20 dollars for a videogame? UNACCEPTABLE!
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Apr 19, 2023 02:35
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Alctel posted:So what actually happened to this game? I feel CCG like this are usually a license to print money I guess I'd say they loudly pushed it as more complicated and difficult to play than competitors, which there didn't turn out to be a niche for, plus their galaxy brain ideas for the card economy didn't turn out to have much appeal, plus it wasn't free to play
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Apr 19, 2023 02:36
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Alctel posted:So what actually happened to this game? I feel CCG like this are usually a license to print money Garfield phoned in the design and the first set was incredibly dull and unbalanced and they did poo poo like go "Oh you wanted progression so you could earn free packs and play tickets like some sort of F2P game? Okay, there's now five free tickets and packs on a level-up progression system. The free packs and tickets are one-time only. Also we took them out of the 20 dollar buy in packs and tickets so now we're making you earn the items you already spent money to purchase. You're welcome."
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Apr 19, 2023 02:38
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I feel like the biggest nail in the coffin was just that the cards weren't very interesting. There was very little synergy between the cards - it was difficult to use one card to set up another, for example. Keyforge (also designed by Garfield at around the same time) was a great counter-example - almost every card could be used alongside one or two others to get better effects. Stun an enemy with one card then on the same turn kill all stunned monsters with another card, or whatever. Artifact had very little of that, most of its cards were insulated and didn't mix well together. You could have a lot of cards that did similar things, but they all just acted on their own. This wound up making many games / decks feel boring and samey. Yeah there's a lot to be said about the readability of the game or the balance or whatever, but I think that's all stuff that could be fixed with patches or bypassed if people cared enough. But the cards just weren't interesting to play with or against.
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Apr 19, 2023 03:04
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it was a game that was sold for 20 bucks, with a marketplace to buy/sell cards, which already makes it less player friendly than basically any of it's online counterparts, and then the actual gameplay felt less like a complete game and more a first pass beta.
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Apr 19, 2023 03:14
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Also one of the core mechanics of any card game, attacking your opponent was literally decided randomly by how the cards moved on the board. Combine that with just outright ignoring one of the 3 lanes was usually your best bet to victory. Also you could just use Axe who was easily the best character in the game except he was 20 dollars so that pay to win aspect was heavy. In a weird way, Artifact cracked the perfect perception of Valve to its audience. It no longer could pretend to be that perfect studio on a hill with this albatross of a game hanging off its neck. Buckwheat Sings fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 03:21
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I feel like maybe online card games were just kind of a fad anyway, it seems like the survivors now are mostly games that pre-existed hearthstone. I guess there's Marvel™ Snap
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Apr 19, 2023 03:21
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Kinda surprised this isn't Steam Deck verified.
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Apr 19, 2023 03:49
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TheFlyingLlama posted:it was a game that was sold for 20 bucks, with a marketplace to buy/sell cards, which already makes it less player friendly than basically any of it's online counterparts, and then the actual gameplay felt less like a complete game and more a first pass beta. tbh for some games/players/formats, a marketplace like this can be insanely effective. it's not as true as it used to be, but when I was playing MTGO a meta Pauper deck could be bought for like, literally five dollars. looking at recent pauper decklists, the deck price has gone up - but for a lot of decks it's just because they want some commons that are in insanely limited circulation. the meta burn decklist I'm looking at wants 34 dollars worth of Great Furnaces... to enable one burn spell. you could probably skip those two with a few cheap substitutions, and if you're not worried about the sideboard, the deck is a grand total of ten bucks - and if MTGO did reprints like MTGA, it would easily be like, five, maybe ten bucks max for the meta version. at the end of the day I'd rather play something like Netrunner, where you just get all the cards at once, and a F2P version of that kept afloat by cosmetics and tournaments and poo poo would be much better. but capitalism disagrees, and at the end of the day if I want to play digital CCGs with arbitrary and artificial supply issues. I'd rather play the one that lets me trade or outright buy the deck I want rather than having to slowly build up to it by grinding out weekly missions or busying boosetd
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Apr 19, 2023 07:08
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Buckwheat Sings posted:Also one of the core mechanics of any card game, attacking your opponent was literally decided randomly by how the cards moved on the board. Combine that with just outright ignoring one of the 3 lanes was usually your best bet to victory. The whole point of the creeps in Dota is that they're extremely predictable and manipulatable, lol quote:Also you could just use Axe who was easily the best character in the game except he was 20 dollars so that pay to win aspect was heavy. Well, until then they nerfed Axe, which lost them the collector whale audience. Really just a perfect storm of burning every single possible demographic, remarkable stuff.
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Apr 19, 2023 08:16
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Buckwheat Sings posted:In a weird way, Artifact cracked the perfect perception of Valve to its audience. It no longer could pretend to be that perfect studio on a hill with this albatross of a game hanging off its neck. It also means Valve is even less likely to make new games or take any risks with their current ones. Look at Counter-Strike 2, which is pretty much just a patch for CS:GO. They were clearly terrified of changing too much and ruining it.
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Apr 19, 2023 08:24
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The decision to make the card game based on the entirely F2P MOBA so expensive was baffling, but the launch numbers were actually fairly respectable so there were people who were prepared to buy in. I think the issue was more that the game was, on a fundamental level, not fun.
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Apr 19, 2023 10:13
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Alctel posted:So what actually happened to this game? I feel CCG like this are usually a license to print money Plenty of card games never really attract much an audience and then quietly shut down. This one just couldn't pull off the quietly part because it was so high profile. TheFlyingLlama posted:it was a game that was sold for 20 bucks, with a marketplace to buy/sell cards, which already makes it less player friendly than basically any of it's online counterparts, and then the actual gameplay felt less like a complete game and more a first pass beta. Yeah, I feel like if there was a decent way to earn cards as an f2p player it could have hung on to a core audience of 12 year olds for a pretty long time. But maybe not, there's a lot of competition these days. That and the game just wasn't very fun.
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Apr 19, 2023 10:53
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It's pretty funny how Riot copied everything Valve did but made it all work. Like Teamfight Tactics, the autochess that's pretty much Dota Underlords but way more popular, and Legends of Runeterra, a card game that's very much alive today unlike Artifact.
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Apr 19, 2023 10:54
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Double Bill posted:It's pretty funny how Riot copied everything Valve did but made it all work. Like Teamfight Tactics, the autochess that's pretty much Dota Underlords but way more popular, and Legends of Runeterra, a card game that's very much alive today unlike Artifact. LoR is far more Hearthstone than Artifact. Valve were trying to do something different even if they hosed it and played it far too safe with the card interactions.
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Apr 19, 2023 11:37
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Alctel posted:So what actually happened to this game? I feel CCG like this are usually a license to print money The first run of cards were all kind of uninteresting - like a good CCG should make you feel like you’re somehow getting away with breaking the game - and apparently the plan was to build up to that. In many ways it was like the culmination of all of Valve’s slightly iffy, kind of naive libertarian approach to just about everything, especially the gold they’d struck previously in creating whole new economies, but overlooking the fact that those economies usually emerged from established good games - They created a luxury, pay-to-unlock card game for the Microsoft millionaire California golf course demographic - Garfield kept saying in the marketing that he wanted your fancy deck to be like owning a nice set of golf clubs), but with the Dota IP, which is pretty much exclusively popular due to people with no disposable income in mostly Slavic countries. There isn’t really enough of a middle in that Venn diagram to sustain the game through its rocky launch. Nobody wanted to own virtual items for an unproven game taking place in an IP famously associated with only ever monetising cosmetics rather than mechanics. And then, in another instance of valve economy whiplash, the beta period targeted almost exclusively streamers and pro gamers whose careers were completely entwined with the e-sports and virtual economies of Dota, which meant that people were incentivised to hype up the game and both stay within Valve’s inner circle, and draw enough of an audience - and provide no meaningful feedback to the developer, because everything was so hype and glowing. This also caused the game to have no sticking power because the moment all those streamers went back to Dota, Artifact disappeared from the conversation. Typing all that out its crazy how similar this all is to the problems with NFTs.
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Apr 19, 2023 12:02
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It wasn't a good game, basically nobody liked playing the game for more than ten hours. Monetization can explain why a game wasn't more popular, it doesn't explain why everyone who bought in stopped playing within a month. Marvel SNAP took the two best concepts from artifact (initiative and three lanes) and made it a billion times better and they have their own hosed up creative monetization but the game is good so it's popular. Artifact was exhausting 40 minute games with random hero placement and arrow points deciding whether your hero won the game or did nothing.
No Wave fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 12:32
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No Wave posted:It wasn't a good game, basically nobody liked playing the game for more than ten hours. Monetization can explain why a game wasn't more popular, it doesn't explain why everyone who bought in stopped playing within a month. Marvel SNAP took the two best concepts from artifact (initiative and three lanes) and made it a billion times better and they have their own hosed up creative monetization but the game is good so it's popular. Artifact was exhausting 40 minute games with random hero placement and arrow points deciding whether your hero won the game or did nothing. Yeah I don’t think anyone here is saying it was a good game. What I mean is I think Valve were planning to be Valve about it and just kind of hammer out the kinks via audience feedback over time, which is what they’d always done, but they released and monetised the game in a way where it couldn’t sustain itself through that process.
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Apr 19, 2023 13:04
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Honestly, people are willing to put up with really bad monetization schemes if the core game is fun enough. It wouldn't have mattered if Artifact was entirely free and gave you every card and had zero micro transactions - the game just wasn't fun, so nobody played it.
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Apr 19, 2023 14:13
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It was a good game
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Apr 19, 2023 14:28
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Buckwheat Sings posted:In a weird way, Artifact cracked the perfect perception of Valve to its audience. It no longer could pretend to be that perfect studio on a hill with this albatross of a game hanging off its neck. I didnt finish it and people tell me i missed the best bit (8 hours in, theres a good boss battle that uses your mic creatively supposedly) but I feel this way about Half Life: Alyx too. i went back and tried to play it again recently and bounced off even harder. the VR gameplay is SO dire compared to its contemporaries and other than the pen in the first room and the boss i missed theres nothing creative going on. its VR garrys mod "horror" game where you toss things at slowly moving zombies and headcrabs and the terrible HL2 shooting is directly ported over without improvement and feels even worse in VR. theres not even any environmental lore, in a game where your face is inches from any wall. the only thing i remember positively about it is the lighting, it had some very nice lighting and shaders. imagine if everyone talked about how good Artifact is and how valve still got it but only 1% of gamers could play it to confirm
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Apr 19, 2023 14:33
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I was so loving hyped for Artifact. Everything coming out about it was glowing. It was the first new Valve game since forever. The art and animations were polished. The three-board idea was novel. Some guy called Garfield was getting name-dropped constantly. You could bet on Valve and this guy to make something to surpass Hearthstone and maybe even MTG. Valve News Network started covering Artifact almost exclusively. The last time I couldn't handle the hype was when I bought a beta key for Quake Champions. That game owned and I did not regret the purchase one bit. So I found a guy on eBay selling his Artifact beta key for like 60 bucks and snatched it up. I liked the "depth" and "complexity" on a surface level. For most of any match I couldn't tell who was winning. Eventually the random directions that creeps point screwed over one of us enough that someone won. After 3 rounds I realized how badly I had hosed up. This was a turning point for me in how I consume games. Other poo poo in gaming happened but it was a major factor in why I don't pre order games. I will never pay money to beta test a game again. If a game interests me and I know I will play it near launch, I avoid any media I can about it. No hype, no spoilers, and I get to have my own opinions and refund if it sucks poo poo. I don't trust Valve to just make good games by default anymore, and I went into Half Life: Alex completely blind, all for the better. Artifact hosed me up. Can't bring myself to run it once on my Steam Deck for a laugh. Heran Bago fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 15:12
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the biggest mistake was their marketing thumbs upping a game that rhymes with shartifact
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Apr 19, 2023 15:13
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Minera posted:the biggest mistake was their marketing thumbs upping a game that rhymes with shartifact Just go with fartifact. don’t portmanteau a portmanteau. You’re flying too close to the sun friend
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Apr 19, 2023 15:17
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has anyone posted Shartifart
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Apr 19, 2023 15:30
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It was a game that was in love with its concept over being an actually good game. The game board was unreadable due to the lane system. The secret shop was total poo poo and TP scrolls were busted. The way stats worked in the game made it almost impossible to balance heroes and their abilities. Artifact was 100% doomed to fail because it was a bunch of bad ideas taped together in a way that appeared cohesive at the surface level.
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Apr 19, 2023 15:36
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I'm still bummed it sucked. I'd rather buy the cards like a traditional TCG then futz with crafting or battlepass poo poo, and the game had some good ideas that rapidly got buried with cruft.
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Apr 19, 2023 15:39
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Also instead of adding the heroes from Artifact into dota they added a lot of dumb stupid lame ones like A Girl from the anime.
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Apr 19, 2023 16:32
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CodfishCartographer posted:I feel like the biggest nail in the coffin was just that the cards weren't very interesting. There was very little synergy between the cards - it was difficult to use one card to set up another, for example. Keyforge (also designed by Garfield at around the same time) was a great counter-example - almost every card could be used alongside one or two others to get better effects. Stun an enemy with one card then on the same turn kill all stunned monsters with another card, or whatever. Artifact had very little of that, most of its cards were insulated and didn't mix well together. You could have a lot of cards that did similar things, but they all just acted on their own. This wound up making many games / decks feel boring and samey. This is what I remember. I actually liked some of the core mechanics, but the cards were aggressively vanilla in design. Even the heroes, who should have been the exciting heart of asymetric deckbuilding, were often just stats with a staple CCG effect (deal 3 damage to target) as a separate, 'signature' card. I remember in their design blog for the (abandoned) overhaul, the developers wrote that they were now planning for all hero cards to have an ability. Avasculous fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 16:47
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CodfishCartographer posted:I feel like the biggest nail in the coffin was just that the cards weren't very interesting. There was very little synergy between the cards - it was difficult to use one card to set up another, for example. Keyforge (also designed by Garfield at around the same time) was a great counter-example - almost every card could be used alongside one or two others to get better effects. Stun an enemy with one card then on the same turn kill all stunned monsters with another card, or whatever. Artifact had very little of that, most of its cards were insulated and didn't mix well together. You could have a lot of cards that did similar things, but they all just acted on their own. This wound up making many games / decks feel boring and samey. Uninteresting is fine as long as your game requires very little thought to play at least for the first set of cards. Hearthstone, Marvel Snap.Hearthstone simply didn't have interesting cards while Marvel Snap uses/used (I assume they still do) interesting cards to get you to play daily.
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Apr 19, 2023 17:21
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The long haul.
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Apr 19, 2023 18:43
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Minera posted:the biggest mistake was their marketing thumbs upping a game that rhymes with shartifact When are you entering the million dollar tournament
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Apr 19, 2023 22:43
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Does anyone still have pictures of that physical version someone made of the Artifact board? I remember that looking cool at least.
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Apr 19, 2023 23:06
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Just play draft mode jeez. 🙄
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Apr 20, 2023 00:59
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artifact? i shartifactly know her!!!
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Jun 9, 2023 04:44
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collect one million a giant tournament next big steam release on the horizon shartifact!
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Aug 31, 2023 13:45
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Why was it called Artifact anyways?
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Nov 6, 2023 10:51
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Because they knew ahead of time it would be a relic of past failures
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Nov 6, 2023 11:01
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