Artifact: What Went Wrong?

Some things that weren&#x27;t covered in this article.<p>The beta players said that Valve largely ignored their feedback, and only made trivial changes. Richard Garfield said in an interview that people consistently didn&#x27;t like some aspects of Artifact, but that him and his team knew what was best for the game, so they mostly disregarded complaints about RNG and some cards being frustrating to play against.<p>There were unrealistic expectations about Artifact. Some of the people in the beta couldn&#x27;t stop singing its praises, calling it the best game ever made. After launch, one of the other beta testers said that a lot of the people publicly praising the game had privately said that they were trying to use the hype around a new Valve game to launch a twitch&#x2F;youtube career, and they didn&#x27;t actually like the game. There were also features present in the beta that had been silently cut before release, and some game breaking bugs that were present in the beta, and never got fixed.

As a huge CCG buff (top 10-100 finishes in YGO, Hearthstone, MTGA), I tried to get into Artifact for ~80hrs. There are some really great things buried in the game:<p>1. The heroes add a bit of consistency to draw RNG. The equipment to upgrade them was also pretty cool.<p>2. The three lanes set up can create some crazy mind gaming &#x2F; outplay comebacks.<p>3. The draft experience was fantastic. The color restrictions of the heroes was a bit less punishing than MTG but still required some thought.<p>---<p>Unfortunately there were WAY too many issues for the game to survive:<p>1. Expense was way too high to play constructed. No one is going to pay ~$60 for a single deck in an unproven game.<p>2. The RNG was too obvious. It doesn&#x27;t matter how skill based the game actually was when a significant portion of games were decided by coin flip attacks. The frustration will drive people away.<p>3. Game length. 20 minutes is just too long to spend with Artifacts simple mechanics and RNG losses.<p>4. Progression. There was no meaningful rewards for playing. Keeper drafts were prohibitively expensive. Getting packs naturally was just too slow to feel like you&#x27;d ever be able to make a decent deck. Competitive ranking was non-existent at release.<p>I actually think an Artifact re-launch could be successful.

There’s something missing here. The insiders club created by the closed beta. Only famous personalities were allowed access.<p>Enormous hype leading up to the launch was wasted by gating the majority of players into watching streams.<p>This led to the creation and widespread awareness of a meta game before non-casual players could even touch the game. Arguably, one of the most fun times to play a game is during launch, before spikes know what to netdeck and most are clowning around.

The common comparison with Artifact is with Dota 2, as it&#x27;s the IP that Artifact was based off of.<p>They&#x27;re also both &#x27;complex&#x27; games. Complex in the sense of having lots of intricate mechanics that make up the game state. Dota 2 has its reliable vs. unreliable gold mechanics, while Artifact has its nuanced system of keywords and three lanes.<p>However, I would argue that having high complexity in a game is fine. What&#x27;s more important in games like these is feedback on every individual decision.<p>In Dota 2, there are clear mini-success and mini-fail states that build up over the course of a game. Destroy a tower, kill a hero, eliminate a Rax. These are clear moments of feedback that unequivocally gives Players an advantage.<p>But in Artifact, these same decisions all had to be interpreted. Only the language between the games was the same. For instance, killing a Hero or a Tower wouldn&#x27;t necessarily be the correct decision. Even typically simple decisions like &#x27;buffing a Hero&#x27; or &#x27;winning a combat trade&#x27; had to be weighed against everything else happening in the game. Every board state resisted simple answers.<p>This ambiguity was both Artifact&#x27;s greatest strength and its greatest downfall. At its best, Artifact was a game in its own class. No easy answers and a high volume of meaningful decision making made for a really unique card game. It was the game that ruined Hearthstone and MTG for me, as they started to feel too &#x27;slow&#x27; in comparison.<p>But, good luck introducing anyone to the game. Good luck trying to get better at it either. If every decision has to be interpreted (especially when the results of decisions can be delayed for multiple turns), how is any player realistically going to get better at the game? It&#x27;s no wonder that so many people bounced off the game.

I enjoyed the point about tutorials. As far as tutorials go, it was maybe the best I&#x27;ve seen. At some point though, no matter if I know I can take 1 of 10 actions, I still have to make a decision and I had no idea which one to make or how to model my thinking to help me.<p>I think if you look at a comparison like Dota or League, whenever a new player is being given an explanation of the game, they are told to just &quot;last-hit&quot; the minions for gold. This is sort of mini-game within the game and allows players to feel like they are achieving something while also improving their skills. It creates simple gameplay in a complex game. Without simple actions or choices to improve at the game starts complex and remains that way throughout. This creates a high barrier to an intuitive understanding of the game, and I think intuitively people understand whether a game is fun or not.

I recently started playing Mythgard - it seems a bit like artifact _done right_. It has the same ups artifact: grid-like play, satisfying combinations and outcomes, clever sacrifices and distractions, but doesn&#x27;t rid the player of control: you can select what to attack and when to attack, most cards don&#x27;t have any delays and the whole game feels like &quot;you are playing&quot; it.<p>The biggest issue with Artifact was that it wasn&#x27;t an enjoyable game for big majority - it felt that you&#x27;re sitting in the back seat while the game unrolls and often you don&#x27;t get any useful feedback. The absurd amount of RNG, eventhough managable, made people feel bad and unsatisfied.<p>At the end of the day no one wants to play a game which isn&#x27;t satisfying and Artifact was exactly that.

It seems like the common wisdom in Artifact is that the economic model was bad. I think Zvi is correct in saying, Artifact was just not a good enough game.<p>Personally, I enjoy fairly complex games, and I’m willing to spend money to try games out. But I just found that Artifact was way too complicated to be enjoyable. It is hard to follow what’s going on while watching a stream on Twitch.<p>If Artifact was fun but expensive, it could have found a core that loved playing it. But no, there are more people streaming and watching the indie card game Slay the Spire (which isn’t free to play) nowadays on Twitch, than there are people watching Artifact.<p>So I don’t think the biggest problem was the price; the biggest problem was the gameplay.

This article captures a lot of the issues that I had with Artifact. I ~really~ wanted to like it; I&#x27;ve very fond of other Garfield games like Magic, Android Netrunner, and Keyforge and had a friend that was very excited about the game. But in the end, it didn&#x27;t hook me.<p>The issues that stuck out to me:<p>1. The complexity, particularly when watching a stream&#x2F;game where you&#x27;re not intimately familiar with the decks in use.<p>2. Lack of a budget format.<p>3. Valve failed to move in the right direction when there were problems. Games have recovered from much worse launches, but Valve responded too little, too late to the issues.

&gt; Artifact had in effect a perfectly reasonable economic model, but players did not see it that way.<p>CCG player stockholm syndrome is why we can&#x27;t have nice things.

I think Reason 2 really hits the nail on the head. Very few multiplayer get away with properly rewarding player skill. The new Quake seems to have the same problem. Most of the population consists of veterans, which makes it so that new players have a hard time getting opponents at their level, thus creating a nasty feedback loop. Getting into Artifact today would probably be a similar experience. I think it is a peculiar trend, as single player games seems to be going in the opposite direction with titles like Dark Souls, the plethoras of insanely difficult indie titles and speedrunning like practices growing more popular by the day.<p>The most efficient way to adress this &quot;problem&quot;, while still keeping the qualities of a high skill ceiling, seems to be scale and strict matchmaking. With that in mind, it is sad that Artifact never got off. The evenly matched games that I had during the first week of release where some of the most exciting experiences I have had.

&gt; Dota 2 takes dozens of hours before one is able to play the game as anything other than a training exercise<p>Hundreds even before it is consistently fun. But people have been playing Dota for well over a decade and it&#x27;s pretty common for newbies to have fun because they have someone good on their team that carries to the point where the new player gets to feel the magic of being OP in Dota. I think that&#x27;s a big part of the complexity problem with Artifact - everyone I&#x27;ve ever seen get into Dota 2 without having played Dota 1 had a friend who was good enough to make the games fun.

I personally found the disparity between my individual opinion and the crowd consensus was really interesting. It seemed to be a great game that fixed all of my gripes with hearthstone and magic. There was just this tidal wave of negative opinion that seemed to come in large part from people that didn&#x27;t understand or in some cases never played the game themselves.

For me it was the economic model.<p>I play Magic the Gathering (Arena) regularly and own and enjoy Slay the Spire as well. I was really interested in Artifact, but it seemed cost-prohibitive to play it casually so I never tried it.

For me the business model was the biggest turn-off.<p>If I wanted some big CCG company to take my lunch money, I could always invest in an established platform already, like Hearthstone.<p>What I&#x27;d consider an interesting alternative, would be a less greedy game with an initial AAA entry fee ($60), and then nothing else. Just, nothing else. It&#x27;s financially viable, if a giant production like The Witcher 3 can profit this way, any card game can.<p>If they really wanted, they could introduce maybe some cosmetic card back covers, announcers, avatars etc. in a silly gem shop I&#x27;ll never visit anyway, but the game loop and the outer loop of getting new cards and deck building should be free. In fact, for such competitive games, it should offer no pay2win option at all. Let me play the game, win and get stuff after every match, feel that I&#x27;m progressing through the game without ever having to worry about my IRL wallet. If I win, I win, if I lose, I know that I lost fair and square and I must improve.<p>There are enough venues in this world for pissing contests over money already, why would I ever want to concern myself over real money in a virtual world. For most genres of games paywalling the progression is pretty much unheard of (except for maybe (bi-)yearly expansion packs), yet for CCGs this is considered normal, and no company ever tries to flip the table.<p>Maybe there was no demand for yet another money-grabbing CCG.

What went wrong? Valve released a soulless cash-in trying to capitalize on the card-game-with-kid-friendly-aesthetics trend, a day late and a dollar short. The market responded accordingly.

The fundamental big mistake was having 3 boards at once.<p>I have no idea how they thought that would be an acceptable design given that nowadays it&#x27;s well known that mainstream people are unwilling to learn any interface that is even slightly complex.

IMHO there are some parallels to the MMO Wildstar here. Both are products aimed directly at the most hardcore fans, but architected such that you need a reasonably large playerbase to sustain the game. The developers refused to water down the game mechanics for the filthy casuals, and as a result made a game that was absolutely perfect for a niche of game players too tiny to maintain multiplayer critical mass. Shortly after release the game implodes.

That&#x27;s a very long article without even a single sentence about what Artifact is.

&quot;Randy Buehler reported it took him about two weeks to start understanding things well enough to begin having fun.&quot;<p>When someone like him has such trouble understanding and enjoying the game, reaching and captivating a broad enough audience for profitability is a tall order.

I hope that Artifact isn&#x27;t abandoned by Valve and they spend time to update (refactor?) the game to make it more enjoyable. I never even had the chance to play because the narrative surrounding the game was so murky and then everything fell apart.<p>I was and still am excited to play it but not until it&#x27;s ready. On the other hand Valve&#x27;s team making Underlords is doing a very good job. Valve still has passion and talent.

almost off topic - i think every card game fan should take at least 15 minutes to look at prismata: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prismata.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prismata.net&#x2F;</a>

An interesting perspective would have been to compare it with the relative success of autochess, even though to my eye it looks also complex and confusing.

TBH I saw this coming at the reveal premiere when everyone was boo&#x27;ing at it.

I&#x27;m convinced that the problem is the economic model. F2P is just such an overwhelmingly positive and casual friendly model that any other failures may be attributed to that. It may be that the other points have some merit, but there is no way to know if they do until the paywall is removed.