Editor's note: This feature's two videos include transcripts, and many of their details appear in the article's text and galleries. So however you want to learn about Valve's latest video game, Ars has your back.
BELLEVUE, Washington—Right as this article goes live, Valve Software is taking the wraps off its next video game, Artifact, in a major way. At this weekend's PAX West expo in Seattle, lines of eager fans are currently waiting to play the first public demo of Valve's online trading card game (TCG), and they have good reason to be excited.
I say that not just because of the game's pedigree—designed in part by the creator of the world's biggest TCG, Magic: The Gathering, and supercharged by the fantasy world and characters of the Valve smash Dota 2. I say it because Ars already went hands-on with this PAX West demo, thanks to an exclusive invite to Valve's headquarters ahead of the show. I had a blast. Plus, unlike PAX's attendees, I had quite the guide sitting over my shoulder: MtG's creator and Artifact lead designer Richard Garfield.
With so much access, I took the opportunity to extensively break down the game in its early state ahead of a November 28 launch on Windows, Mac, and Linux (with an iOS and Android version coming in 2019). So if you can't get to PAX West this weekend, have no fear: my interview with the development team and my narrated look at how the game plays might actually be better than waiting in a PAX Artifact line.
A post-token world
"It's a card game," Garfield says as he watches me mouse over card-draw options in the middle of combat. "You should always draw more cards."
Garfield may be an experienced and thoughtful game designer, but he's not a gentle instructor. I have to goad him into describing exactly how the game works. In my first moments playing the game (which I'd briefly sampled at an event in March), he urged me to hit the corpse-lined ground running.
"Artifact is an electronic trading card game," Garfield says when pressed. "You assemble a deck, and you're competing to be the first to tear down two out of three of your opponents towers. Or, if you tear down the same one twice, thats OK."
At the most zoomed-out level, every Artifact match begins like this: with three lanes of combat, across which you will arrange five heroes in a mission to destroy towers. Sure sounds a lot like how Dota 2 works, doesn't it? (Not shown here: the "flop" of your creeps that are randomly added and arranged between every round.) Now we're zoomed on a lane. Based on the attack, armor, and health stats on the board, the game will show you how the round will end should no other cards be played or mana/gold be spent. The bottom player has one unblocked hero, who will directly attack the top player's defense tower. Both players still have all three points of mana for this lane, which they can spend on any three-or-less card in their hand that matches the color of any hero(es) in the same lane. The top player is out of luck if he doesn't have any black cards in that value. Tap the "pass gong" in the bottom-right corner if you would rather not play any of your cards. This flashy animation is a result of Luna's incredible hero-specific ability "Eclipse." Sometimes, due to sacrifices in previous rounds, you may wind up with zero creeps or heroes in a lane, at which point your opponent can wail on your tower. (Much like when things go bad in a Dota 2 match.) But again, like that game, sometimes letting one tower go is worth it in terms of swinging your momentum to the two other lanes, as you only need to drop two towers to win. (When you destroy a tower, by the way, it comes back with 80 HP instead of the standard 40 HP. Your foe can just hang around and re-destroy that boosted "ancient tower" to count as a second downed tower and win a match.) The top row represents equippable items that you can add to your heroes through the course of the game, and this zoom shows that the equipped sword and ring boost this character's attack and health stats.
From there, Garfield starts immediately describing Artifact's differences from other TCGs, both tabletop and electronic, without breaking down a lot of the genre's elements, traditions, and quirks. For the uninitiated: in games like Wizards of the Coast's MtG and Blizzard's Hearthstone, players are expected to build a deck of cards that have war-like powers, including damage, healing, and armor. The game has some rigid rules, including an expectation that you defend your half of the table while attacking the other half, but gameplay is largely governed by the cards in a player's deck—whether either side's cards emphasize offense or defense, quick assaults or drawn-out tactics, and so on.
He points out his game's major differences from other electronic TCGs: "Any number of creatures in play at the same time," "any number of cards in your hand," and three distinct-yet-connected arenas in which to play and deal with cards. As a result, every Artifact match unfurls over a giant virtual table that wouldn't fit in an average, real-life apartment.
Garfield cannot stress enough how much the possibility of tons of cards drove his dreams to make an electronic TCG. One point of inspiration came from watching a real-life MtG match in which one player had to deal with too many unwieldy components.
"Somebody had like 30 creatures or something ridiculous," Garfield says. "They had all these tokens. I thought, a computer can handle this better than my tabletop, so why cant I have that experience playing on a computer?"
He's careful to praise other electronic TCGs, particularly Hearthstone and CD Projekt Red's Gwent. Garfield calls them "marvelous" and "fresh." He also makes no bones about what he misses in those and other electronic games: depth and scope.
"Electronic card games that had been made up to that point tended to be much simpler than paper card games," Garfield says. "That seemed like a shame, because you have this resource, a computer, which could handle much more complicated things than a tabletop." This was around 2015, Garfield says, at which point his former Wizards of the Coast colleague Chris Green had been working at Valve. (Green has since left the developer.) Through that existing friendship, Garfield eventually brought a cards-on-computer design document to Valve's offices.
His early idea had no ties to Dota, or fantasy worlds, or even any existing IP. Instead, it focused more squarely on the reasons MtG's digital versions, up to that point, had left Garfield wanting. In particular, he thought MtG's system of interruptions didn't translate well to online play—"you constantly have to be on the alert for what your opponent is doing," he says. Other gameplay elements were changed for online versions to "make the game simpler."
"The game I was presenting [to Valve] was more of, lets take the bounds away," Garfield says.
"That narrows you"
We already knew Artifact's cards will look cool… …but for the first time, Valve is also providing high-res samples of how the game's fancy art looks in a card's "battle sleeve," complete with health and damage indicators. (This art was drawn by artist Forrest Imel.) They even gave us the tooltip text for the character-specific ability. This one is reactive, so it just happens automatically, as opposed to requiring a toggle and a cooldown. Some card art from our previous visit to check out Artifact. This is the Ursa-specific spell card "Enrage," again by artist Forrest Imel… …only now we get to see exactly how this hero-specific spell works in combat. A relatively expensive piece of equipment, at seven gold. Slightly more expensive equipment card, as it adds cumulative "charges" to the field of battle. "Chain Frost," by Wisnu Tan. "Crippling Blow," by an artist who goes by the name Daarken. "Dark Seer," by Stepan Alekseev. "Hound of War," by Lake Hurwitz. "Keenfolk Turret," by Robbie Trevino. "Grazing Shot," by Kieran Yanner. "Day at the Track," by Ji Hun Lee.
After mulling over Garfield's design document and getting excited at the idea of enlisting MtG's creator to make a Valve game, a newly formed team didn't take long to focus this prototype's design on the Dota universe.
"You have to look at the full spectrum of options that were available to us," Artifact project lead Brandon Reinhart says. "We could make a new IP, and theres a lot of cost and risk associated with that. We could use one of our existing IPs, and when we looked at those options, Dota made a lot of sense."
Both Reinhart and Garfield emphasize that Dota afforded the design team room to invent a lot of ideas while still creating some boundaries. "Dota is an open book," Reinhart says. "We can add new chapters. And a card game desires to create new chapters. Each set, each expansion, wants to explore the world."
I pressed Garfield about his thoughts on licensed card games, which he had spoken about in the past—saying that the likes of the Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh TCGs rose above similar fare during a late '90s and early '00s boom. "Where [other games] really run into problems is where [a license] is not broad," he says. "That narrows you. Also, where the person who is in charge of that doesnt want you to add a bunch of things, because it doesnt fit with the lore theyve already got. Dota was very open to adding things, and at the same time, it had enough tools there that you could populate something like the card game we were working on without any problem."
A sample round of combat from my tutorial mission, which was probably helped by stupid tutorial AI. I have eight mana to spend; let's start with a one-point card. It's black, and I have a black hero who is still alive in this lane, so I can use it. Before combat resolves, heroes and creeps alike absorb all damage, unless any card has a "piercing" perk (which mine at the bottom don't). But killing this guy frees my hero to do a full 10 points of tower damage. Seven mana left. Let's spend it on a black-card spell in my hand, in this case a turret… …which is now visible just to the right of my tower's "28" health. I activate it this round to shoot at a hero or creep in any lane; I choose this one. (The power will regenerate in four turns.) Even though this lane's "dire" tower (the exploding one) is toast, my turret will remain active if the game isn't over, since the first destroyed tower transforms into a doubly strong, 80-point tower.
Thus, the team immediately had access to a range of existing "hero" characters, and as a result, players' card decks revolve around these heroes who land on the table of play as attacker cards next to simpler, gruntier warriors, known in the Dota world as "creeps." The majority of your card deck is devoted to "spell" cards, and these are all color-coded, just like the hero cards. Each round of play spans across the table's three arenas, or "lanes," and in any given lane, you can only play spell cards if they match a hero's color in the same lane. (You also have to manage "mana" points, much like in MtG, but Artifact's mana is a bit simpler. It refreshes and grows by one point between every round.)
Magic's "reaction" system was modified, giving players a pool of time to use whenever it's their turn to play a card or spell in a lane. Turns are taken and alternated via an "initiative" marker, and a second currency, borrowed from Dota, factored in: gold. You can sacrifice your cards as a defensive maneuver to spare your all-important towers from damage, but doing so gives your opponent more gold currency to spend on "equipment" cards. Once these are bought, they go into a player's hand—and can be played whenever appropriate, without any mana requirements.
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Ars Technica
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