The Failure of Artifact - Lane 2
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 มี.ค. 2024
- An Indie Dev and a AAA Dev discuss Artifact and how its design was unapproachable to new players.
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The average experience of an artifact player at launch was paying 20 dollars, getting absolutely trounced in the draft mode, then having zero to do in the game. No single-player content, no dailys.
Running out of things to do was so brutal. I wanted to play more, but felt like the game didn't want me to.
You could play against the cpu. And the single player experience was brilliant because of the randomization in the gameplay. What other single player content could there be?
I think a large factor you didn't quite address when it comes to the topic of how Artifact focuses on complex "mid-game" board states and doesn't have traditional agro and control archetypes is that a significant portion of the card game audience plays the games for their themes. Some people just like playing a bunch of goblins, others like drawing a bunch of cards, and some people like shooting down every creature the opponent plays. Artifact focused purely on the players who want to solve complex board states, which is kinda what the Reynad quote encapsulates.
So even if that part was absolutely amazing the game lost the interest of a lot of players because that's the only thing of interest the game offered.
Yep. I like the occasional complex board state. I don’t want EVERY GAME to feel like that. Playing Artifact was just exhausting.
Artifact both had an initial buy in, and also still had all the trapings of a physical tcg indluing routine expected paying to keep playing for entries into the draft mode or other competitive modes requiring tickets, it was offputting to online ccg players because it expected you to pay mroe upfront, and someone who liked physical tcgs, likes hvaing a physical product and not having the publisher taking a cut of everything they do with their cards. If Richard garfield was so adamant on the model, it shows how it was doomed to fail imo it inherits two cursed conflicting problems
I've tried multiple times to play Artifact, and I'm a big TCG player, but I've never actually managed to get thru an entire actual game. There's just so much going on, it feels like 3x as much as a normal card game, and I also feel like I have no idea what's going on or what actions I can take, and that experience keeps dragging on and on. The whole game just feels super overwhelming, and honestly I think that aspect alone could have sunk the game. I feel like I've learned more about Artifact from listening to you two than from playing the game itself. Every person I've asked to play the game and let me watch, got overwhelmed to the point where they asked me if they could stop.
The monetization problem was really bad - you buy into the game, play it a bit, oh wait to play more i need to pay more? Or play with zero stakes vs people who don't take it at all seriously because there are zero stakes?
Very easy to just quit because of this, which is exactly what I did.
There was also the shrinking hardcore problem in the modes with stakes. In order to reward winners the system is too punishing if you lose. This creates a feedback loop where the worst players lose too much, quit and stop, then the next worst players lose, quit and stop, and so on until nobody is playing the game. The need to pay more to play more made it very hard to stick around if you were losing which exacerbates this.
viewership seems like a meaty interesting topic for you guys to chew.
lots of current games are heavily benefiting from the impact of streamers having fun with the game and making it a good show vs the game being equally fun but having lesser ability to provide a good show out of it.
and there was always the factor of tournaments and audiences as well as party/couch friend spectating.
i feel like moving forward, in general for all game genres and in specific for some genres, studios can benefit a lot from adding some design traits that improve or facilitate the "show" facet of the game.
Rule one: never develop with the intent to be an e-sport. This will cause the dev to optimize the fun out of the game.
Rule two: no one likes randomness. They will accept a small, controllable amount.
These seem to be Artifact's biggest errors.
Pro level players despise randomness and do everything in their power to reduce its effects. Meanwhile, it sounds like Garfield did everything in his power to maximize randomness short of having the game decided by a die roll.
Richard’s talk about luck vs skill is really interesting and informs his opinion on the matter. It does seem a bit like swimming upstream though.
@@distractionmakers I really like the mana system and deck building in MTG. The variance forces you to account for it in deck building, having only 60 cards, having 4 of important cards, having low mana curves, having the right amount of lands. It tests your deckbuilding knowledge. And it respects your agency as a player.
Rolling is another form of variance that I think players have some amount of experience with, from either DnD, or Warhammer like you said. But I think random targeting or random board states would feel weird, because it takes your agency away. I want to choose, even if I get mana screwed or roll a Nat 1.
"Players are always right about how they feel and always wrong about why they feel so." :P Lots of players like rolling the dice, stealing wins, getting lucky, and getting to play novel situations. There are definitely bad feelings that can be avoided, but just making a game more deterministic doesn't necessarily make it more fun, satisfying, or skillful. Edge and game speed are probably important considerations for card games. If the best player only has a 55% winrate against a typical player, and weekly tournaments can only fit 3-4 rounds, tournament winners will be from a wide variety of skill levels, which defies player expectations.
I think those rules have a lot to do with who is going to play your game. To use Mark Rosewater's terminology. "Spike" (hyper competitive player) absolutely loves the idea of e-sport designed-game and dislikes randomness (especially output randomness). Which is great is your game is sustainable on just Spikes and spike loves your game. But "Timmy/Tammy" (Wants to experience cool stuff) and "Johnny/Jenny" (Wants to do crazy thing) aren't really going to stick around in that environment at all.
Rule 2 isn't true, though. Like, look at Hearthstone. There are people who like its gameplay
Artifact failing was hugely dissapointing. Despite all the long lived TCGs have thousands of viable cards in their pool for decades now, artifact was exploring design spaces that others hadn't. The biggest hurdle I saw that new players hit and nearly instantly give up on was 1. paying for both game and cards and 2. the randomness of the opening heroes, where they point, and who got placed before them. i think people seeing that their Meepo or another "wimpy" low P/T creature getting turn 0'd placed against axe, a high P/T hero with armor who kills wimps in one shot, and being able to do nothing about it unless they had the right low mana card, made them instantly feel the worst kind of dissatisfaction that can come from RNG. You mention that theres still more to the game, theres more layers that happen afterwards and i agree, but just the mental image of loading a game, seeing that the game dumped your meepo facing death, your black assassin fighting a creep instead of their hero, and the last lane with two heroes trading, its just instant bitterness. And this is even before any of the other mechanics, cards, hero and hero abilities, etc come into play.
The irony of Garfield and team wanting a game to not be “pay-to-win,” yet effectively making a game with only 1 or 2 viable deck builds where all cards are locked behind payments and rarity. I’m sure facing the mono-red “Time of Triumph” was the death knell for anyone who didn’t want to drop more than the initial cost of the game. The ToT card itself was worth more than the buy in, and the game itself was made to simply be a cash cow considering Valve gets a cut of all market sales of their own e-cards. It was a game built in a sham market.
I agree that there have been multiple factors why Artifact failed but monetization was the biggest reason in my opinion. It could have survived with a better one. Three of my close friends all refused to play Artifact because it cost 20$ + paying for draft / packs. I could not convince a single one of them to still buy it and they just jumped on the negative bandwagon like most people did.
This paired with not having any reward systems / dailies at the beginning killed all momentum the game had.
Valve abandoned the game way too early instead of trying to improve the pricing model. It had and still has the most polished TCG game client. The tournament function was just great!
To this day it is my favorite TCG and I play it from time to time. I can't believe that it failed... (I didn't like Artifact 2.0 and I think it was a step back)
Did u guys ever play the board game, skytear?
We haven’t, Looks neat!
Who is the red guy in the thumbnail.
That’s Axe, one of the hero cards.
This is the main reason Artifact failed. At its bones the game was good, they just monitized in the worst fucking way imaginable.