The Failure of Artifact - Lane 1
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 มี.ค. 2024
- An Indie Dev and a AAA Dev discuss Artifact and how it attempts to be an unsolvable game.
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Gavin Valentine www.gavinvalentinedesign.com/
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honey wake up there's 3 new distraction makers videos
Valve not having an extended open beta for this game is just mind boggling. They were WAY too confident in their monetization model on release, and thinking they knew what player base they were trying to appeal to. It's a shame because they had something that could have been amazing. They could have collaborated with the player base, but they were just like "Nah, we know everything. We don't need anymore feedback" They didn't even listen to the closed beta testers who brought up many of the balance concerns others had, and didn't get to see the monetization of the game. I love DOTA 2. I have loved other Valve games too. Their arrogance about this game still stuns me to this day.
All I know about artifact is that they wanted us to pay in order to be able to pay, which you know.. It killed any motivation to try the game regardless of design competency, but I guess that'll be one of the next videos.
In regards to hero laning deployment, having that be random is _so so SO_ at odds with the MOBA fantasy. Selecting hero positions is THE FIRST DECISION you make, even before the match starts proper. I dont know man, Artifact just saddens me lol I was so hyped for it I even made a custom hearthstone card per Dota hero. And then it drops dead on pre-arrival, not even arrival
It's so nice to hear a postmortem that's more than just "They tried to charge money for a card game?!? 🤯"
Keep it up guys, new favorite channel.
same
As for the topic at hand, Monsterpocalyse is probably one of my favorite example of output randomness. Roll dice for attacks (and a couple of other things) but not all dice are equal, and there's actions you can take to influence the dice you roll. Definitely hit the sweet spot for me.
We’ll check it out!
I loved artifact. I am the exact type of player this game was made for. It was a very demanding game when it comes to brain power. You end up exhausted after just a few games. The player who made more good decisions than the opponent was likley to win but you also had to understand that one single game means nothing and it is all about long term winrate. Having game plans for all the possible outcomes is hard but it is what you have to do in your head. And I think that this heavy planning is what people didn't like. Many people claim that they want a battle of wits but they really dont. They just want to play in the moment and have some fun.
I also really enjoyed Artifact and think you've very accurately summed it up. I actually get the same feeling from Warhammer Underworlds (the boardgame rather than the Steam adaptation) in terms of playing best of 3 games, focussing on winrate and overall brain power needed to plan everything out in a limited number of actions. Would recommend checking it out if you enjoy that (genuinely, unlike the people who say they would but don't, as you acknowledged)
another long hauler here. artifact was actually my favourite game at the time and made me consider selling most of my MTG collection (glad I didn't!). I don't really think that people lose to luck in artifact - there are just too many decisions and it's pretty much impossible for you to get unlucky enough as a strong player to lose because of it. I'm pretty competitive in MTG and was also in artifact. one thing that artifact did was make me feel responsible for my mistakes, which isn't actually a good feeling. when i keep a great hand in MTG but proceed to draw nothing but lands for 6 turns in an aggro deck, then I can blame something other than my skill. in artifact every loss felt like i could identify exactly what decisions i made that were incorrect and sum it up as a skill issue. i don't know if this feeling of accountability is actually something good to place on casual players who just want to sling spells and have fun.
You can still love it!
Agree, the problem wasn't the RNG like people blame. That was all manageable and the better player won almost all of the time. The issue was closer to what is mentioned in this video. The RNG was very visible which means it was an easy target for people to blame for their loss. Also the messaging around the monitization wasn't great. People talk about it failing because they wanted people to pay for the game but I don't agree that is necessarily a bad thing. The cards could just be sold to make your money back. I actually made money on it from selling some early Axe cards. People just needed to go into it thinking it was more like a traditional TCG.
Oh damn man, that was some lit art you did, thanks! I heard you say in another episode you think Runeterra is the most beautiful card game... hmm Im thinking of artifact :) Another thing I disliked a little in Artifact btw were the many combat tricks, the items already being combat tricks themselves. I would have definitely gotten rid of some of these cards. This is also a problem Runeterra has which pulls me away, apart from the cutscenes. Another thing: I think it would be appropriate to do a 4th video on this series comparing it to Snap, since the games are very similar with the 3 lane structure. Thanks for the great work
I heard a GDC talk that mentions how output randomness is just input randomness for your next turn
Haha I love that. Though, if the game ends before your next turn maybe that is what feels bad 🤔
@distractionmakers I think that is sort of the case. In early Hearthstone, one of the infamous cards was called Crackle, and dealt 3-6 damage at random. If you were dead the next turn and hail mary the Crackle at the enemy face, then yeah it would be "pure" output randomness. However, imagine Crackling the enemy creature with 4 Health that has some very scary text that you must kill ASAP, and only deal 3. I feel that those randomness also feels horrible since your win rate just dropped to like 10%.
But in the same vein, input randomness can do the same thing. It's just much rarer. Drawing a bad hand would probably be input randomness (especially if you imagine a CCG that disallows mulligans) and can at times be frustrating
So I think that output randomness might be more susceptible to frustrating design, but both are still very similar and can both have equally aggravating problems.
Please post the link for referenced videos in the description box. Thanks!
Added!
I wonder if you're versed enough to make a similar video on the failure of Legends of Runeterra. Even though 80% of why it failed you can chuck towards anemic monetization, my spicy take is LoR wasn't as perfectly designed as it players claimed it to be.
As someone who isn't a LoR fan, but only played for a bit (I'm very big on fab, and played many others top card games for many years of my life) it was missing a community.
The game was amazingly designed, and very original imo, but being way harder to grasp at the start than a game like hearthstone. There was no great incentive to learn to play lor and you could not just pop in a game shop and ask people to teach you the game.
Runeterra has fair monetization and has amazing art, voice acting, fun dialogue but still isn't fun to play
Just wanted to comment that it was nice to see the Keyforge boxes back there! 🤘
i decided to try out your strategy and watched all 3 vids at once. i dont feel like it enhanced the substance much. but it also didn't detract too much as well.
granted, i did only leave sound in 1 of the vids each go...
Great episode guys! I’m looking forward to watching the other two artifact videos. Do you think you’ll ever talk about rogue-like deckbuilders (slay the spire, Inscryption, bolatro)? Or even deckbuilding games in general such as dominion? I’d be curious to know your thoughts.
For sure! We have been digging into deck builders a bit recently so that is likely a good topic for the near future.
you know I never knew you guys where working on so many things. I started watching you guys videos bc Im trying to design a card game on my spare time and became a big fan
Fun tidbit: Keyforge HAS created a deck building format*. It has some rules and caveats, but it is a new format since Ghost Galaxy took over the game.
Also I don't know since I didn't watch the BTS stuff, but I'm also curious how much was actually contradictory, vs how much could "both be true." (Especially given how long projects could take, I could see something starting out as a the case and then changing as time passed.)
*Full details:
All the decks you assemble from must come from the same expansion. (No mixing of Call of the Archons and Age of Ascension.)
Your deck must have 3 different houses. (No building a pure Brobnar deck.)
Each house must be all 12 cards from a singular deck.
So basically you break your decks into thirds, and then reassemble them into a new "alliance" format deck.
Oh interesting! Didn’t know that about keyforge. We’ll have to look into it.
Generally output randomness make for a bad competive game as randomising something after the player no longer has agency make the game alot more luck based that is likely desired.
Output randomness does usually improve the casual player experience as it offset the advantage of more skilled players as well as generally leading to more intresting results in scenarios.
Input randomness on the other hand due to player getting to react to randomness make for more strategic games as your able to accomodate for the randomness in the scenario.
It generally lead to less flash gameplay, aside from scenarios where someone is able to make a great strategic play despite being seemingly screwed by the input rng.
The practical example of this is in game where you roll dice to perform tasks. It is imput randomness if you asign the dice to tasks after they are rolled whereas output randomness would have you assign the dice first.
The excessive rng plus the high complexity made everyone play as safe as possible which meant the 2 red heroes with control abilities or the blu with infinitely wide armies cheap boardwipe and the best initiative steal card. At least in foundry this adpect is more even
Pokemon TCG has alot of output randomness in coin flips. The game is designed around it though so for the most part it's fine.
It is crazy though how much trouble output randomness gives people in strategy games.
I have a MTG Commander deck centered around coin flips where one card draws you cards for each coin flip won and another can present lethal damage if you win 3 coin flips in a row and does relatively nothing if you don't get at least 3 wins.
If those 2 cards are on the field at the same time most people will go after the one that presents lethal if you win 3 flips even though that is statistically unlikely and it is almost always correct to kill the one drawing cards and play the odds with your life.
I think some players drawn to strategy games are really uncomfortable with uncertainty. Evaluating how to make a decision without perfect information is a great life skill, but it is very stressful. Not everyone is going to enjoy that level of uncertainty in what is supposed to be an enjoyable experience.
@@distractionmakers That is a very interesting angle; I would have to agree though. I've never thought about the "types" of people that tend to play strategy games and how that translates to what mechanics/systems are palatable for an audience even in a "strategy" game.
@@distractionmakers that is absolutely an accurate observation in my estimation. now lets add another layer:
humans retain negative experiencies much more than positive. not just that, we also tend to amplify them. so for unlucky people, or people with unlucky streaks the negative random outcomes compound into an overall bitter dissatisfaction with the game/mechanic/system.
there is also sunk cost affecting things. you spend x minutes in matchmaking. x minutes ramping up your game to a given state, and then, you feel like leaving your win or loss up to chance of a mechanic pulling 1 result over another taints all those summed minutes into a waste of time in the negative outcome. in the positive outcome it feels like a thrill, but that gambling high most often than not diminishes into numbed irrelevance with time.
all these layers resonate with each other as well, like the pros of variance resonate with skill to compound an intricate and fun game experience. so i assume the balance is the key as well as playing the design into the game's type of experience.
@@00101001000000110011 Good insight. With the length of Artifact games being over an hour sometimes I'm sure this negatively affected the perception of the RNG. We could compare it to Marvel SNAP.
geez 1h games and they wanted it to be an esport?! in these modern times of ADHD and worklife imbalance commiting to a game of an avg 1h run is a high ask. it's not like gamers wont often sink 4h straight hours playing, but the fact they can pause or break the session down for a quick irl interruption is a major boon on the game's life..
Hard agree about that initial trap that young designers have when learning about input vs output randomness. Every time I do my unit on Chance, my intro students immediately just poo poo the use of output randomness and start trying to force input randomness into their prototype for the unit. I think it is because of the things they associate with it (loot boxes, missing attacks) are negative emotional responses that they can recall really easily, forgetting the "good feel" output randomness events.
Love your content, so glad the algorithm suggested your channel to me
I saw the video title and I thought you guys were gonna talk about Artifact type cards in MTG, but looks like I was wrong 😂😅
Making notes that if I make a game, there probably shouldn't be so much confusion about whether the inputs or outputs are randomized.
I was the target market for Artifact. I played magic, I was addicted to Dota, loved it.
Then I launched artifact, looked at the expected price tag to play it, uninstalled it and went back to playing dota without a second thought.
you play mtg, whats the price tag on that? you play dota how much did you spend on that
you wanted to play artifact, what was the price tag on that?
Man, I played Artifact long after its downfall, and I actually really like it! It certainly needs a lot of tweaking and fixing, but overall I enjoy it quite a bit. It certainly feels like the Alpha-Beta-Revised era of Magic. You look at old Magic, and it's just a... very bad game. There are so many flaws to the card pool, the play patterns, and even some of the basic rules, that if you released it today as Gagic the Mathering, it would die a quick and painful death. I just wish it had the time to be able to "grow into" what it could be.
At the start of the game, its imput as It deploys the Heroes before you make any decision (not including deck building). But when you deploy a hero in a Lane its output, as you make a decision and there is a random result in the position It lands.
As for general game design, output luck Works for eighter casual games OR of you really Lean into It. Make the output luck the core of your game, so that everything else revolves around players mitigating that luck and making risk calculations.
Agreed. Xcom, Warhammer, and DnD are all games where players accept output randomness for different reasons.
@@distractionmakers I was talking specifically about board/card games.
And regarding WarHammer, the large amount of output luck drives A LOT OF PEOPLE from playing it (me included). It's not a good example of use of luck in my opinion.
A good example would be games with a press your luck mechanic like Abyss. Where the whole point of the game is calculating when to risk and when to stop.
For Keyforge Best of 3 format is clothest to parity Keyforge could ever get
Random initial board state sounds unplayable tbh
Anyone can make these long videos about the game design but the homies that played at the time know all Artifact needed was to RELEASE ANOTHER EXPANSION!! We just watched the game slowly fade away with nothing to talk about.