Valve decided to enter the collectible card game market with its own iteration of the genre through Artifact. Unfortunately, a combination of the game's steep learning curve, unentertaining and complicated gameplay mechanics, and uninviting to new members to jump in.
Recently, the studio officially announced a reboot of the title, followed by more information a couple of days after that on what Valve has in mind for what they labeled as Beta 2.0 of Artifact's life cycle. The studio's latest blog post on the game's Steam page decided to lighten the mood and give the community a brief behind the scenes look on what the art and development team are doing with concept art to add to Artifact's card library.
They started off with addressing the community's main concern from their original announcement regarding the upcoming period, as the studio mentioned putting gameplay first above everything. However, the community, especially the founding Artifact players and early adopters, had certain changes and suggestions in mind that Valve admittedly would love to implement but aren't in the state to do so. The development team intends to start considering them once their own changes are stabilized after the update's release and implementing the community's feedback, which will probably take a while.
There is one class of concerns raised that we wanted to address specifically. Those from the founding players of Artifact - the people who played extensively and built a collection in the original game. There are some great ideas floating around for things we could add, and they mesh well with our own. We want to make sure that there are some incredibly cool and special things that we deliver to our founders, but we aren't ready to implement them yet.
We mentioned in our previous post that we were focusing on gameplay first. That wasn’t just a random choice - We wanted to make sure the game had a strong foundation to build upon. It's not going to look polished because we're going to be changing things a lot during this process based on feedback and data. It's really important to us that we take your ideas for how to improve the game into account.
Further down the blog post, Valve revealed the rough concept art of several cards, including their actions and abilities. The cards showcased were; Mirana, Wraith King, Sticky Greevil, Morphling Whelp, Defenstrating Ogre, Sheep Stick. The hand-drawn temporary art are a joy to look at, and I wouldn't mind playing it with their current state. The demonstrated values and descriptions aren't final, but these cards inclusion in Artifact's beta 2.0 indeed is.
Do you think Valve's Artifact reboot will revive the game and give it a much-needed facelift? Will the changes possibly bring a healthy competitive ecosystem with it as well? Let us know your thoughts on the upcoming beta 2.0 period in the comments section below.
