Maybe if you collect all the cards, you win a free copy of Half Life 3! :D
that really drives me nuts. they have this whole infrastructure to experiment with a meta card game based on the games you have in your library. maybe it would suck. but it would at least be interesting. unlike dota hearthstone.
Most of you guys are such pessimists.
I think it could be great, I love digital card games. The problem with Hearthstone is that it’s too simple and there’s no trading. The hearthstone clones can be better but when you play them you get the lingering dread that the game’s population is already on a slow decline to zero.
The concept of Artifacts sounds different enough to not be derivative of Magic/Hearthstone, the population should be healthy, and I hope the monetisation will be less harsh than these other DCCGs (if they allow buying individual cards on the steam market that’s already a big improvement over grinding boosters for dust to craft the cards you want).
Put me into the “excited” pile. The structure of the game as a MOBA match is something different for card games, which I appreciate. And the assumed trading economy is something that I love about Magic and other physical games, where I can buy a playset of a common card for a quarter instead of opening packs. Or have my two-dollar card spike to six dollars overnight after tournament results.
Maybe it’s just years of never being able to play the really cool Magic decks talking here, but man I really hate the idea of enforced scarcity, especially in the digital space. The idea of Rares alone is obnoxious, but I hope to fuck that DOTO CARDO doesn’t also emulate the awful Magic practice of sending whole sets “out of print” so the 5000 digital copies of OBSIDIAN FLOWER are the only ones that will ever exist. . .
(I feel the need to state I hope these things because they’re such intrinsic/assumed parts of the MTG trading experience)
This reads more “board game” than “card game” to me. I guess it’s a fine distinction, but emulating the positioning aspect of DoTA seems like it implies something other than a straight Magic / Hearthstone variant.
Which is to say that while there isn’t anything particularly exciting here, I’m interested to see what the actual game looks like.
There are plenty of lane based digital card games out there - Calculords springs to mind.
If it’s a CCG, what are the chances that Valve will be able to balance it in non-Valve time?
calculords looks pretty funny. im going to give this a try.
Bethesda’s CCG is lane-based also. People say it’s great, but of course nobody is actually playing because it isn’t spelled “Hearthstone”.
I guess my point was more that CCG doesn’t necessarily imply Magic/Hearthstone clone.
There’s plenty of design space for something new and interesting.
there sure is. it is just all happening under the banner of LCGs
An LCG just doesn’t fit valves strategy right now. They will want the client to be free to match dota2 and get it installed on as many pcs as possible. Digital CCGs don’t have to be ruthless with monetisation though, there’s a number of things valve can do:
- free cards or card packs for playing
- open the steam market so that you could probably grab a common card for a few cents
- don’t make the rares/legendaries too op.
- set up tight controls on deck construction (e.g. No more than two legendaries per deck)
- have good matchmaking for decks so if you are rolling with a deck with no rates you won’t get matched with a spoiled rich kid who has bought everything.
We’ll see how valve play this, but dota2 is the most generous f2p popular game right now (am I wrong?), so I have high hopes. You might be able to make a few good decks with as little as $5 and some play time instead of 20-30 with a LCG.
I think Valve earns the benefit of the doubt. How many of their games have turned out to be awful? There is also a good chance some of the excellent game designers that they have hired over the last couple of years are working on this.
Richard Garfield is the designer!
Also, Valve said it will NOT be free to play.
Aw man, a CCG?
There was a time where I would have killed a man who told me that in a decade I’d be playing neither the Blizzard nor the Valve digital CCGs.
Now…meh. Eternal is a great game by any objective measure, and I’m just so over it.
Huh. If it’s not free-to-play, does that mean you buy it and have access to all of the cards? Kind of like an LCG? I think that’d be cool, but I doubt that Valve is going to pass on the license to print money by having packs for sale.
I like that Garfield is involved. I’m still worried there might not be enough different about Artifact to set it apart from the increasingly-saturated market.
I read in PC Gamer that the game will allow trading and selling cards on Steam.
…so that’s it. I can only be cynical and think this isn’t a game they are doing because they truly believe on it. It’s first a business decision, and a game second. The business decision of making a big digital CCG with the famous Valve and DOTA brand, with them taking a % of each transaction.
The game itself seems a mix of unoriginal (all the game elements of the MOBA games are there!) and original (I don’t think anyone has mixed CCG and MOBA before?).
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It seems more likely to me that it’s going to be a “traditional” CCG model, like Hex except with the Steam market. Probably the entry price will be the same as a starter pack and you’ll just pick the one you want the first time the game starts up.