Artifact - Looking Forward, Looking Back

Posted: 06 Apr 2020 11:52 AM PDT

When the members of the team decided to reboot Artifact we all did it for different reasons. Some of us loved the original game and wanted to see it thrive. Some of us liked the freeing sense of creativity you can have with a card game. Some of us love trying to figure out how something is broken and see it fixed. There was one unifying reason for all of us - we thought that there was something special in the game, and with hard work we could bring it to light. Thanks for the feedback over the last two weeks, it's been great seeing how many of you share those feelings.

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, so please email them to ArtifactBetaFeedback@valvesoftware.com. We are going to read all of them.

With all that said, let's look at some of the fun stuff to come! Also, speaking of things that aren't finished yet, check out this sweet placeholder art. ;)

Mirana

Mirana has a pretty standard stat line for a Black Hero. (Stats overall have been scaled to around 60% of the original game.)
Leap gives her excellent mobility and can be used defensively and offensively. You can select your landing spot so it's possible to buff specific units and go for a knockout punch.
Her include card, Sacred Arrow, is versatile and powerful. (Probably a bit too powerful right now, to be honest.)

Wraith King

Wraith King looks fragile for a green hero, but his built in death shield makes him one of the most survivable units in the game.
Reincarnation makes killing Wraith King a bad time for all the enemies in his lane.
The Decay from Hellfire blast works similarly to regeneration, just in reverse. Unless a hero gets healing it often means death after two turns.