so, Richard Garfield, the creator of M:tG and other things, is working with Valve on their new digital not-heathstone card game Artifact (based on DOTA2)...
Is Richard Garfield still golden? Like, is his name enough to get you excited for a project you barely know anything about, except his name?
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It doesn't matter because Artifact is a Hearthstone carbon clone.
the guy knows how to design games, but there are lots of game designers who do.
Game companies go to guys like Richard Garfield for a few reasons. They either wanted to buy something Richard has been developing as a card game for years (so essentially most of the design work already done by a veteran) or they really needed someone to trim the fat off their in-house developed game and make sure they have an elegant system with input from a veteran
It's also possible they just wanted a big name to steal headlines, but I don't think they needed one. Headlines probably don't matter when they can advertise themselves on steam for free, put a booster in every user's account, etc.
I'm sure it will be a good game, since RG is pretty much the only person who's ever been able to design a CCG that wasn't mediocre, but I don't particularly care about the format these days.
At the very least the fact that there is no unnecessary RNG and the fact that you have to split your resources in three boards instead of randomly dump all the big shit you draw as long as it's on curve makes it more interesting than HS. I don't mind if they don't add anything else.
For the type of mass casual audience they're hoping to reach Garfield's name means squat. They want him for his expertise, not branding.
Netrunner a shit and he worked on that. His involvement does nothing to me.
>put a booster in every user's account, etc.
It'll be pay to play, but yeah the marketing is a big deal. I'm curious how they do the card distribution, with trading it should be quite simple to get the cards for a new deck by selling ones you no longer use etc.
Original Netrunner or the FFG Netrunner?
He had nothing to do with and hates the FFG Netrunner.
>3 Games at once
>2 Win conditions
>5 heroes at a time
>Colors matter
>Shared item deck
>Not being able to pick targets for attacking
Sure looks like Hearthstone to me!
I thought FFG netrunner was just reprinting the original, with better art?
No FFG Netrunner was massively reworked.
Like L5R they ripped the soul out of the game and marketed the husk.
title made me think richard garfield was found trying to sell off his collection of power 9 cards, got REAL worried there for a second...
5 mins of game play video and explains the market
The thing with Richard Garfield is, he's kind of a one hit wonder as a game designer. His non-Magic games have been medium at best.
MTG was one of his weaker games IMO. He learned a lot from it and his later games improved greatly. MTG just had first mover advantage.
>gameinformer.com
>40 cards minimum
just from reading this... what's with the 40 card desk sizes anyway?
It doesn't feel like a "round number", or particularly key mathematically.
40 cards is a 60 card deck minus mana/land
okay, but then my question becomes what's a 60 card deck about?
Like, Gwent is 25 minimum, 40 max... it doesn't have lands, etc.
Is he shoving lands/mana in this too?
60 cards is the min deck size for MTG so it has become kind of the base people go off.
It hits a nice balance of being able to hold a good number 4 copies of Unique cards while having room for land.
With Land being removed from a lot of modern TCGs you chop off the 18-20~ land most decks run and that leaves you with 40 cards.
any one who doesn't think they hired him for name alone is a idiot. valve is shallow as fuck you think they really cared about hireing icefrog or the counter strike guys. they did it 100% for pr and just so in the hardcore scene people could say "it has the original guys"
>Headlines probably don't matter when they can advertise themselves on steam for free
It won't be free, but I could still see it drawing a huge crowd similiar to PUBG (for better or worse) since you can sell your boosters and cards on Steam's marketplace. That's something where it's way ahead compared to Hearthstone, Arena and even MTGO retarded trading system.
As for promotion, they mentioned that they're going to take a cut from their Artifact earnings to fuel an Invitational-type of tournament.
>It doesn't feel like a "round number", or particularly key mathematically.
10 cards, 4 of each card.
Pretty much this. If you look at pretty much every popular game Valve has ever released aside from Half Life, it was a case where someone else made it first and then they essentially bought out the idea. Like both Portal games being based on indie projects from grad students, TF2 being one big mod, etc...
They are creatively bankrupt, and this game will fail largely because Valve’s micro transactions are often worse than Blizzard’s, which is no small feat.
>Is Richard Garfield still golden?
definitely
>is his name enough to get you excited for a project you barely know anything about, except his name?
Yes, but that is tempered with my immediate reaction towards anything coming out of Valve.
What changes were made? I know how l5r got streamlined to a sad level, but never knew original netrunner enough. What's Garfields beef with it
There was no IDs or Factions before. They super nerfed ICE into being meaningless for the most part, They removed the Bad Publicity loss condition, change up the entire balance of the game to be faster and less tactical.
Garfield said it was like someone took Quake and made it Call of Duty.
valve don't really make games.
HL2 was only made to showcase the source engine
every other game they have released has been some one els mod.
I really think valve wanted source to be a popular engine like Unreal and that's why they invested so much money in it but it ended up just being used to sell other peoples mods on "their terms"
I think the only situation we will see a true new game from valve is if they decide to put in the investment to make a new engine to try and market to the wider gaming community and I cant see them doing that until their is literally some huge advance in technology that makes building a new engine from the ground up viable. so yer we might not see HL3 until quantum computers come around.
sure you could argue they didn't know steam would be a huge success while they where developing HL2 but I call bullshit valve was always looking at Korean gaming markets and all this weird edgy shit and seeing torrents get more popular and I think they knew exactly what they where doing. hell HL2 isn't even that impressive a game to call it a tech demo is not that insulting to it. I know lots of people love that game but really its mostly for the nerdy story and some of the setting. the actual gameplay is average and kinda dated even when it was released in 2004 it felt like a game from the 90s
It's pretty late for them to join the market, since it's already crowded in all fromts. Hearthstone dominates digital and nothing can compete with it, Shadowverse cornered the weeb market and most Garfield fans are MtG fans and will just play Arena or MTGO. You can make a game survive and get an okay playerbase but there's no room for it to thrive.
They are not looking to enter the market. They are looking to change it. This is the Half Life of card games. The history of card games will be marked by pre and post Artifact.
TF2 wasn't a mod, the original was. For tf2 they hired the person responsible for the mod and had make a sequel with them.
Artifact wasn't a mod, the original was. For Artifact they hired the person responsible for the mod and had make a sequel with them.
That's wishful thinking and you know it. Card games are a well stabilished market, there's little room for changes to happen to it.
That is what people said about FPS then Half Life came in and changed them forever.
FPS weren't well stabilished back then, a number of impactful ones still were made. The card games market never had anything post Hearthstone that was meaningful.
In 1998 the standard FPS format was fairly locked in. The fast arena shooter and the doom clone was more or less the entire market.
Just like how the MTG and Hearthstone clones are the entire card market now.
Half Life came in and changed the entire FPS genre into what it is today.
Their goal with Artifact is to do that for Card Games.