| Artifact 2.0 - My Personal Review Posted: 25 Sep 2020 05:24 AM PDT Hey guys, Ive been planning to do this for quite some time, because I want this game to succeed and the best way to do that is give feedback of course. I didnt just want to talk out of my ass, so I decided to play the game until I thought I could actually give useful feedback. I got into the beta with the very last wave of players, so I havent been playing that long, yesterday however I reached Immortal rank so I feel like I played the game enough for my opinion to have some weight and it had enough time to develop properly. In general Im very positive on A2 and have quite a few bad things to say about A1, but I will try to give reasons for everything I say and also give positive and negative feedback. So my way of starting the game was, I played the campaign all of the mssions except the hunger ones and hero draft until I had a full collection and then waited a little more until I reached Ancient rank so I could experiment in constructed without losing ranks. So I basically got the new player experience the way it was intended, even though of course Im not a new player really, because I played A1 and Im an experienced card game player. I will still give my opinion on this system. So here we go. The campaign: Playing the campaign didnt really scratch too much of an itch. A lot of the missions were super easy and therefore not fun to play at all. Thats kinda expected from beginner missions, but as a lot of other people already pointed out it also didnt really do a good job of explaining the game. Now I know that a proper tutorial is planned, but if thats the case maybe making the first mission a little bit more difficult might be a good idea so they dont feel like a complete waste of time. The later missions like the meepo one were well designed and fun to play, but we need more of those if campaign is gonna be a thing in A2. Also on another note: I actually had a good idea to complement the new tutorial. I didnt see any other game do it, but I think its a good idea and might be downright needed for a complex game like A2. You could have a menu in the main menu thats called rulebook or something, that you can open where you can read about all the game mechanics and keywords. I think this would help newer players a lot since often times you cant remember everything just because you played it in a tutorial once and playing the tutorial again is not fun at all. So having a place thats easy to navigate where you can read up on stuff you forgot would be super helpful. Hero Draft: When I didnt have access to the game yet I was kinda sold on the idea of hero draft. Now after playing it, Im a bit more sceptical. It looks like a fun concept on paper, and as a casual game mode it totally is, but it has several problems that Im gonna point out. First of all as many players pointed out, playing hero draft until you have a full collection in general is not a good experience, because on the way there you really get excited to play other modes. In general the mode does a good job of showcasing the mechanics of A2 and why they are great and what you can do in theory, but once youve realized that, you actually wanna start DOING these things instead of just theorizing about them. So basically you grow out of hero draft at some point, and for experienced card gamers that doesnt take long. Now whether thats a problem or not depends on whether there is a grind for cards in the full game ( which Im expecting there is), because that basically locks constructed away. Even if the matchmaking takes into consideration the card pools of the players, people are just not interested in playing constructed with limited card pools, and I wasnt either. This concept doesnt work, because if players like the concept of playing around and managing limitations, then phantom draft is likely where they wanna go. So I guess it all depends on at what point phantom draft will be available for new players. So the problem with hero draft and why it wont be a permanent game mode for most people is, that it lacks competitive integrity, and I think the crowd this game will attract will mostly be competitive people. I have a few suggestions that can help mitigate this problem, but I feel like hero draft just cant get to a point where people will respect this game mode and therefore it probably shouldnt be a ranked game mode. The first thing you can do is to improve the random decks created. I still remember having some really shitty decks and the game should generally make efforts to create a useful deck. I still remember one game where I played mono blue and my hand was complete garbage, to a point where I overdrew and had to struggle to get rid of cards in my hand to get to my items and newly drawn cards, because all the cards that were sitting in my hand were useless. Of course this is also kind of a balance problem, but if the variance in deck strength in general is too high the mode kinda becomes coinflip simulator instead of a deep strategy game. So this could definitely use some improvement. The other thing is the card pool. Currently the game uses a combined card pool of both players, but that gives the more experienced player an unfair advantage, on top of the fact that he already has an advantage because hes more experienced. This game mode matched me with a lot of players that had way bigger card pools than me and I assume this will stay this way for full release since people will leave this game mode fairly quickly and the ques wont be populated that much. Therefore Im suggesting that you change the card pool to only using cards that are in both players collection. This shouldnt be a problem because the starting card pool is big enough to play this mode, and it actually has benefits for both groups of players. The newbies dont get needlessly disadvantaged when playing against more experienced players, since they are already likely to lose, but this could actually help make these games less stompy and feel more like meaningful games. On top of that the experienced players that will likely only come to this mode for casual games, get a different experience from their play-with-full-card-pool-games, they get in the other game modes, depending on who they are facing and how progressed their collection is at this time. So that might make the game mode more interesting for them as well. Constructed: Im not gonna say too much about constructed, because in general I feel constructed is great in this game. Im mainly a constructed player, I played constructed only after reaching Ancient rank with hero draft, and I got Immortal rank in it yesterday. The quality of constructed mainly comes down to the game mechanics and card balance. I think the game mechanics were pretty much made for constructed play and Im also very pleased that you take card balance so seriously. Theres something for everyone, great ways to come up with creative decks that noone plays except you and have success, but also the "Im gonna netdeck an already optimized deck and play with it"-experience, that a lot of people seek. The good thing is that playing the game has a really high skill ceiling, which makes netdecking in this game not op, because you have to learn how to play the deck properly if you want to have success. Last thing I wanna say is that I hope you guys nail phantom draft as much as constructed, so theres a home for every type of player in Artifact. Mechanics that were changed from A1, and why those were good changes: In the next paragraph Im gonna go over things that changed from A1, and why these changes made the game better, because a lot of people still demand that specific mechanics go back to the way they were in A1, however I dont think there is a single change they made over A1 that is not an improvement, so Im gonna explain myself. - Lets start with the elephant in the room. The mana system in A2 imo is pretty good, even though it could still use some tweaks and Im gonna adress that a little later. But whats more important is, to realize why the A1 mana system was deeply flawed and imo the main reason why A1 failed, from the gameplay side of things. Imagine there was a card in Hearthstone, that read: "Destroy 1 minion your opponent controlled and burn 3 of their mana" and costs 7 mana. Would that be balanced? Maybe, Im not a HS expert. Would that be fun to play against? Hell no! What I just decribed to you Is what the average assassinate in A1 would do. You can say a lot about modern card games, and how most of them are dumb as hell, and I would mostly agree with you. But the thing is the card game industry figured some things out over the past couple decades. And one of those things is: Which mechanics are unfun, and therefore shouldnt be in our game. Mana burn is actually one of them (funny thing is mana burn does exist in A2, but is far from a competitive concept, so I guess we are in the clear for now). The mechanics of A1 are designed in a way, that the whole game revolves around this concept, a concept that is deemed unfun by the vast majority of the card game industry, and for good reason I want to add. It has always been an unwritten rule of card games that, if you can prevent your opponent from playing the game at all, then that will always be a winning strategy. I used to play a lot of old school Yu-gi-oh! back in the day. And back then cards existed in the game like " The Forceful Sentry", "Confiscation" and "Trap Dustshoot", that had the effect that you could look at your opponents hand and then take away one of their cards. All of these cards are still banned to this day in modern Yu-gi-oh! and the reason is simple: Looking at your opponents hand and taking away one of their cards is such a powerful concept, that it will decide games on the spot way too often and create an unfun experience in the process. And from my understanding, card game developers understood this, because this mechanic simply doesnt exist anymore in modern card games ( sure there probably are some exceptions, and funny enough Imperia in A2 is one of them, but you get the idea). And this is where A1 went wrong and why A2 is doomed to fail again if the developers should ever go back to the old mana system: The fact that you can deny a big chunk of your opponents mana pool by clearing all the heroes from a lane. As long as this is a thing, the game will always revolve around this mechanic, because the concept of denying your opponent actions is just too powerful of a concept to not use if its available. Sure you could design your cards in a way that this is not easily achievable, but why would you limit your design space this much, when the answer is simple: Just dont have your game have mana burn as a major mechanic because its not fun! Sure disruption is still a concept that exists in card games and its always gonna be powerful, because its simply impossible to design a game without having at least unintended interaction, that limit plays for the opponent. But it is from my point of view a consensus that the card game industry came to, that games are generally more fun if both players get to do what they want and noone gets shut out of the game. This of course is a utopia, not every single game can be a back and forth, but this is also an utopia that is worth working towards, and in my humble opinion A2 does a great job at that. And A1 just didnt respect this at all. A1 to me always felt more about shutting the opponent out of the game and therefore preventing them from executing their strategy at all, rather than letting the strategies of both players clash head on. And that is why I think A1's gameplay was incredibly unfun for the vast majority of players, and the mana system is to blame imo.
- The deployment phase I think we all agree on is a straight up improvement from A1. Flops could be super frustrating and downright game deciding in A1 and A2 didnt completely eliminate this problem, but made some improvements to mitigate snowballing from the flop and those are very welcome. Deploying heroes after the flop also just got way better. No more random position for heroes, which I think a lot of people wanted, and rightfully so, because more player agency also means more room for skill expression.
- Removing the random arrow was very important in my opinion, because this was just a source of needless frustration. Yes you could influence the arrows in A1, but a) this concept was not nearly prominent enough in the game to fight the bullshit rng that came from the random arrows, and b) even if you do have quite a lot of ways to influence arrows, it would still be randomly decided whether you needed to use that limited resource or not, which is still not ok. I dont think you would be cool with havin a random chance to discard your cheapest card and burn one of your mana at the start of your turn in A2, would you? I could go on my rng rant right here, but I will save that for later so lets move on.
- So the shop is an interesting one. I already said, that I think it is an improvement over the old shop. But this is for me the mechanic, that still needs the most tweaks. But I will have a seperate section on how I would change the shop. This is about whats wrong with the A1 shop and why it needed to change. The obvious one are the consumables. People have complained about TP scroll randomness for ages and for good reason. Having one consumable that shows up at random and is like 10 times more impactful that the other consumables on top of also being cheaper is just straight up bad design. But also the item deck was very flawed. Not only that you could get crazy strong items on turn 2 or 3 if you highroll with an econ deck and decide the game then and there, you could also never really put high cost items into non-econ decks because they could show up at random and block you for the turn, which led to this really stale item meta especially in draft. The A2 shop improves on that by giving the player some agency over which items show up and therefore eliminate the problem of items blocking you like that, on top of the fact that they always allow you to run high cost items and then decide during the game that its not worth upgrading the shop because youre not gonna be able to afford pricey items. Also im not a big fan of the secret shop either, but ill go into that a bit later. The A2 shop still needs improvement for sure, but its already a sizeable improvement over the A1 shop, which was a complete dumpster fire imo.
- The hero designs in A2 are so much better. Interesting cards are very important for a game to be succesful and A1 had way too few of them, which led to this super solved meta/tier list, mostly because the game didnt give a lot of reasonable alternatives. Now this is also a balance issue, but having simple cards also pushes this kind of development. Because the simpler a card is, the easier it is to evaluate its power level, on top of the fact that simple cards are also more boring to play with. If it was for me, I would probably have given every hero1 passive and 1 active, but Im fine with the way things are currently on the hero front. More complex heroes = more room for experimentation = more stuff for Timmies to do, which cannot be understated for a card game that wants to be succesful. But this also raises the skill ceiling, which is something that a Spike can appreciate as well.
- The overdraw pile is also quite controversial, I still like it better than having no hand limit at all though. Havin no hand limit promotes this do-nothing-and-accumulate-cards-playstyle, that Im not a big fan of. For the same reasons items and abilities now cost money and I like that as well. I think having too many cards in a card game needs to be punished, because if it isnt, this will create unhealthy playstyles. The funny thing is, as bad as the overdraw pile feels sometimes, I even like this solution more that the standard cards-get-discarded-if-you-have-too-many-approach. Because artifact has items unlike most of these games, and your hand needs to be able to contain them. But I still stand by the stance that no hand limit is unhealthy for games, and this imo even apllies to items. Players SHOULD get punished for not playing cards imo, this also changes the flow of the game towards more proactivity, which is a good thing imo. The one thing that needs to change about the overdraw pile though is, that you need to see which cards are in it and in what order, but Im sure this will be a thing at some point.
- For the last one Im gonna talk about a change thats fairly underrrated imo and therefore needs some attention, because it shows to me, that the devs DO KNOW their stuff about card games and are able to identify problems with the design, that dont get circlejerked in the community. Lets talk about why the armor changes are a nice improvement. One thing that the hero/item system in artifact brings with it is, that heroes over the course of the game can become unkillable behemoths, which feels really bad if youre on the other side of the board from that. This is still a thing in A2 by the way, which is for example why I think a card like Lady Anshu is somewhat problematic. The armor changes are a step in the right direction though. In A1 it felt like games were frequently coming to a point where instakill cards like Coup de Grace, Annihilation or Assassinate would become a neccesity, because key heroes couldnt be killed in other ways anymore, which is really bad for card balance. The armor changes are not the most important change in A2, but they are a step in the right direction. It always feels bad, and this still applies to A2, if you look at a hero and think to yourself "I will never kill this hero...", because it is either not possible or simply not worth the effort it would take to do so. This for example is my main problem with Tidehunter atm in A2. He is way too hard to kill for how annoying he is on the board, and that makes it pretty unfun to play against him.
Things that you should/could change about A2: - Lets start with the mana system again. I think the mana system of having one mana pool for all the lanes is good and needs to stay. I also think that items and actives costing mana is a good change, because these chages reduce the stalling, but also create meaningful decision, because mana is a limited resource and you cant do everything you want in a turn, so you have to evaluate, which action is the best to take out of your options. Its still a common opinion here that people want to take more actions a turn and that high cost cards should have more impact in general. A solution or maybe its more fitting to say improvement for this that I would at least try is: Remove the courier and start the game with 4 mana. This can improve a couple of problems at once. First of all it is widely known that the current iteration of the courier is a bandaid and that it will be changed in some way in the future. But even if the courier becomes a standard game mechanic in the future and not a card, is that really good for the game? The courier as is, is a pretty confusing mechanic for players new to the game. I doubt that it would be more clear if the courier is not a card anymore, it will likely be even more confusing even if there is a visual indicator for it. Removing the courier and starting at 4 mana would be in net the same as having the courier and playing an item every turn, which from my experience you do not. So this change would not only mean that you remove confusion from the game, players would also have a little more mana to spend and they would get earlier into the turns where they can play high cost cards. So it at least adresses some of the problems the players are having currently. I think its worth a try.
- The shop is a pretty hard one to solve and still has many flaws. Im gonna focus on the one that is the most prominent to me for now. This also ties back to why I think the secret shop was a dumb concept in A1. I know this is probably a controversial statement, but I think the shop still has too much RNG. Having random items pop up in the shop, when theres so many items that are straight up hard counters for certain strategies is just unfun in general and should never decide any games. In my perfect vision of the shop, the shop becomes a toolbox for you to have at your disposal, where you can put items that complement your strategy or disrupt the opponents strategy, IF and only IF, you have identified that you need answers to that strategy. So what I think is, that a player should be able to design their entire item deck if they wish to do so, and further doing this should be mandatory at least in official tournaments. Now this would never be a good addition to be mandatory in regular ladder play, because it would just create an inconvenience for players to add items to tiers they know they wont be using. So autofilling the items deck still needs to be a thing, especially in draft because you wont have enough items, but the item deck should not be random if the player piloting a constructed deck doesnt want it to be and on top of that all the items in the opponents and your deck should show up in the deck tracker even if they were generated randomly, so that you dont get blindsided by a hard counter that just happened to be in the opponents item deck without you knowing. Easy examples for that would be hooked net for creep based strategies, jasper daggers for decks with lots of crowd control or demagicking maul for tower enchantment based strategies. You should never lose to a randomly created counter in your opponents item without at least knowing its in there and you should not be able to counter anything in tournaments unless you decided you want to counter this specific strategy, thats a tleast my opinion. Now I know this is basically a debate about rng in card games, which is obviously needed, but even then the shop will still have rng over which items show up, just then all the items that could show up were chosen by you, and theres still draw rng and in draft your deck is also rng, I dont really think this rng is needed at all. Managing rng is an interesting concept, and A1 wanted to be that kind of game, but I dont think theres a place for that in the current market, and even if there was A1 just didnt execute this concept well enough to be succesful. Hearthstone and autobattlers are somewhat successful in that genre, but the harsh truth is, none of these games will ever get close to the behemoth that is Texas Holdem Poker. Truly the king of all rng management games, it offers benfits to lovers of this type of gameplay that even Hearthstone can only dream of. It offers way more money to you for being succesful in it, while also giving you a way bigger edge over your opponents, if youre good at it, while also being quite fun. Its hard to compete with THP for any of these games, when its just the obvious go to for rng-lovers. And I always hear this argument "But when we remove all the rng out of card games they will just become chess!", and I have to say, that is such a dumb argument its not even funny. Chess is a full information, almost all-skill-game. A card game could never hope to get anywhere close to that! The only rng in chess is the coinflip at the start of the game, thats it. In card games there will always be draw rng, which already puts like a 1000 times more rng in a card game then in chess, there will almost always be the fact that you cant see whats in your opponents hand, and in Artifact, even with the shop changes I suggested, there will always be shop rng. The compasison between A2, which reduced the rng significantly from A1, and chess is so far fetched, you need to be a complete moron to think thats even somewhat close to being accurate. The only thing this achieves is, that it gets further away from being a slot machine, which is a good thing at least for me. Im not a chess player personally, because its a bit too boring for my taste, but I would probably play chess if you could choose your own pieces out of like 50 different options, because thats basically what card games feel like to me, and why I like them in the first place. If they are executed well, they feel like some customizable version of chess with rng sprinkled in, these are the ones I want to play, the bad ones feel like slot machines, and those are the ones I stay away from. Whether you lean more towards the Chess or the THP side is a matter of personal taste, both are excellent games. What we need to understand though is, for a card game to be successful, it needs to have some legitimacy when compared to these games, because at the end of the day card games are in the same overall genre of strategy games. So the best case scenario is, that you position yourself somewhere in between those two, because no game can become successful by being a shitty ripoff of any of those two games ( except Hearthstone I guess, because they were the first digital card game with a masive IP behind them...). And I understand, that a lot of you are afraid that A2 will become a shitty version of chess, which I think we are still quite far away from, but I couldnt help but feel, that A1 already was a shitty version of THP, which made me not wanna play it.
OK, this is all I can think of for now. I probably forgot some things and I will edit them if I think they are important, but this needs to do for now. I hope this is some useful feedback, and I will of course be here and in other threads for discussion in the future. I hope this game becomes a success, even though the road there is still long and rocky. Devs keep up the good work! submitted by /u/X-Bahamut89 [link] [comments] |
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