EVERYTHING WE KNOW SO FAR ABOUT VALVE'S NEXT GAME

Posted by jesuslewis on August 12th, 2017

During the reveal, Plott said “If you’ve played previous trading card games, it has a lot of similarities in terms of having creatures and spells that you cast onto the board.” That being said, it also sounds like Artifact is doing a lot differently.

You control five heroes, all based on the ones from Dota, and deploy them on three different boards representing the lanes of the map. Heroes have abilities that they can use similar to those in Dota 2, and will be able move from lane to lane.

Every turn, creeps spawn in each lane just like Dota. Killing enemy heroes and creeps gets you gold, which you can spend to buy “item cards” and then equip them to your heroes. Certain cards also have persistent effects on the lanes themselves.

We really don’t know much more than that. The specifics of these systems, deck building, hero picking, etc. are still a mystery.

We don’t know, but almost certainly PC. There have also been rumors in the last year or so that Valve is getting ready to make Steam better on mobile devices. It seems like another safe guess that Artifact will eventually be on mobile as well, but consoles are harder to say.

Developer Steve Jaros said on Twitter that there will be “Lore bombs galore,” indicating that Dota’s story or world-building would have some role to play in Artifact. You could maybe stretch that into guessing there will be some kind of single-player component, but it could also just be referring to flavor text or something less significant.

Brad Muir, a well-known designer from Double Fine who left in 2015 to join Valve, said on Twitter that he’s been working on Artifact “for a while now,” so we can probably guess that it’s been in development for at least a year or two.

Plott said that, although they weren’t showing gameplay at the event, he did have the opportunity to play Artifact, giving us some vague idea about the state it’s in. He described the experience, saying “You really feel like the commander who is allocating all their various resources among this entire huge battlefield, moving from lane to lane.”

The use of the term “trading card game” is interesting, as most digital card games don’t have trading and refer to themselves as “collectable card games” instead. It’s not a stretch to imagine Valve will be taking advantage of its own Steam Marketplace, as it’s done with all its games, and make card trading a feature of Artifact.

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