{"id":75745,"date":"2019-01-15T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/334316"},"modified":"2019-01-15T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T14:00:00","slug":"blog-a-very-incomplete-review-of-artifact-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/01\/15\/blog-a-very-incomplete-review-of-artifact-cards\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: A (very incomplete) review of Artifact cards"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. <\/small><\/i><\/strong> <\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n<p><big><strong>Artifact<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n<p>Since it was announced I\u2019ve followed <em>Artifact <\/em>with the intention of writing about it. It\u2019s right in my wheelhouse – not only do I play card games but I worked on a game that\u2019s similar in some ways. It\u2019s also appealing to write about a new game rather than one that’s several years or decades old.<\/p>\n<p>Normally I write what is probably best described as design-centric game criticism. But based on metrics <em>Artifact <\/em>clearly has issues and those issues are fairly well-understood. There\u2019s no definitive writeup or video on those issues (though <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/YZh7mNO5k7o\">this video<\/a> provides a good overview) but if you care enough to read forums the repetitive nature of the complaints is clear. It\u2019s also tough to write about the design issues with <em>Artifact <\/em>in that you have to get deep in the mechanical weeds. Someone unfamiliar with the game might not understand the complaints, and someone familiar with the game will be well-aware of them.<\/p>\n<p>I expected <em>Artifact <\/em>to be bigger than it is, that I’d strike while the iron is hot with some cogent analysis and reap the benefits of high click counts. (At zero cents a click you need a lot of clicks to get rich) But not many analytical developer types are discussing it, and when they try to discuss it\u00a0the conversation often turns to “well I can’t say much because I haven’t played it myself.”<\/p>\n<p>So for this blog post I’m diverging from my normal format. Rather than writing design-centric criticism I\u2019m instead doing something more\u00a0akin to game design work, the kind of design work I\u2019d do on my own games or as a consultant.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/blog-a-very-incomplete-review-of-artifact-cards.png\" width=\"640\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>Shamelessly taken from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/Artifact\/comments\/acnkl7\/urobomartion_made_a_boxart_for_artifact_so_i_used\/\">https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/Artifact\/comments\/acnkl7\/urobomartion_made_a_boxart_for_artifact_so_i_used\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p><big><strong>A (Very Incomplete) Review of Artifact Cards<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n<p>My Google doc <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/document\/d\/18yg5Bkf4zeXnqi1jXvcj_tV6kEOAwr1xNZML9218_nk\/edit#\">notes on Artifact cards.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In college I took a short fiction creative writing class and got back an\u00a0assignment splashed with red ink. One of the errors called out by the professor was that I\u2019d written \u201cshe saw a vision of\u201d – his note was that you see visions by definition. They key lesson of that class was that while a novel can have entire sentences, paragraphs or chapters (or in the case of long fantasy series, entire books!) that are sloppily thrown together, in a short story every word matters, and you can and should make every word the best possible one.<\/p>\n<p>A card game is similar in that the cards represent a finite amount of content. In a card game with 100 cards you have 100 text entries, 100 pieces of art, 100 names, 100 sets of stats, some keywords (hopefully not 100!) – you can and should iterate and agonize over each of them.<\/p>\n<p><em>Artifact <\/em>strikes me as a messy game – I sometimes describe it as \u201cloose.\u201d But I wasn’t sure what caused that feeling. So as an experiment I started doing what I might do for work – I began listing the cards in order and noting issues. And there are a lot of issues.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Fresh eyes on a project can be invaluable and they only last a short while. Like a pet owner who gets used to pet smells developers and testers quickly become used to quirks or difficulty issues.<\/p>\n<p><em>Artifact <\/em>feels to me like a game that needed fresh eyes. The document I\u2019ve written represents that – it was written after a few hours with the game, to reflect the thoughts of a new player. In some cases it\u2019s not correct – initially I thought that blocking and combat targets are the same. They aren’t.\u00a0But my confusion reflects how these two concepts mostly overlap and appear to be used somewhat interchangeably, even if on closer examination there\u2019s some technically justifiable logic behind that.<\/p>\n<p>That last sentence describes a lot of <em>Artifact <\/em>– on deep examination awkward rules technically work out, but they\u2019re inscrutable on not just a technical level but an intuitive one.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" height=\"831\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/blog-a-very-incomplete-review-of-artifact-cards-1.png\" width=\"646\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In the document I tear pretty hard into Regeneration. This is a Reddit conversation on how Regeneration in <em>Artifact<\/em> works. As you can see there are about 5 different mental models on display: it’s an instant heal, a shield, like armor, like single-use armor that also heals you so \u201cactually not really like armor\u201d, \u201cnegative damage\u201d…<\/p>\n<p>This is not the only conversation like this I\u2019ve seen. When I first saw Regeneration I too was confused, and I\u2019m a relatively smart person who\u2019s played other card games and DOTA2. Regeneration is not a novel concept invented for <em>Artifact<\/em>, it\u2019s a straightforward one that appears in dozens of video games. It takes some doing to make regenerating health over time this complicated and confusing.<\/p>\n<p>After playing the game more I\u2019m no longer confused by Regeneration, and every game has some oddities that must be learned. But <em>Artifact<\/em> has too many – a death by a thousand cuts. It\u2019s not just Regeneration that\u2019s problematic, or the wording on Purge, or the counter-intuitive nature of Siege Damage – it\u2019s all of these things together. And these are just card problems that are joined by base mechanical problems like the apparent arbitrariness of attack arrows.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the things in this document might appear anal – but if there\u2019s a place to be anal it\u2019s when examining the text of cards in card game. To write these complaints off as pedantic is like accusing a copy editor of being pedantic about grammar.<\/p>\n<p>A note on format: the bold bullet point lists are probably where I\u2019d stop if I was writing this for my own game, or if I was writing it for someone I\u2019d conversed enough with to be on the same page. The paragraphs are more talky, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with <em>Artifact <\/em>or who aren\u2019t in basic agreement about high level issues. Tonally it\u2019s a little less professional than I\u2019d write for an employer and a little more than I\u2019d write for myself.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect they\u2019ll be the temptation among some people to go through the document and rebut – well this isn\u2019t right, this is just your opinion, etc. \u201cWell I don\u2019t think Regeneration is confusing at all.\u201d These are, of course, my opinions, and if you don\u2019t like them you probably shouldn\u2019t hire me to do contract work on your game. But if I think this way probably other people do as well, and in many cases I know that they do through observation of internet chatter and watching people play.<\/p>\n<p>The point of this sort of card design review is not to be 100% correct. It\u2019s an early step in a process that would involve a lot of back and forth that results in a variety of changes and, in some cases, none at all.<\/p>\n<p><big><strong>On Intended Audience<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n<p>My hope is that this document will be interesting to three audiences:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Laypersons looking for an example of day-to-day game design work<\/li>\n<p> <\/p>\n<li>Game developers looking for an example of card game iteration<\/li>\n<p> <\/p>\n<li>Players (including developers) familiar with <em>Artifact <\/em>looking for criticism<\/li>\n<p> \n<\/ul>\n<p>While the document is a design-style document it works as criticism, and one reason I wrote it is to push back on \u201cnobody can deny the core game design is excellent\u201d, a sentiment I see a fair amount.I enjoy <em>Artifact<\/em>. The design is interesting and in some ways very thoughtful. But it\u2019s fraught with issues. Too often I see both players and developers refuse to acknowledge design problems in a game, and instead push the blame for underperformance onto factors like marketing and ancillary features. When <em>Heroes of the Storm<\/em> shuttered its competitive league there were multiple Reddit posts on what Blizzard could have done differently to make the game more successful, but most of them didn\u2019t address the gameplay at all, instead focusing on irrelevant changes like \u201cimprove the MVP voting screen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>(Side note: I wrote about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/blogs\/JamesMargaris\/20161212\/287359\/On_the_eSports_Failure_of_Heroes_of_the_Storm.php\">Heroes of the Storm struggling as an esport<\/a> in 2016)<\/p>\n<p>When you like a game, when you or your friends worked on it, or if you\u2019re just trying to be mindful of hurt feelings it feels a lot better to say that the PR strategy was flawed or that the game just missed the target audience rather than that the game has major issues. But \u201cit\u2019s not you it\u2019s me\u201d usually means that it is in fact you. It\u2019s not helpful to say that a game \u201cfailed to find an audience\u201d unless you can say why – just saying that is more restatement than explanation.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps I\u2019m committing some sort of faux pas as a developer critiquing the work of another developer, especially on a game so close to release. But I think the document is fair and not written out of malice, and in my defense I never attended game developer finishing school.<\/p>\n<p>On the first point: we often do a great (if dismissive) job of explaining what game design is not. It\u2019s not the \u201cidea gal\u201d who says \u201cwhat if <em>World of Warcraft<\/em> but <em>Starcraft<\/em>?\u201d But we often don\u2019t do a great job of explaining what game design is, and what a game designer or jack-of-all-trades indie developer does. Often game designer is positioned as the person who writes and maintains the \u201cgame design doc\u201d, a keeper of the sacred scrolls. But that view of game design is both partial and more outdated each day. We\u2019ve gone from massive game design bibles to smaller docs to wikis or loose collections of different docs for different departments. Most game developers have some collection of design docs but the idea of the game designer as the person who writes the doc then leans back in their chair with their hands clasped behind their head elides most of the work. It yadda yadda yaddas over the best parts.<\/p>\n<p>So this is an example of what form day-to-day design work can take, while hopefully being more interesting than entering numbers into an enemy stats spreadsheet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Artifact Since it was announced I\u2019ve followed Artifact with the intention of writing about it. It\u2019s right in my wheelhouse – not only do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}