‘We are doubling down on that effort through a single-player campaign’
For the first time in nearly a year, Valve’s Twitter account for Artifact, their under-performing card game, actually tweeted something.
It was all the way back in March of 2019 that Valve noted that they were working “towards a better Artifact,” but it took them over a year to actually tell us what that meant. The end result is “Beta 2.0,” which will fix numerous issues with the game while making it more exciting to play. One of the biggest changes: “We aren’t selling cards, so you won’t face an opponent with a stacked deck.”
Valve continues to clarify that “in the new version cards are unlocked through play. Individual cards are likely to have been changed, removed, or brand new; so old decks and stats wouldn’t be valid.” The publisher notes that they don’t have concrete plans on what to do for people who already dropped cash on the original.
In true Valve style there are no exact dates given and a lot of details are left out, including this most recent drip-fed kernel of information: there’s going to be a single-player campaign. If there’s one thing people actually liked about Artifact it was all of the great DOTA art and storylines, so they’re “doubling down on that” with a single-player campaign that serves both as a tutorial and a campaign. While I’m not crazy about Artifact as a whole, I’ll give it a shot.
Completely starting over and wiping original progress is a bold move, but it’s a very Valve thing to do. Given that the dedicated playerbase is so low, they probably figured they could get away with leaving those people behind.
Mechanics! [Steam]
