- Hey everybody, Sam Machkovech here from Ars Technica, hanging out at Valve Software in Bellevue, Washington. I'm here to play Artifact. It's the new digital card game that's based off of the popular Dota 2 series. It's coming out later this year. But right now people are getting to play it at Pax West in Seattle, Washington. But we got to come by a week early, test it out, and talk to the guy who created it, Richard Garfield. You may have heard of him from a little game called Magic: The Gathering. [upbeat rock music]

- Well, Artifact is an electronic trading card game. You assemble a deck. And you're competing to be the first to tear down two of three of your opponent's towers. Or, if you tear down the same one twice, that's okay. Some of the things which make it distinctive from other electronic trading card games are that you can have any number of creatures in play at the same time, you can have any number of cards in your hand. You're dealing with three arenas at the same time, so there's sort of this sense, not only of tactics, but of strategy. My connection with Valve is Chris Green, who used to, worked on the online Magic. And when he went to Valve, I kept in contact with him and I always followed what they were working on. I'm a big fan of TF2. And I would occasionally come to 'em and pitch 'em some game ideas. [upbeat rock music]

- I think the reaction was in a bunch of ways a good thing. We knew that because of the kind of game that we were making that there would be a reaction of, from a, like a broader set of fans who expect us to make a shooter or expect us to make, you know, some other kind of product. That, hey, why are you making this?

- The electronic games that had, electronic card games that had been made to that point, much simpler than paper card games, and that seemed like a shame because you got this resource, the computer, which could handle much more complicated things than a tabletop. And so I had some mechanical ideas for how to keep the game flowing because there are these issues, for instance, with Magic, when you make Magic into an electronic card game, there's a lot of things which don't work as well electronically as they do over a tabletop, you constantly have to be on the alert for what your opponent's gonna do so you can interrupt the action at any time. And so mechanical things like that had been when thinking about them in other products, it had made the games become simpler, I think, than a lot of the game players were looking for. And so the game I was presenting was one where, let's take the bounds away. Let's make it so you can have any number of creatures out, you can hold any number of cards in your hand. Let's get a timing sequence so that you can feel like you're reacting to your opponent without constantly being slowed down by that. Very quickly, we decided Dota was a good fit for this.

- So there's been a trend in online gaming recently to push towards matching against the world, matching against people that you don't know that are out there in the world somewhere. So we've been thinking about this a lot and we've really moved in this direction of, like, what made card games fun in the old days, and even today, is to play with your friends. So when we think about how people will play Artifact, we're trying to think in terms of, how do we create a social environment or enable existing social environments, like if there were Ars Technica fans who had a club together they would be able to take that into the game and play with each other. So, we've moved a long way away from the, like, the single massive ladder that everyone gets dumped into to thinking about this much smaller, more social driven experience or set of smaller experiences. So our thinking about game modes and ways to play is moving in that direction.

- Dota 2, it's a broad fantasy flavor. And there wasn't a lot of constraint as to what we could add to the universe. Where you really run into problems is where, when it's not broad, that narrows you, and also where the person who is in charge of that doesn't want you to add a bunch of things because it doesn't fit with the lore they've already got. Dota was very open to adding things and at the same time it had enough tools there that you could populate something like the card game we were working on without any problem. There's a certain, certainly a certain modularity to design where when you got all these different heroes you can drop in and you can drop in all these different pieces of crazy equipment and it all interacts in these crazy ways, yeah, it's like a very flexible game operating system, almost. As far as the three lanes, that didn't come about until we actually started talking about Dota and it made sense because of the structure of Dota with the lanes. This is kind of like three separate matches and you have to win two out of three. And that felt good to me also because a lot of card games, like Magic, the formal way to play is, a match is, is often you have to win two out of three games. And so I thought if we could roll this together and make it so that one game is two out of three, that would feel pretty satisfying and pretty epic. And I think it's getting into a strategic area which players have been hungry for, maybe haven't realized yet, that they're actually playing this sort of much grander strategy game than they've been able to play, and at the same time be turn based. Like I get very frustrated playing a game like StarCraft, which I love StarCraft, and I love MOBAs, and all these games but I get frustrated at the same time because it feels like you have to juggle at the same time as doing this strategy game. And a root doot doot doot doot and I gotta figure out my strategy at the same time. And so here we've got something much more focused on the strategy and it's turn based so you got some time to think about things, yet it doesn't drag, you got a little clock going. So people are looking at that and finding that this is overwhelming but it actually isn't overwhelming to them because they like it and they come back. What I would say the most exciting thing about watching people jump in, it hasn't led to changes but it's sort of gotten me very excited, is this sort of constant feedback that this game really appeals to me, I wanna play it again, but, I don't think anybody else will play it because it's too complicated. And when you get that again and again it feels really special because you're getting all these people saying this is something which appeals to me but I'm not sure whether it's gonna be broadly appealing. That's sort of, some sort of secret sauce there. [upbeat rock music]