Artifact is a mess. 101 players are in game at the time of writing, with the 24 hour peak being only marginally better at 124. Valve hasn’t said anything about the game since 29th March, when the company announced the team will “be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates”. The most action Artifact has seen on Twitch in recent months was when people decided to stream full length movies and porn in the game’s section. Artifact, at least for now, is a dead game, and arguably Valve’s most spectacular failure to date.
“It was a couple of weeks before the Artifact launch, and I was like, they can’t really launch it like this can they?” Sean “Swim” Huguenard tells Eurogamer.
By this point Swim had been in the Artifact closed beta for almost a year, and had submitted “several pages of pretty lengthy feedback” to the development team. He made a name for himself in the world of Gwent, having been one of the top deck creators, had consulted on other games, and planned to go into Artifact when it launched as both a content creator and pro player, aiming to make it to the $1m tournament Valve had planned for early 2019, even signing with esports organisation Evil Geniuses. So he certainly knew more than most when it came to card games. But it seemed the feedback from him, and other top card game players, was being ignored during the beta.
“It’s a test build, so you don’t really expect the game to be perfect, but we all saw something, you know, all the card game pros, basically looked at it and were like, these are really great fundamentals, there’s so much potential here,” says Swim. “And then it just felt like there wasn’t really a lot of changes during this period. A lot of us engaged in conversations with the developers, which didn’t really end up resulting in any changes, which was very disappointing.”
The lack of significant changes during the closed beta is something multiple participants have revealed. There were some here and there, with changes such as Drow Ranger’s rarity being boosted and others reduced, and the costs of Cheating Death and Golden Ticket being changed, but for the most part the core game we played at launch was the same as it had been through most of the closed beta, which kicked off about a year before launch.