HomeNewsArtifact
Valve show some Artifact 2.0 ahead of the impending betaSecond draft
Second draft
Did you miss it?Artifact’s back, and it’s not quite how you remember it. After a year of tinkering following that disastrous 2018 debut, Valve are ready to re-introduce theDota 2card game to the world. This week’s brief demonstration runs through some of the promising changes arriving with Artifact 2.0 - and if you’re lucky, you may be able to try the beta yourself starting next week.
Details onArtifact’s upcoming reboothave been trickling out of Valve for months - from itshard pivot away from Artifact’s card marketplaceto word the card-shufflerwill have a singleplayer campaign. This week, we got our first look Artifact 2.0 in action, courtesy of this condensed gameplay preview from Valve.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
In the vid, two Valve devs run through a round of Artifact’s new Hero Draft mode, a new addition that’ll build a deck for you based on the heroes you draft up. After a back and forth featuring some of thatdelicious placeholder cart art, we jump into Artifact’s extremely work-in-progress new “frankenboard” (with the assurance that a much nicer 3D board is currently in production).
While it’s been streamlined somewhat, much of Artifact’s original design remains. You’ll still need to burst two towers (or take down a single lane, twice), and combat still plays out one lane at a time - playing out in alternating directions each turn. I do feel it loses something in the single-screen overview, removing much of the sense of fighting across three fronts, but it’s inarguably much easier to keep a track of things in this new format.
They’ll be trickling out invitations starting with folks who’ve had the original Artifact in their Steam library (installed or not) earlier than March 2020. If that’s you, keep an eye on your inbox - invites will start rolling out from next week.
