Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Artifact, Defense of the Ancients, dota, DotA 2, valve

Everything We Know About Valve's New Game, Artifact, So Far

Valve announced their first new game in years yesterday, the DOTA card game Artifact. Which was a bit of a disappointment to a lot of fans hoping for Half Life 3 or even Portal 3. But, really, we should have all seen this coming.

Blizzard has done damn well with Hearthstone, so seeing a DOTA tcg should have been expected. But Valve has been silent on the development front, so we all caught by surprise. As one of my colleages put it, the reveal was like seeing a trailer for a new movie and then finding out it would be directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

That said, we've finally got some details on the game for you, so here is everything we know about Artifact ao far:

• It is a DOTA-themed digital trading card game developed by Valve.
• Artifact aims to recreate a game of DOTA 2 in the form of a 1v1 card game from what little we know so far.
• Sean "Day9" Plott has claimed that "anything you see in Dota, it's here."
• It will feature creature cards and spells as, during the reveal, Plott said "If you've played previous trading card games, it has a lot of similarities in terms of having creatures and spells that you cast onto the board."
• You control five heroes, all based on the ones from DOTA, and deploy them on three different boards representing the lanes of the map.
• Heroes have abilities that they can use similar to those in DOTA 2, and will be able move from lane to lane.
• Every turn, creeps will spawn on each board just like in DOTA.
• Killing enemy heroes and creeps gets you gold, which you can spend to buy item cards and equip them to your heroes.
• Certain cards also have persistent effects on the lanes themselves.
• Artifact will release sometime in 2018, though nothing has been announced beyond that.
• It will probably be free-to-play, but we do not know for certain. However, nearly every digital tcg is F2P, and DOTA 2 is also free-to-play, so it's pretty likely that Artifact will be as well.
• The game will definitely be on PC on Steam, but there are rumors that Valve is getting ready to make Steam better on mobile devices, so we could see Artifact on mobile as well.
• Valve said they won't be revealing anything else on Artifact during The International 2017, which ends this weekend. So it could be a while until we hear more about the game.

As IGN reports, there are a few other things we've seen about Artifact, but most of that is still speculation with little to bolster it.

We'll be updating this page as we learn more, so be sure to check back from time to time.

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