Valve made a surprise announcement Tuesday about a new game coming in 2018 during The International, the “Dota 2” tournament that it’s hosting at KeyArena in Seattle this week. But a teaser trailer for “The Artifact” didn’t reveal much other than that it’s a card game — and fans in attendance and online reacted as if they were hoping for much more.
VentureBeat called the move a surprise for the Bellevue, Wash.-based video game giant, and said it appears to be Valve’s effort to go after Blizzard Entertainment’s “Hearthstone” and its dominant position atop digital card games.
The collective moan from the crowd at KeyArena, when it was revealed that “Artifact” was a card game and not, perhaps, a long-awaited follow to 2007’s “Half-Life 2” first-person shooter game, was captured in one classic video:
https://twitter.com/Jameskii/status/895268300426543104
Ars Technica had a little more detail on how the game might work, via broadcaster Sean Plott, whose “brief description hinted at a one-on-one digital card-battling game, like ‘Hearthstone,’ only with a ‘Dota’-themed three-lane system and other ‘Dota’-like tweaks.
Valve developer Brad Muir at least tried to stoke some excitement in what was to come:
https://twitter.com/MrMooEar/status/895092648469450752
But fans online may need a bit more convincing. The teaser on YouTube, above, had more than 14,500 thumbs down to just 2,200 thumbs up as of Wednesday afternoon. And the tweets just kept coming:
https://twitter.com/CapnCocoCharms/status/895097456924295168
https://twitter.com/doom_txt/status/895367692164714497
https://twitter.com/XEECEEVEVO/status/895091663332229120
https://twitter.com/StefenMski/status/895374324504416257