As part of Edge Magazine (opens in new tab)‘s all-access trip to Valve HQ in Bellevue, Washington, the studio’s founder and CEO looked back on the failures of its 2018 card game, and how it plans to respond to its first major flop. 

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“Artifact was an interesting failure in its first go-round.” Newell tells Edge, “We were surprised. We thought that it was a really strong product.” 

“We ran an experiment, we got a negative result, and now we need to see if we’ve learned anything from that, so let’s try again,” he says. “And that’s what [the Artifact team] have been doing and that’s what they’re getting ready to release. Based on the reaction to it, what was wrong with the product? How did we get there? Let’s fix those things and take another run at it.” 

Edge reports that, internally, the follow-up to Artifact is being referred to as Artifact 2, though it’s unclear if this will be a full blown sequel, a No Man’s Sky (opens in new tab)-style comeback, or something else entirely, but Newell stresses that Valve has “to do a larger reboot in order to justify its existence to customers and to markets.”

Valve is days away from the release of its virtual reality Half-Life prequel, Half-Life: Alyx (opens in new tab), and you can read all about that – as well as Newell’s thoughts on the Epic Game Store and Steam Machines – in the latest issue of Edge Magazine (opens in new tab), on sale Thursday 26th March in stores, with an early digital release on Monday 23rd March. 

You can subscribe to Edge magazine for 5 issues for $5 / £5 (opens in new tab) on tablet / phone, and have the full 34-page Valve special edition as your first issue.

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Expansions are on their way 

Just like in the Year of the Mammoth, we’ll get three large expansions over the course of the Year of the Raven. We don’t have an exact date yet for the start of the new season, but Year of the Mammoth started on April 6, 2017 with the arrival of its first expansion, Journey to Un’Goro. Game director Ben Brode teased that the first expansion for Raven will come “real soon.” 

A new Druid hero skin 

Win 10 games in Standard, and the new Lunara the Dryad skin is your prize. Heroes of the Storm players have already had the chance to dally with this dryad, and she can also be found in the Dreamgrove in World of Warcraft. Her daddy is Cenarius, a legendary druid minion card from the Classic set, so I guess she’s following in papa’s footsteps.  

Hall of Famers go wild 

Ice Block, Coldlight Oracle, and Molten Giant are all leaving the Standard deck set, but you’ll still be able to play with them in Wild. Molten Giant fans will want to know the big man is going back to its pre-nerf state (a hero-health-affected mana cost of 20, down from 25). The card sets for Whispers of the Old Gods, One Night in Karazhan, and Mean Streets of Gadgetzan are also headed to Wild.  

Tournaments are coming 

Later this year, Blizzard will launch a beta for in-game Hearthstone tournaments. This isn’t a feature aimed at Hearthstone esports pros – it’s for humble civilians like you and me who want to get competitive with friends or at Fireside Gatherings.  

Daily Quests will pay better 

Not only will gold rewards go up, but daily quests will be easier to complete. Whereas before, you might’ve needed to win three games for a quest, that will go down to two. You’ll need to play, say, 30 cards for a specific quest, not 50. Hey, anything that means more coins for cards is fine with us. 

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“Unique, powerful weapons are a common element of the fantasy dungeon crawl,” explains game designer Dave Kosak. “These are the sorts of weapons that heroes go on quests for—some might be even be sentient and talk to you. That was the kernel for our Legendary Weapons. We really wanted to capture that fantasy in the game.”

Peter Whalen, also a designer on Hearthstone, explained that Spellstones came from the team looking back on ideas for previous expansions. “One advantage of creating three big expansions a year is that if an idea is cool, but doesn’t quite fit thematically, we can come back to it when the time is right,” he says. 

“Spellstones originally came about when we were developing Journey to Un’Goro.

We had two ideas for Quests. The first one, which we shipped, focused on Legendary cards you’d build a deck around, and that would give huge rewards. But the other idea we had was to create ‘mini quest’ cards that would level up in your hand as the match went on, and that wouldn’t force you to build around them. Spellstones came from the second idea.”

Kobolds & Catacombs also introduces the Unidentified Items class of card to Hearthstone. These have a consistent base effect, and they will also gain additional characteristics when you add them to your deck. Kosak goes all Santa Claus on us and compares it to opening gifts. 

“When we have a fantasy that we want to get across in Hearthstone, it’s important for us to really find the ‘sweet spot,’ which is the simplest execution of that fantasy that’s also the most fun,” he says. “Unidentified Items fall right there. You still get all the joy of opening your Christmas present—you don’t know what it’s going to be—and you can adjust your strategy depending on what you get. But you can still plan for it.”

When it came to picking some Legendary Weapons for Kobolds & Catacombs, the Hearthstone designers only had all of World of Warcraft’s lore to choose from. Tricky. “Eight of the nine Weapons are from WoW—cool things with great names or long histories from that game, that mean a lot to players,” says Whalen. “We wanted to tie the ninth Weapon into our adventurers—the characters going through the catacombs—because we wanted a Recruit weapon. Recruit is tied in to this adventuring guild, so their weapon—the weapon of Master Oakheart—is Woecleaver, which Recruits a minion when you attack.” 

It’s clear that as well as a lot of programming, art, and you know, developer wizardry, there’s also a lot of love that’s gone into this expansion. (No, you’ve had too much spiked eggnog.) 

“We’ve all had experiences from childhood onward of exploring dungeons with our friends, whether in a computer or tabletop game, and we really wanted to capture that feeling and fantasy,” says Kosak. “Everything from the candle-lit board, to loot and Dungeon Run treasures—everything feels like it hit that fantasy. We hope our players feel that way, and we hope we can take at least a few people on a trip back to their favorite dungeon.”

Kobolds & Catacombs is out now, and you can buy the cards here.  (opens in new tab)

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