Dota 2
Dota 2 is the game Artifact uses as base for its lore and game design.
General[edit]
Based on the Warcraft III mod "Defense of the Ancients", Dota 2 is a by Valve Corporation developed and published MOBA game.
The development of Dota 2 started after IceFrog (the developer of Defense of the Ancients) got hired by Valve.
In Dota 2, two teams face off against each other with five player-controlled heroes to destroy the enemies ancient.
Dota 2 and Artifact[edit]
At the Artifact press conference at 2018-03-08, Gabe Newell emphasized that Artifact wasn't developed to be a Dota 2 card game, but rather that the Dota universe served best as a base to Artifact's lore:
"It's important to understand: The requirement for Artifact was to build the best possible card game. It wasn't to build a Dota 2 card game.
The Dota 2 team didn't say: "Oh, look everybody else, they got card games, we should have one too."
The Artifact team was like: "Let's go build the best card game." and they said: "Out of the available IPs that we have, which one is most appropiate? We could use Half Life, [...] we could create around."