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Demigod looks wierd. Ripped off a WC3 mod, made by the idiots that made Supreme Commander suck, delivered by the guys who think Sins of a Solar Empire is balanced, it's not off to a good start.

It's a hero-based, short-throw RTS with tech trees pretending to be Diablo loot items like DotA, where you fight across a map to destroy the enemy base/achieve enough kills/gain dominance. The heroes are different enough from each other and contain four different playstyles. It's apparently angled as a 'casual' game as it's short, quick, relatively simple and team-based.

None of these things are true.

It's not 'casual' to have a 'shop' with about 50 items that you have to essentially memorise to buy in a reasonable time. The first act of the game is to buy items, so 'casual' players are going to piss their team off by browsing for 30s+ in the critical early phase. The skill trees are similar and there is no 'out of game' way to look at this - the only way to gain experience with the item list or skill list is to play and piss off your friends. The ludicrous nature of buying boots of speed for a giant walking castle or full plate for a naked woman in a giant flower needs no comment.

It's not simple - it just has obfuscating tooltips. While it's stolen good UI ideas from MMOs, the tooltips are NOT updated or presenting real numbers, so they'll say 'omg ur stabby does teh damage' and you have to look elsewhere (a fullscreen popup) to see the net effect. The buffs from items are not presented as icons as spell buffs are.

The maps are interesting yet massively bland. One takes place on the back of a snake held by a marble statue of a man IN SPACE. However, the actual play surface is boring as hell (the ground isn't even normal-mapped to make the tiles look better) and the 'towers' and 'forts' etc are exactly the same between maps and generally just look like low-poly dicks hastily glued on. Overall the presentation is more that of a mod than a game in development for years, which is ironic.

An interesting mechanic is that of 'war rank'. I've not seen this before but I doubt it's original - while your heroes gain levels and get skills etc (starting the battle at level 1) your team overall has a 'war rank' that limits the maximum level of skills or upgrades available, which acts to keep the early game slower and prevents people raping up one side of the skill tree, and in the games I've played it takes about 15m to get to rank 10 where everything is available.

The game has balance issues - the pvp heroes are WAY better than the minion heroes, simply because minion damage is so low - and the defences can be either meaningless or super-useful depending. Some of the skills in particular seem overpowered, generally the spike or debuff abilities. The online stats reflect this, with Giant Castle Man and Angel with Harpoon Gun easily ahead in wins, win:loss and overall points.

However, all this said, the play is interesting. You can play minions or direct pvp, you've got buffers, healers, dps, aoe, everything neat (except tanks due to the aggro system). Players working as a team can get major synergies from other heroes. It's even possible to sink your money into upgrades for your whole team. I haven't played any decent multi yet (with people are aren't tards) but it has the scope to be interesting when played with a full load of human players.

I'm curious if anyone else has played this, as there was some silliness with the release date. It's not out in AU for May sometime, but I got it online for teh cheeps. I don't expect this thread to see any traffic of course, since it's not self-indulgent or talking about bad roleplay.

We're just never going to find a successor to World in Conflict at this rate.

It's not all bad - to be honest, my problems with the game are just polish and balance. I don't think I've digested enough of the playstyle to know if it'd be interesting long-term. In a casual 'with yer mates' sense, the game isn't horribly balanced, it's just lopsided in terms of competitive tournament play and ladders.

A strange thing is that the sound is distance based ut you play with a high camera... so much of the time you can barely hear any sound effects. The game is generic Epic Horns with the UT3 announcer saying SMITER and DOUBLE SMITE and H-H-H-HEADSHOT and the occassional big explosion. With all the dudes on the map fighting, the sound gives no sense of GIANT BATTLE GOING ON IN HERE, which is a shame.

The natural question is is the gameplay better than the WCIII mod?

PS: Can you use 'is' twice in a row?

To be honest, I never played DotA (since I hate WC3 etc etc). From what I've read, it's DotA with several new angles and features added, so I -imagine- it's better/more complex.

Oh and the fog works really strangely; I've seen a Rook (ie giant walking castle man) totally invisible in what appeared to be a few pixels of fog, then revealed and because he's so huge most of him is well inside the areas that were revealed before... ie the units are revealed or not based on point position, with no consideration to the fact that you SHOULD be able to see half of the rook before you can actually see his head (or how absurd the idea that you can't see him is since he's bigger than everything in the game and the map is flat).

And I think you should have a comma in between, ie my question is, xyz a quesiton.

Sounds cool, but do they have "Establish electromagnetic dominance" (conquest) mode for multi or is it straight deathmatch. I guess...is there a cool story to go along with interesting gameplay?

The story is beyond stupid.

I noticed the game has neither in-game voice chat or a q-menu, placing it firmly in 1997 communication wise. You have team-say and say, that's it. This may -somewhat- impact the 'casual' appeal of the game, but it's amusing the guys that made SupCom are this divorced from reality. A very team-based, cooperative game, with no method of communication beyond TYPING SHIT? No contextual pings? Pffft.

That said, proper multi is heaps of fun. I haven't played enough to work out what character I prefer, but I'm leaning towards the underpowered minion guys (the PvP guys are very much like GW or WoW spikers).

Chardok wrote:Sounds cool, but do they have "Establish electromagnetic dominance" (conquest) mode for multi or is it straight deathmatch. I guess...is there a cool story to go along with interesting gameplay?

For multi you've got-

Conquest- Destroy the enemy's Cidatel structure to win.
Dominate- Territory control on a points ticker. The more flags you control the faster you head for the goal, first one to the point limit wins.
Slaughter- Straight up Deathmatch, win by killing a particular number of enemy Demigods.
Fortress- Destroy the enemy fortresses scattered around the map to win.

I just read an article from Stardock that showed they have a massive piracy problem with Demigod at the moment, their servers being horribly mangled up by people stealing the game and being able to get online with it. That's a terrible problem, as it is causing network stress on their system that they weren't planning for, so now everyone's connection is degrading. I wasn't planning on getting Demigod, but now I feel really bad for Stardock, as this surge in demand isn't being met with an equal surge in purchasers. Moreover, it also blows a hole in my "effective copyright" idea, since the pirates are getting online somehow. Doesn't Stardock use basic copy protection at all? CD Keys and such? If they can, as they assert they weill, figure out some way to boot the pirates off their servers I do hope that a portion of those hijackers pay for a retail copy--one in ten would still be a huge boost in terms of sales.

Covenant wrote:I just read an article from Stardock that showed they have a massive piracy problem with Demigod at the moment, their servers being horribly mangled up by people stealing the game and being able to get online with it. That's a terrible problem, as it is causing network stress on their system that they weren't planning for, so now everyone's connection is degrading. I wasn't planning on getting Demigod, but now I feel really bad for Stardock, as this surge in demand isn't being met with an equal surge in purchasers. Moreover, it also blows a hole in my "effective copyright" idea, since the pirates are getting online somehow. Doesn't Stardock use basic copy protection at all? CD Keys and such? If they can, as they assert they weill, figure out some way to boot the pirates off their servers I do hope that a portion of those hijackers pay for a retail copy--one in ten would still be a huge boost in terms of sales.

No, they don't. They rely on the essential goodness of human beings, with a key to access patches.

Covenant wrote:I just read an article from Stardock that showed they have a massive piracy problem with Demigod at the moment, their servers being horribly mangled up by people stealing the game and being able to get online with it. That's a terrible problem, as it is causing network stress on their system that they weren't planning for, so now everyone's connection is degrading. I wasn't planning on getting Demigod, but now I feel really bad for Stardock, as this surge in demand isn't being met with an equal surge in purchasers. Moreover, it also blows a hole in my "effective copyright" idea, since the pirates are getting online somehow. Doesn't Stardock use basic copy protection at all? CD Keys and such? If they can, as they assert they weill, figure out some way to boot the pirates off their servers I do hope that a portion of those hijackers pay for a retail copy--one in ten would still be a huge boost in terms of sales.

Frankly, as bad as this is ethically or whatever, they were fucking idiots to not have seen it coming. GC2 is SP only and Sins is a relatively niche game - Demigod is higher-profile and aimed right at the Warcraft Piracy Squad. It's absurd that they didn't have a more robust system in place, ESPECIALLY considering the innovative p2p way they run multi (which is causing problems by itself) and ESPECIALLY since account-based authentication is FUCKING EASY.

No DRM is fine, especially for SP and LAN. When you're hosting a goddamn online tournament, it's not a fucking crime to have authentication. They're just idiots.

Having played a lot more (and all the characters except the yeti-spamming healer that I despise) I think I can upgrade it from 'strange' to 'good'. It's quite item-heavy (ie the items you buy a competitive with your powers/skills/etc) which is a bit of a barrier to entry until you work out what goes with who, but it's a lot of fun. I'm enjoying using the worst character - the vampire - and specing into spike damage with speed boosts and assassinating people left and right. Bite that slows + reduces armour + four attack wands + turn into mist and become invincible = lolgasm.

That said, the game should have a tooltip that says 'always buy a teleport scroll'. Cheap as shit, 2s warmup, move instantly to any friendly structure. Given the game doesn't have MMO-style 'health regen acceleration' this is very useful. I look at the game as MMO style PvP in an RTS framework, and I think that's effective.