I just made a post about this in another thread but the post is not showing yet - oh well. In short, cross pollination and networking are very important for successful products and collaborations beyond cursory affiliations.

I must be the only person out there that really doesn't care about stats, achievements, and ranks. They're nice for some people, yes, but I do hope they're truly optional. I hope Stardock/GPG doesn't come up with one of those idiotic ideas to tie unlockable items to ranks or stats like what's done in the Battlefield series or even in Crysis. I absolutely DESPISE having game elements locked away until I give x amount of my life away to the game. I will not buy games that do that because I will choose how to spend my time, not you.

And honestly, I don't see how people can be anticipating this game much when we know very little about it. I see dozens of armored hamburgers with pitchforks fighting in the shadows of these colossus type things while dinosaurs fling spiked balls into the air. The descriptions I've read make it sound like every single battle will play out the exact same way except the scenery or placement of items changes. I'm sorry to be so negative, but it sounds like an extremely shallow game.

Considering Stardock has seen it and (obviously) remains interested, and knowing their fascination with strategy games that are a bit heavy on the "strategy", I suspect Demigod is not shallow.

But yes, I'd agree for the average consumer, there's no way to be able to tell whether an individual will like it or not. Which is one reason why I miss the old days when you didn't know years in advance what was on the horizon. It was somewhat more exciting to be in your local store and be surprised by what magically showed up on the shelf.

Ah, teh tubes of teh Internets. What they've done to us.

-HM

I think a big reason people are excited about it is that a lot of people really liked DotA, and as such any game that's touted as a bigger, better, prettier DotA is going to have a pretty solid fanbase, even if we don't yet know a ton about Demigod specifically. Plus the aesthetic looks kind of like Shadow of the Colossus, which I really like.

As for Stardock advertising (and I use that term VERY loosely) on Sins' site, it's pretty natural, and they're not really that obtrusive about it. It's a news post, not a flock of banner ads or something like that. It's pretty natural that the two teams (dev and publisher) would want to support each other, especially after how closely they worked on Sins.

re: ZBJDragon, I too hope that Impulse and its MP ladder/networking/matchmaking system isn't entirely dependent on stats and the like (or some sort of overall gaming "rank", which would pretty much ruin it for me too). That said, to make any kind of matchmaking service, you need some metric of comparison. Here's hoping they don't go overboard. I DO like achievements though, but I think that's just my gaming personality, heh.

One comment:


EPIC WIN

Now I hope they put FA on this service. (FA= My favorite Game of all time, followed very closely By Sins)

I put this in that forum suggestion thread, but why not have a "Stardock" forum where all the 'official' related stuff can conglomerate, then have the database shared with the GC2 and Sins one, so that new posts in the Stardock forum are linked on both child forums?

You are not alone my friend. We are legion.

...and Sins is just a game where a bunch of starships blast each other to smithereens, right?

It's way too early to be that judgemental about a game in which the only information that's been given is a small amount of detail and a couple screenshots. I agree that achievements and in particular unlockable content won't appeal to every gamer, but it's unfair to infer that Demigod will be "shallow" based on what little we know at this point.

-- Retro

Anyone who is not excited about this game has not played DotA. Go buy WC3, and try to find a game of DotA on Bnet, and you'll see the enormous potential of this game-play concept.

If you're not a DotA fan, then you probably won't like this game either.

Updated 1up interview with Chris Taylor now mentions Stardock at the very end. http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3167280&p=1

From the original interview's February content:


Cue buzzer.

It's true for those people that just want to play short MP matches, but there's a huge reason why StarCraft II spends so much effort on cinematics and voiceacting, and there's a huge market segment of people that never or rarely go online to play. I'm glad this is open for discussion now that Brad's on board.

That being said, the interview DOES confirm that this is more of a "casual" RTS with short matches and not a Sins-style epic gameplay map concept where games can last 6 hours or more.

-- Retro

Do you know how often people say this? Pretty much every single time criticisms are levied against something that hasn't come out yet. I didn't start following games yesterday, and this is far from the first time I've had pre-release criticisms of a game. From the descriptions, screenshots, and promotion thus far, I can infer a lot. The game being shallow is a big one. Structures get auto-placed, you don't build units--they're built automatically, and you play as big colossus thing whose sole intent is wipe out the enemy colossus and base. Doesn't sound like much to me and reeks of repetitiveness. Maybe control of a few strategic points is mixed in, but the game sounds awfully shallow and way too short. At worst it'll seem excessively short like Rise of Legends, and at best it could be short or take a while like in World in Conflict's multiplayer.

I don't really care who Chris Taylor is and I do think he's an idiot now. It really should say something when the developer of Unreal Tournament figures out that people play the singleplayer against bots more often than they play multiplayer, if at all. This applied to all versions of UT from the old UT to the new UT3. Ok, so Epic does doesn't polish or support their products or customers anymore, respectively, but at least they figured it out that even predominantly multiplayer games see a ton of singleplayer action. GPG should be paying attention here. That segment of the market cannot be ignored. Battlefield 2 has always been annoying to play online because of all the cheating, base raping, stat padding, low-ticket servers, and so on. I had my most fun with it playing the singleplayer 64 mod with unlocks 123 turned on.

Again, another PC developer that doesn't understand their PC audience. These people are a dime a dozen these days. It doesn't take an industry veteran to come up with a great game.

I too do not care about achievements, and never spend my time actively pursuing them. Neither do I play multi-player, so ladders, leaderboards, stats means absolutely nothing. And while I know Frogboy already said they won't be ignoring the single players out here, I have grave doubts about it. Specifically with the quote that said the SP was merely a training ground for MP...

I find it irksome that most games and game developers these days focus so much on multi-player... I don't have anything against multi-player but some people just prefer to play with themselves... ooooh, that didn't come out quite right  :NOTSURE: 

Tossing aside strategy games that are strictly single-player (GalCivII, MOO, etc.), what strategy game's single player campaign ISN'T a training ground for multiplayer. As far as gameplay goes, a single-player campaign eases a player into the rules of the game, progressively teaching him or her more about the game and slowly peeling back the layers of the game during the entire process.

Remember Starcraft? You had three types of units during the first mission: marines, SCVs, and vultures. You had one resource: minerals, and you couldn't do much with the units you had. The second mission ramped this up by adding gas and firebats, and soon after you had goliaths and various defensive structures. At the end of the Terran campaign you had the entire tech-tree under your disposal, but they certainly didn't drop that all on a new player right from the beginning.

IMO a single-player campaign in a multi-player game fails if it doesn't teach the player how to play the game. It definitely also exists as a device to tell a story, but whether a developer takes advantage of this is up to them.



None of the UTs have had a particularly engrossing story, and neither the UT or Battlefield series' have had strong single-player campaigns. Your examples are perfect examples of single-player "training grounds," so I don't know where your complaint really lies.

Don't get me wrong, a single-player component is really important to me. But if you're talking about a campaign and not just a sandbox or training ground, a single-player mode MUST train the player about the rules of the game, especially in strategy games where the emphasis is almost entirely on the gameplay.

I think people want an engrossing story to get them to play the game, but good single-player AI and multi-player keep people playing.

You missed my point. I never said a thing about campaigns. I was commenting specifically on singleplayer modes such as skirmish/custom matches against/with AI opponents who put up a fight. Campaigns are normally the last things I play. I play custom matches all the time though. Sometimes it's a random map in Sins with 5 other hard AI's, a stock map on Battlefield 2 with 56 other AI's running around the map, or perhaps some UT2004 with 31 other bots on a map of my own design. None of these games have single player campaigns. The co-op 64 singleplayer mod for Battlefield 2 was a huge hit on the BF2 forums, and I already stated that the developers of UT determined most people don't play online. Singleplayer training and tutorials are important, yes, but there should also be regular singleplayer combat, skirmish, custom match, and other modes. Scenarios and campaigns are a welcome addition to that, but not an absolute necessity.

Do I play online? Sometimes, but it's not very often. Most of the time it's with friends I know. Generally speaking, I have a more consistent experience playing against AI opponents. AI opponents don't quit half way through, complain when they start losing, do stupid stuff like fart into their microphones, use hacks/trainers to get an edge on you, or sit around padding their stats all day in some random corner of the map with a friend.

<3 Frogboy.

Not just one of my favorite game company people, one of my favorite people. ;o


I just hope This Demigod being pushed back to Febuary is just to make it better not to add a bunch of single player..

The head developer months ago said Single Player would basically just be training and that it's a primarily multiplayer game.

But you quoted this:



At any rate, since there is going to be an open beta people have a chance to clamor and critique the AI for a single-player sandbox so that it can be put in the final release. Like they did and are still doing (and the developers are still changing) for Sins.

So... ZJB... Simple gameplay =/= simple game. Chess. Really simple gameplay. Anybody can learn to play in one day. But it's a bit complex, when you get competitive.

Halo. Simple gameplay. Incredibly complex game.

Interestingly enough, often times the complex deep games can become quickly marginalized, and the gameplay reduced to something incredibly simple. LRM spam anybody? Zergling rushes?

So, again, go play DotA. Then come back and talk about it. I agree that you can infer a great deal from reading pre-development material. But if you haven't played the 'spiritual successor,' as I can only assume you haven't, then why bother commenting at all?

Also, stardock has stated that they intend to do something about shifting a bit more focus to single-player. So again... Don't jump the gun, you'll sell yourself short.

Personally, I'm all for anything that means enhancing Impulse and Stardock's content-delivery systems. Also, it's more or less a given that when you buy a game SD's involved in, there'll be a lot of updates/bugfixes--you're not stuck with an "out of the box" product. These are definitely good things.

On the other hand, I'm not really excited about Demigod. The developer comments by Chris Taylor, quoted earlier in the thread, indicate that the gameplay is being modelled after the Battlefield games. I played Battlefront about a year and a half ago, which was basically Battlefield: Star Wars. I didn't enjoy it. The gameplay for all of those games basically follows this model of 1) pick a character class, 2) start a battle/campaign/skirmish, 3) shoot everything you can see and try not to get shot yourself, and 4) when you do get shot, respawn and try again. It's basically a MMO FPS. I find that to be tedious and essentially the opposite of fun.

I understand these kinds of games are very popular, especially (it would seem) with many of the posters here. But quite frankly I enjoy a good, story-driven, single-player campaign in my strategy games. Why? Because I spend zero time playing multiplayer online games and I spend little time playing skirmishes, with very rare exceptions. I play skirmish games for AoE II and III (although I haven't reloaded either since I last reinstalled Windows). For this reason, I want a good, solid SP campaign when I play a strategy game, because that's going to be my first and possibly my last impression of that product.

(As regards SoaSE, while I would love to see an SP campaign and I am hoping that this will be a HUGE part of the upcoming expansion, at the moment, I'm enjoying its hybrid gameplay. I'm finding it to be much more compelling than GalCivII, and although the AI is handing me my butt so far, I'm exploring a balance between turtling and researching versus striking out fast and colonizing new worlds.)

Wait for the game to actually get out in the wild before making too many guesses on what it's like.

Also, Brad has said now that Stardock is involved, to expect more of a single player component than was originally mentioned in preview articles.

-HM

From what I've read of Demigod it has the potential to be cool, but what are the system requirements for Demigod going to be; that's my big question currently. My Laptop is half a year old and quite powerful (and Sins runs well on it), but I don't know if it could've handled Supreme Commander.
Also it needs to support at least two computers for LAN with one key. A campaign would be nice as well and 40$ is definitely the sweet spot.

I personally have no use whatsoever for multiplayer. I play to have fun, and being repeatedly ganked by what appear to be cheating, foul-mouthed, over privleged, under-mannered eight-year-olds is not my idea of fun. Even if the game in question isn't infested with smacktards, I'm not very likely to win anyway. (I like games a lot, but I'm not, unfotunately, particularly good at them. In RTS games, any AI setting above "Normal" will usually stomp me into the ground in fairly short order.) Also, at the moment the only Internet access I have is through a fairly slow dial-up connection. My options for broadband access are limited to the following; A) pay about $700 for equipment and installation, and then nearly $100 a month for a digital satellite-based system that would be useless for gaming anyway, and move to an area less techologically backwards.

That said, if a game is multiplayer only, I have no reason to play it. I can appreciate that it takes time and resources to develop a single-player campaign. But if you aren't going to include one, the skirmish gameplay had better be absolutely awesome. I'm probably in the minority - it's hard to say, since people who rarely or never go online are obviously not being accounted for in online polls.

For me, another worrying trend is the push for online-only distribution. I can't reliably download a file that's more than about 50 MB in size - my ISP tends to "accidentally" hang up after about seven hours. (I've called to complain about this, and they swear they have no such setting. I've found seven hours to be suspiciously reliable.) Due to all the problems with bandwidth pirates, very few sites seem to support file managers and resumed downloads anymore. In most cases, I can get large patches by taking my ancient laptop down to the wi-fi hotspot, a mere 40 miles away, but that only works if the patch is hosted on a fairly normal file-server, such as Fileplanet or an actual FTP site. For services like Steam... well, the point at which they release a truely huge patch for HL2 will be the point at which I can no longer play it, obviously. (My laptop is a 300 MHz IBM Thinkpad with a staggering 156 MB of onboard RAM. It won't even run Linux, at least not any version with a GUI.)

For me, things like ranking, friends lists, and especially clans are completely irrelevant. I find the entire concept of Achievements somewhat baffling. Unlockable content is traditional in games, but most of the lists of Achievements I've seen in online strategy guides are completely pointless - their only apparent purpose is to indicate that you've spent a truely insane amount of time playing the game. Most don't even relate to any particular level of skill - many of the ones I've noticed were for playing for a certain amount of time, for finishing a specific level in the single player game, or simply using a certain power/weapon/whatever a specific number of times. I've seen several games where most of the "achievement" list could be accomplished by taping down some buttons on the controller and leaving the game running overnight.