By Jim Rossignol on July 25th, 2008 at 9:01 am.
Gas Powered Games’ battle-of-the-gods title, Demigod, is looking appropriately awesome. It’s actually a little more sedate than this trailer, as I explained in my first look at the game, but I think this gives you a good taste of the thunderous tone we should expect. Go watch.
EDIT: If you have trouble viewing try going directly to this page.
25/07/2008 at 09:07 Koopa says:
Can’t watch the video, just get a red “undefined” text under the axe box. :(
25/07/2008 at 09:14 Jim Rossignol says:
Seems fine for me. Anyone else have a problem? (I can’t find anything other than the Gamespot version atm)
25/07/2008 at 09:19 caesarbear says:
I also get the “undefined” error.
25/07/2008 at 09:20 Ian says:
Same problem here.
Wasn’t it Gamespot where there was a video issue before and most of us had to go to the actual site and watch it?
25/07/2008 at 09:25 Koopa says:
Cool, works fine at the actual site.
25/07/2008 at 09:25 Noc says:
I’ve got the same issue as Koopa.
25/07/2008 at 09:25 Theory says:
I can see it embedded. It’s the screenshots with animations.
And a barely-clothed lady, I guess.
25/07/2008 at 09:26 Seniath says:
I have no idea what is going on in that trailer, but it sure looks purdy.
25/07/2008 at 09:36 Josh says:
I was interested in this game before, but now I’m anticipating it. That was quite the well-done trailer.
25/07/2008 at 09:46 TheLordHimself says:
I get the red text too :(.
25/07/2008 at 09:52 davidAlpha says:
This is going to be so awesome. Thats just an amazing art style. Finally something to replace DOTA.
25/07/2008 at 10:05 MaxMcG says:
Looks great. Another game to look forward to. I hope there is an equivalent of Nukes. God I loved those in S.C.
25/07/2008 at 10:16 slang says:
Yeah, looks really promising.
25/07/2008 at 10:29 Okami says:
me want
25/07/2008 at 10:52 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Demigod! Yes please.
So, I see it’s being marketed as a hybrid RPG/RTS! I wonder if this implies the character development is meatier than that found in DotA. Not that not-quite-meatier is necessarily a bad thing, seeing as how WC3 was actually pretty fine in that regard.
25/07/2008 at 10:53 Real Horrorshow says:
It looks cool but why is the entire game confined to those shallow walkways grids way up in the sky? That’s going to get boring very fast.
25/07/2008 at 11:41 Commando says:
For some reason what really struck me was how good the animation is. The art looks really good but that animation was top notch.
25/07/2008 at 12:31 davidAlpha says:
@real horrorshow
In DOTA, which i think this game is loosely based on, there are 3 main “roads” to enemies base. The AI sends troops of both parties down these roads every x seconds. You, as the hero, help your troops push back the other parties troops in order to advance to the enemy camp.
Because of these set routes the advancement and strenght of your units on a road is important to your strategy. From what ive seen theyve tried the same principal in Demigod.
25/07/2008 at 12:43 Muzman says:
Ok, um wow.
This looks like that proper Giants style RTS I always wanted.
25/07/2008 at 12:57 Lukasz says:
@Commando
Yes. I saw bouncing boobies too.
25/07/2008 at 14:30 andy says:
cgi movie, nice, but i think there was only one or two seconds of actual gameplay in there, both of in which the character were just standing still.
those 2 seconds definitely looked like something from the supreme commander engine (i.e. crappy).
plus multiplayer only i believe. passing.
25/07/2008 at 15:22 Kestrel says:
They’ve confirmed single player:
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/313497
25/07/2008 at 15:39 Evangel says:
@andy: The entire trailer is ingame footage, they’re using the Supreme Commander engine for this game and unless you’ve got everything turned down, looks brilliant. There’s also single player campaign.
Your entire post is wrong.
25/07/2008 at 15:53 Mr_Day says:
I like the style of that aquaduct like environment, a very pleasing place to have an Epic Battle Between Large Things.
Does anyone remember the last time they went from futuristic RTS to fantasy? TA: Kingdoms? They have learnd-ed from their mistakes, it seems, and this makes me a happy Petey. Happy Petey claps his hands and hopes for the game to live up to its looks.
25/07/2008 at 16:05 Anthony Damiani says:
Red text. Undefined.
25/07/2008 at 16:07 TheBigOne says:
andy, the video is completely ingame graphics – no prerendered CGI. They however did some slight video-effect postwork stuff to it but expect the game to look nearly the same.
25/07/2008 at 16:08 Aaron says:
I’m not big on RTS games, but the art style and the chess-board-on-steroids look of this has me intrigued.
25/07/2008 at 16:29 RichPowers says:
Can we expect the game to be DRM-free since Stardock’s publishing it?
Awesome art direction and setting. I’m particularly fond of the giant rook guy who solves his problems by smashing stuff with a hammer.
25/07/2008 at 16:30 mujadaddy says:
I can’t even get it to work on the Gamespot site. I’m in the USA, though.
25/07/2008 at 16:38 TheBigOne says:
RichPowers, yes it will be DRM-free (although you will need to register @ Impulse to get updates and for multiplayer of course).
25/07/2008 at 16:46 PetitPrince says:
I also got the red undefined of death.
25/07/2008 at 16:59 Chris R says:
For the record, I too got the red Undefined txt, but the trailer worked by going to the site.
Also, this looks like fun. We should make the dude with towers for shoulders the new RPS mascot, what say ye?
25/07/2008 at 18:30 SwiftRanger says:
Download the ‘hi-res’ .mp4 version of the trailer (for free users), looks a lot better that way. It’s in-game idd but I also wonder how much extra stuff was added later on. Nevertheless, for a SupCom engine game the units at least look a lot more animated and to be honest, Forged Alliance definitely wasn’t that bad in the graphics department, especially not when you’re talking about the special effects so I am not that surprised if DG could really dish up such graphics in the final version.
I do hope we will see more Demigods though, now we’ve got that huge, hammer-stomping Rook, the fiery, dead Viking wizard, the hot chick in a flower, the fat bastard in a throne and that plant-hide/long tongue monster.
25/07/2008 at 19:32 Vollgassen says:
Ah so it looks like GPG put all their good art directors on this project instead of Space Siege
25/07/2008 at 22:37 Jake Mix says:
Well, someone sure does like Battlestar Galactica!
26/07/2008 at 00:53 Cronus says:
I also get the undefined error. It seems like more and more video embedded into RPS stories don’t work. Every GameSpot video and about half the GameTrailers videos on this site haven’t worked for me.
26/07/2008 at 03:53 Nick Halme says:
I can’t decide whether this game will work yet — where is a gameplay trailer? Pomp matters little to an RTS-like game
26/07/2008 at 04:01 RichPowers says:
Pomp matters little to any videogame. I was constantly frustrated by the lack of substantial gameplay footage during E3. Hey, I know you’re all videogamers, but let’s go ahead and show this Dragon Age trailer that looks like a battle from Lord of the Rings! Oh, right, enjoy this snippet of gameplay we’ll show a few days later.
Blizzard shows gameplay trailers when it reveals a new game. After the Diablo III reveal, there was already a 20 minute video on YouTube of the barbarian kicking ass.
26/07/2008 at 06:04 steve says:
“Blizzard shows gameplay trailers when it reveals a new game. After the Diablo III reveal, there was already a 20 minute video on YouTube of the barbarian kicking ass.”
It would be a lot easier to be Blizzard if everyone had billions in the bank and could work on a game for 3-5 years before showing it in any form to the public. You could spend the time to polish that gameplay demo instead of trying to finish a game so the public could actually play it.
While I would love to think pomp doesn’t matter—and it certainly doesn’t while playing—no one would pay any attention to most games without something visually arresting to get their attention. Or to put it another way: How much coverage/comments would this game get had it been a dozen screens from a far-zoom gameplay perspective versus a video, even when the video consists of in-game footage (albeit zoomed in to levels you’d never play at)?
26/07/2008 at 23:55 Nick Halme says:
Don’t pull the ‘Blizzard is so rich’ line here — if your game is ready to show, show gameplay. If it isn’t ready to show, don’t show anything. Be a big boy developer and shirk the industry trend. It frustrates me to see marketing trying to sell games without showing people the GAME.
For instance, I’m still interested in Demigod because I’m TOLD that it plays like DOTA. All I’ve seen so far are a bunch of queer half-naked faeries fighting rock giants. What does that even mean?
27/07/2008 at 02:02 Arathain says:
This looks fantastic. Love the art direction, except for the gratuitous naked chick.
27/07/2008 at 02:40 Noc says:
Gratuitous? Or obligatory?
27/07/2008 at 03:51 cyrenic says:
Both!
27/07/2008 at 04:01 -PATTOM- says:
@Nick Halme: according to the newest Dev Diary, all the footage was recorded during play sessions. The visuals have apparently been tweaked a bit, but the action sequences are in fact gameplay.
Link: http://forums.demigodthegame.com/319323
27/07/2008 at 08:14 Aankhen says:
One word: want. It’s not DotA, it’s way better. The visuals are fantastic, too.
27/07/2008 at 09:08 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
-PATTOM-: Seriously? Hells yeah.
Go team Demigod! If this turns out great, and sells accordingly, then that’ll give those DRM-heavy publishers yet another kick in the pants.
Too bad those bastards all wear steel codpieces.
27/07/2008 at 18:54 cliffski says:
glad to see I’m not the only one who hates non-gameplay videos, with the UI turned off.
I don’t turn off the Ui when I play games, nor have lots of banging noises and zooming, so I’d like to see what the game will ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE IF I BUY IT.
I haven’t followed this game. i don’t even know if it’s an RPG or RTS. And despite pending millions on their movie clip, I still don’t know.
Great job PR team!
27/07/2008 at 19:27 Noc says:
Well, they clearly didn’t “spend millions” on it, because they had a couple guys sit around watching AI battles for a week and edit shots together in Afteraffects. So . . . maybe a couple thousand? If that’s all their moviemakers did for few week’s worth of pay, and they PAID for a copy of AfterAffects?
See Pattom’s link above.
27/07/2008 at 21:04 Skalpadda says:
I don’t see how it would be costly or take a lot of time to simply record a couple of minutes of gameplay (provided that your game is in some sort of playable state of course). Writing up a commentary and having a dev talk into a mic for a few minutes doesn’t hurt wallet nor schedule either.
Blizzard has specially scripted stuff that’s fairly well directed, but at least they have the sense to release both cool cinematics as well as gameplay videos that give an idea of how it’ll play. Valve’s HL2 bink videos were also awesome (I still think they’re amazing after having played the actual game).
There’s no excuse for releasing only cinematic or cutscene(ish) shots of your game, although I tend to enjoy those as well.
28/07/2008 at 01:32 steve says:
The reason there’s no UI in the video is because it isn’t final, though it’s getting closer to being more showable as the public beta draws near.
The cost with producing a straight gameplay video like the Diablo 3 one is that you’d need a team polishing that part of the game to 100% showable form. With a virtually infinite budget and development schedule, you can pull all of your artists and animators and scripters and such on to that specific project. (It’s what everyone had to do back in the E3 days.)
You can argue that it’s worth the cost, but it’s not an insignificant issue for a small team like the one making Demigod. With a smaller team, you’re looking at:
*Make a flashy video that hides where development ends, or parts that are unfinished or non-final. This can be done relatively quickly with a small number of people.
*Pull more people from your main team off the core game development to produce a release-quality video, possibly causing delays to the entire project.
*Go silent, with no PR or marketing or video until it’s finished, though that might be a few weeks or a month before launch. Good luck getting it pre-sold to retail with zero hype or interest.
There are other options here, but most are between “no video/do nothing” and “any video/do something.”
Also, it’s easy to forget that it’s a teaser trailer. It isn’t designed to tell you everything you need to know about Demigod. That info will come later. (Or at least can be found in the various articles floating around.)
As far as teasers go, I think it was pretty effective in that a lot of people are more interested in the game today—or at least more aware of it—than they were yesterday.
28/07/2008 at 02:42 Skalpadda says:
I hope so, because the art direction and concept looks interesting!
In any case, I think it’s mostly the fact that E3 week (and quite a lot of teasers/trailers released in the weeks before) served up loads and loads of cutscenesque and cinematic snippets with very little gameplay. Every time people go through the same motions of “Yes, it looks nice, but what will it play like?” and after a few weeks of that you’ll be getting a bit tired of it ;)
edit: Oh and also, there’s been plenty of low-budgety gameplay teasers, Stalker managed lots of them. Certainly not Valve/Blizzard quality but still interesting. Then again I guess it’s a question of what audience you’re making a teaser for.
28/07/2008 at 07:20 steve says:
“Oh and also, there’s been plenty of low-budgety gameplay teasers, Stalker managed lots of them. Certainly not Valve/Blizzard quality but still interesting.”
That’s the problem. Gamers are generally unforgiving of production values, so unless you make it as good as Valve or Blizzard, you risk creating a negative vibe around your game. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
“Then again I guess it’s a question of what audience you’re making a teaser for.”
Yeah, they aren’t always for gamers. These work on retail more than a straight gameplay video, and you need to start that dog and pony show with them quite early to convince them to take your game.
28/07/2008 at 17:22 Nox says:
Game looks fantastic, can’t wait to play.
28/07/2008 at 19:41 Martin says:
Looks smashing!
/gets coat…
28/07/2008 at 23:10 GeorgeR says:
This looks so good.I’m really interested in seeing how they’ll juggle the online offline thing. Since, unless I’m reading wrong, they’ll be pseudo linked ala spore’s universe?
31/07/2008 at 03:17 Nick Halme says:
@-PATTOM-
Yes, but the footage is presented in such a way that it might as well be a cinematic — it gives us no clear idea of what the game plays like, which frankly defeats the purpose of game footage.