Comments on: Smite ‘Em Up: Demigod Footage

By: SwiftRanger

SwiftRanger — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:56:13 +0000

“No, it doesn’t make him a horrible designer.

The single-player campaign does.”

I’d love to know how highly you think of other RTS campaigns…

By: cowless

cowless — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:51:14 +0000

@Gorgeras
Not fair to judge him on that, RTS campaigns always suck. They’re more about exploiting the scripting than interesting strategy. Now and again they’ll be atmospheric enough to get away with it (CoH, Homeworld) but even those seem paper-thin on replaying them.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:56:27 +0000

Wow, this reminds me a lot of Sacrifice. The “WRATHFUL” is truly horrid, but if it is a placeholder then I don’t fault them. The Fog of War is quite annoying, I’ve always hated the concept. I can understand it if there’s some extenuating circumstance that stops your characters from having a normal sight line (i.e. the blind guy Kestrel mentioned,) but the idea that a unit can’t see more than 20 yards across a flat plain on a sunny day is just asinine. It might be necessary for RTSes due to the player’s ability to move the camera, but at least make sight lines realistic and allow the player to see anything along sight lines from their characters. Similar to NOX and other isometric RPGs.
Beyond that, it looks interesting. I highly suspect a demo will be what wins people over on this one.

By: Gorgeras

Gorgeras — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:32:21 +0000

No, it doesn’t make him a horrible designer.

The single-player campaign does. You can complete a level of any Hitman game in ten minutes, which makes the reliance on clarivoyance forgivable. A game like Supreme Commander unfortunately appears to be the product of a designer that hasn’t noticed we are now in a post-Doom 3 world where the quicksave is no longer an acceptable form of alt-fire.

I tried once more for an hour on the 6th Cybran mission the other day. I don’t think I have the patience anymore.

By: Skurmedel

Skurmedel — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:52:24 +0000

Korgan would you say there is alot of warmth in chess? Alot of people still find it enjoyable for other qualities.

Supreme Commander was great, sure its universe was bland, but I enjoyed it for the tactical stuff. I can see why it doesn’t appeal to everyone, but that doesn’t make him a horrible game designer, he has a different market.

By: Quater

Quater — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:16:20 +0000

DOUBLE SMITE!!

By: Kestrel

Kestrel — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:32:33 +0000

(ok so now I’ve watched it and I was totally wrong – this footage isn’t from a public Beta. Hopefully we’ll see some of the stuff in there in later builds)

“Genre name… how about RTAS? Real-time Action Strategy.”

What about flipping it so it’s ARTS? Action Real-time Strategy rolls off the tongue :P Or Action-Strategy?

By: Tei

Tei — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:12:50 +0000

@Korgan: I don’t know enough of his games. But I would have provide a different style for fog or out-of-map rendering on SupCom. I was shocked to see a green matrix or other crap rendered outside the los area. Like.. the world was inside a emulator, or some crazy stuff. More because videos show a seamless world, where you can zoom on ubermachines destroying everything on his path. But on my game sessions with SupCom, all i see is the zoomed out view, with units as tiny 8bits alike, icons. SupCom is good, but play like a Commodore 64 game. And that is not a bad thing, If you can zoom to look as near as posible to your ubermachines, but that “freecamera” was not posible ( I don’t know on the latest patches, maybe that has been fixed ).

And now, a game is delivered where there are not Hill 301, because there are not Hills. I suppose this will make it easy for the programmers, as programming hills is boring. But.. it may remove the fun for the players. I have no see the video (no flash player here) but as some people say, it remove *more* from the inmmersion, and make you feel like you are in real life playing a videogame.

My main problem here is that I only play a few sessions with games withouth inmmersion. Theres no replayability to me. So even If the game is good and fun, It will be somehow wasted money, because I will only play it once, or 2 times.

By: Korgan

Korgan — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:38:24 +0000

Gas Powered Games – by robots, for robots. Face it, Chris Taylor is one of the worst game designers ever. There’s zero warmth or atmosphere in his games, just balance and mechanics that look good on paper.

By: mashakos

mashakos — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:59:13 +0000

why couldn’t the devs overcome the MMO “jack-in-the-box” style gameplay? Your character is standing around idle, and in a split second BAM! he’s completed an attack. It feels very twitchy, and totally breaks immersion for me personally.

By: Kudo

Kudo — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:29:16 +0000

As someone who’s played DotA for over 4 years, this is looking promising. It’s hard to tell whether it will be enjoyable or not without actually playing it though.

Genre name… how about RTAS? Real-time Action Strategy. I guess we’ll just have to wait until someone creates a label for this type of game that sticks.

By: Gorgeras

Gorgeras — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:13:33 +0000

As a man of dense brand loyalty, I say Demigod is not an RTS but the same genre as DoTA. We as an ignorant mass simply haven’t understood it yet, just as Sacrifice was not an RTS nor an RPG nor an Action-Adventure, etc.

Sometimes, certain games come along which are not any genre that yet exists but won’t be seen as such. Many of the old Warcraft 3 custom scenarios were like this.

If there is a genre for Demigod and DoTA it would save a lot of confusion, or just distract it, to start thinking about a new genre name.

Tower Defense?
Rampage Management?
Or even Smite ‘Em Up?