The Rook is clearly going to be the first demigod that each of us try in Demigod. It’s a giant brick golem with castles for shoulder-pads. It also has a hammer. Lead designer Mike Marr shows it off in the walkthrough below, and although he cackles at one point, he doesn’t sound excited enough for me. Gas Powered should totally get the Black Prophecy trailer dude in to narrate their videos. THE ROOK IS DESTINED… TO SMASH!
Demigod is out soon, and we’re going to review the crap out of it.
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DotA has its own kind of balance, but you have to be very well versed in order to know what that balance looks like. That said, I’d be interested to see if this improves upon the DotA formula at all; ” -water red” and ” -weather rain” can spice the terrain up only so much, and that’s just to start with. I’d like something I can sit down with people who don’t play a lot and have a rollicking good time.
Speaking of which, DEFCON time.
Radiant: That looks like a 1v1 arena map. They go to up to 8v8. None of them are sprawling campaign expanses, but that’s the point of the game. It’s an arena action/RPG/RTS, rather than a traditional base-building, army-blobbing thing.
Also, not everyone is just controlling one unit. 4 of the 8 characters are self-contained fighting machines, but the other four can build their own small personal army which you can command like any other RTS.
The main thing is that each character has a lot of potential upgrades, and different skill trees picked within a match will result in a massively different character by match end. There really seems to be no ‘right’ way to do it.
It’s not a 1v1 map – there are none. Demigod is a pure teamgame. While you can set up 1v1 custom games, there’s no dedicated maps for it and there’s no official gametypes that support it.
That specific map shown in the video is a 3v3 map, IIRC, and one of the smaller ones too.
The maps aren’t too big, in terms of playable area (the background art is gigantic and really nice looking, thanks to the SupCom engine) but that’s intentional to keep the matchlenght low. It’s somewhere around 30 minutes, but mostly less.
Oh yes and:
“Also, heroes that can build towers? Wow, there’s like 50 Dota ripoff maps for War3 that want to say hello.”
Only one hero can build towers – and only if you skill him for it. How about you actually look into things before you make dismissive comments about it based on faulty assumptions?
“Future Cop’s multiplayer was brilliant.”
Wasn’t it? I remember playing it years ago on the PS1; could never a PC copy working on a modern PC. Multiplayer was very different to single player, and quite unique.
P.
So I’m also going to try to explain what DotA is:
Basically the idea of these kind of mods is, that there are two armies fighting a war, and you play the hero that will lead your army to victory. So you play the equivalent of Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies. Except that there are usually 5 or 6 heroes on each side, and every player controls one. And you play only the hero: You don’t control any units.
So it’s not an RTS at all. The armies that are doing the RTS part are computer controlled. I guess you can imagine it best, if you think of something like a team deathmatch RPG on a very dynamic playing field.
DotA is the most succesful of these mods, but there are probably hundreds. It all started way back in Starcraft, but has only really evolved when Warcraft III allowed proper heroes with level ups and stuff. The power and ease of use of the Warcraft III editor meant, that there are constantly new mods, or variations of old ones.
The genre went through lots of evolutions over time. There were more strategic mods, more casual or more complex mods, and lots of very gimmicky mods. But in the end it was DotA that dominated, with a very pure version, which is mainly about team deathmatch. The game does lots of things right, mainly that the armies are only there to provide a dynamic team deathmatch experience. They aren’t important enough to get in the way of the experience, but they are strong enough that it hurts when you don’t consider the current situation on the battlefield before acting. It allows for a lot of great moments, like hiding in the forest while the enemy army marches past you, then ambushing someone behind enemy lines, and finally barely escaping before his team chases you down.
So DotA is all about those great moments known from great team deathmatch games, and then lots more which are only made possible by the addition of the dynamic playing field.
I’ll get it when steam does a 50% off weekend deal next year.
@Adam: demigod is very unlikely to be released on steam in the near future, since publisher Stardock is behind steam’s biggest competitor “impulse”.
Impulse, however, has special offers too sometimes – I got titan quest and space rangers 2 for 3 Euro each a while ago ;).
Impulse also has a very nice advantage over steam: all prices are in USD, so in europe you have a 26% discount on every game that impulse has to offer (hint: “braid”).
demigod’s price at release is 40$, which is less than 30 EUR. Which I think is a good price for a new released title.
That said, buying a game a year after it was released it probably always a good idea.
I didn’t watch the video and I haven’t read any of this, I just wanted to say one thing:
DOUBLE SMITE
i may actually play this game. i liked the basic idea of DotA but stopped playing it because the DotA community is a huge turn off.
i’ll at least give the demo of Demigod a spin to see if the community has some pleasant folks in it. if i have to deal with the “l33t gamer” jerks that populated DotA i definitely won’t bother with Demigod either.
I actually like the look of this. I like its artstyle and like the idea of more action based RTS beating down on the enemy rather than spending 2 hours+ turtling towards the enemy.
Future Cop LAPD was an awesome game. I played on the PS1 for many hours and loved its singleplayer + multiplayer.
It seems to be one of those hidden gems that many people liked but never realised other people even knew what the hell it was.
I don’t want to have to break out the obvious here but , not everyone has played WC3 and even those of us who have played WC3 havn’t all played DOTA. I have played both, personally, however this is the basic idea Stardock has.
MOST gamers have never heard of DOTA, these people will look at this game and say “cool, stardock and Gas powered games made this, I liked other games they made and I NEVER Seen anything like this AND it’s cheep, I buy it now!” Brand grammer indeeded ;P They’ll sell tons of copies of the game, probably mostly through digital downloads. They’ll make back the money they spent on the game and then some, success! This is how they made money on Sins and GalCIV
They don’t care of DOTA hardcore players like the game, that’s like a very SMALL amount of dollars there they can make and they also know they won’t be able to make you happy no matter what they do unless they copy DOTA exactly. For what it was worth I enjoyed DOTA as long as I was playing with other n00bs who just wanted to have fun.
BTW Future cop was awesome!
I have waited a few days for this post to exit the frontpage. So almost everyone as read it and make his own opinion.
I don’t want to influence other people. And this guys proabably deserver respect, and interest on his works.
Is that clear?
Here comes my opinion:
This game is pure crap.
Don’t want to burst your bubble Tei but the post is still on the front page ;P Still that doesn’t make your comment invalid, if you think the game is pure crap so be it. The question is will it sell to the unwashed masses before they realize what kind of crap it is?
“I have waited a few days for this post to exit the frontpage. ”
I think you don’t really understand how the web works…
I also doubt that your judgment would constrain anyone from making his own opinion. It’s not as if there ever was a game without some guy who thinks it’s crap.