What follows can’t really be said to be a review. The plan was that I would write up a “Wot I Think” discussion of Demigod for the week it was released, but that didn’t work out. Having suffered quite a bit of upset on launch, Demigod – which has been heavily patched and continues to evolve – remains troubled. The trouble is nothing to do with game design, it’s to do with the internet. A technical issue. I’ve only been able to connect to a single online game in countless hours of trying, troubleshooting, tweaking, crying. Alec seems similarly blighted. What follows is therefore is the incomplete account of an unhappy soul. But it should also be clear that I think this – in spite of it all – a brilliant game.
From the chiming harp noises of the menu screen to the writhing death-throes of the demigods themselves, Demigod is beautiful. And I don’t mean that lightly: this is one of the most exquisitely presented games I’ve encountered. I’m sure it won’t meet all tastes, but its mix of madness, monstrousness and meticulously detail is somehow exactly what I wanted.
The “gameness” of it is at the forefront: it’s a battle between supernatural beings for the throne of a god: the fiction instantly explains away game logic. It’s a battle on a celestial board. It might be filled with wraiths, giants and other shambling horrors, but it feels as pure as chess.
It is, of course, rather more complex than chess, despite you only having one piece to play with: the demigod. Each arena has two citadels, one light and one dark. The demigods of either side (arenas run up to 5v5) must defend their own citadel and destroy that of the opposing side. The citadels are heavily entrenched, with energy-blasting towers, archer towers, and fortresses (occasionally upgraded with trebuchets) defending the citadel. It’s a strategy game where the turtling has already happened.
Across the map are a series of flags. These represent strategic points and may come with an artifact shop or money making gold-making cog thing attached. They might also be attached to a portal. Portals are at the heart of the battle: from them waves of your forces pour through into the world. On meeting enemy forces, or enemy defences, they begin to attack. As your war-rank increases – through domination of the flags – so your citadel can be upgraded to unleash tougher and more impressive monsters from the portals: angels, dinosaur-trebuchets, giants. The battles can be quite frenzied, with hundreds of causalities on either side. And in the midst of it all are the demigods.
There are eight demigods. Four are assassins, and these are the great fighters and damage dealers. Four are generals, and their powers are in augmenting the efforts of the combatants around them. As the game progresses the demigods rely on two resources to increase their personal power: gold, which allows them to upgrade the citadel, or to purchase items for themselves. And experience. Capturing flags and killing opponents means that you level up, and these open up the trees of skill progression. Choosing your favourite build (ideal for the hours of offline experimentation I’ve been condemned to) is where the greatest pleasure lies in Demigod. Working out how a demigod can be made most brutally effective is a game in itself. (And, it’s worth noting, the game insists on such experimentation and exploration – it doesn’t have any kind of tutorial. This hasn’t been as much of a problem as it might seem.)
Torch Bearer is probably the demigod that most people gravitate towards, not least because he’s top left of the menu. He’s a damage-deal extraordinaire, with a battery of ice and fire powers with personalities to match. Shrill and exuberant with fire, earth-bound and tenebrous with ice. Like all the demigod’s he has a major weakness than needs to be patched up with purchased items – armour, potions, scrolls, powerful bound artifacts. Torch Bearer needs a bit of a hit point buff. And then he’s ready. Floating into a battle and circling everyone in flame, before blasting an opposing god with your fireball: it’s scintillating stuff. I got to grips Torch Bearer quickest of all, and I expect I’ll return to him. The flames are good.
Regulus, the crossbow-equipped angel, is another relatively weak character. But his ranged attack is deadly in world of melee. He’s able to do huge damage to both other demigods and the defensive towers. There’s something about his smarmy face, and the fact that the AI regular uses him effectively, which means he’s my least-played demigod aside from Sedna, but he’s clearly a unique role on the field. I’ll have to experiment with him some more.
Unclean Beast is, apparently, rather popular online. The diseased mega-dog must tap directly into the psyche of gamers, and perhaps that’s why he was the first demigod I used extensively. Something about being fast, but also being a strong melee character must be appealing. Or perhaps it’s the stinky ooze, it’s hard to tell. Unclean Beast, however, is savagely powerful on the field of battle: the damage-over-time infections in his attacks are particularly useful when fight a battle on a number of fronts, and I suspect it’s the all round most powerful melee character. When you just want to put down a lot of damage, he is the way to do it.
The fourth assassin is the iconic walking castle, The Rook. This stone-voiced behemoth is both a builder and a destroyer: awesome against enemy structures, and also able to put down his own, depending on how you choose to develop him as the game progresses. I’ve found him peculiarly vulnerable unless he’s equipped with teleportation items, which allow him (or any god that is able to purchase them) to zip back to base and buff up before heading back into the fray. The giant is quite clearly the most visually impressive of the demigods, and I feel as if Gas Powered missed a trick by not giving him a similarly immense foil among the generals.
The one point where a tutorial might have come in handy would have been in explaining the generals. The first of these, The Oak, I first played without assigning him any additional units whatsoever. He was able to summon wraiths from the copses of his enemies, and I assumed that was his lot. Not so, however, as generals are also able to summon extra creatures with items that only they can buy. There’s something brave about the Oak – his shield state makes him extremely tough, and his general metallic solidity makes you feel confident about sending him into a horrendous melee brawl. As my favourite character I’ve spent a long time playing with him, and he feeds into my defensive, turtling urge: everything I can sinks into buffing him up. More healing potions, more hit-point boosting items, more armour.
The Queen of Thorns – who is woman stamen of a giant writing flower carried on the back of four beetles – is the most bizarre and inspired of the demigod design. She plays in quite an esoteric manner too, with powerful area-of-effect attacks, and shambling monsters which defend her. As with a number of the other gods she can take on different states, giving her access to different powers. She can only summon her shambler minions, for example, when she is cocooned inside the closed flower. Perhaps it’s the sheer weirdness of her, but I hate finding the Queen as an opponent on my field, but also feel uncomfortable playing her. She feels treacherous and unwieldy.
Sedna – a woman riding a sabre-tooth cat – is, as I understand her, the classic healer. She provides huge buffs to minions and demigods alike. She also “silences” other gods, stopping them from deploying various abilities. She’s by far the least interesting design in the game, and therefore the character I’ve spent the least time with.
Finally, Lord Erebus. The floating vampire lord is far the campest of the demigods, but his no less entertaining to play for all that. Buffing him up as an offensive character means you can suck the life out of your opponents in seconds, while making Erebus stronger. He’s good with the minions too, having a bunch of “nightstalker” creatures raised from fallen combatants accompanying him. Playing as Erebus is perhaps the most “general” like of the general players. You do lord over minions, choosing your moment to strike at enemies, aiding your allies as you send in your minions to drag a demigod to his death. Splendid, classic, stuff.
When these gods collide among the hordes of their followers, their abilities going off like fireworks, things really are spectacular. And as engaging as it is to play, so entrancing it is to watch. The game plays well, and looks better. There are some design problems aside from the obvious, larger issues: the UI could be clearer and display more information, the tutorial could exist, the back and forth of the large maps could be less taxing, and mid game could be less about tower-dropping attrition. And yet, I enjoy it enormously. Demigod’s gods are interesting things to play with inside a tactical context that really engages me. There’s no pretense about the gaminess of it and, and when the booming voiceover dude channels Christopher Lee to announce a “double smite” it feels okay: especially as it somehow reminds me more of Clash of The Titans than Unreal Tournament.
And I want to take all this online, to crush my enemies and burn their minions. And cackle. Always the cackle. Alas.
So what about you, readers? How have your excursions into the realm of Demigod treated you? And your favourite demigod?
Related Stories:
Sedna has quickly become my nemesis. I thought it would be Regulus and his idiotically long-range snipe(I’m fairly sure I’ve seen some obvious multi-boxing abuse of this). But once she gets some levels she has this annoying habit of healing when I’m about to smite her.
I’ve recently discovered the Venom Spit attrition tactic as a result of trying to find a way to counter the Rook’s ultra-defensive tower-spam that has become their ‘iwin’ button for flag-snatching Domination games. Spit, run away, come back and spit again. I didn’t think I’d like that power but it’s turned out to be the most useful now against buildings.
I WANT to master Torch Bearer, but the Unclean Beast remains too good as an all-rounder.
@Catska And yet DotA Still works, has been refined and corrected into something near perfect. One wonders why anyone who plays DotA would want this to begin with when they’re already got the best version out there.
Battlenet is also perfect as far as I can tell. Never had a problem EVER with Starcraft, Diablo 2, or Warcraft III. Why improve on something that is already perfect? Even when I had my old dial up modem I could still play games with very little lag . . .
I like Demi-God, but I don’t like it enough for it to take up any space on my computer. I regret having bought it as it is now uninstalled in favor of DCS: Black Shark sim which I’m sure will give me a lot more play time before I uninstall it. Then again I can’t even get my F@#$@ helicopter to take off with my throttle maxed out so maybe I’ll have a fit and uninstall it tonight ;) I doubt it though.
Will I have to pay for two copies if I want to play it on lan at home? I really hate that
@mejobloggs
It is set up so you can LAN as many computers as you want on one copy. The demigod site, probably in the FAQ, says it is perfectly fine to do so.
To update it you will have log into a stardock account that has the game credited to it however.
Awesome
Awesomeawesome
Are there any screenshots that show what minimum graphics settings looks like?
That is the same way most Stardock games work. I believe you can play Sins of a Solar Empire over lan with just one copy.
Quote:”Demigod is a crude DotA clone that has literally 1/10th the depth of the game its trying to replicate.”
No. DOTA is a horribly, awfully designed game. And this is coming from someone who enjoys playing it.
DOTA has too many things cluttering it up. There are too many heroes to remember what they all do, and how to counter each of them. There are too many items, again requiring too much memorization, especially with formulas. There are too many things you “must” do. Hero X will suck unless you get items Y, use strategy Z, etc. This doesn’t add “depth” – it’s complexity! And needless complexity, too, that keep the game from being fun. This is without even getting into the “strategies” that aren’t written anywhere, that if you don’t perform, people in random games will bitch and yell and swear at you because you didn’t do them. Yeah, that’s really helping the game.
As someone mentioned above, Chess is very very deep, but not all that complex in theory. Demigod is very easy to learn, and seems rather deep. DOTA is needlessly complex, and is an altogether inferior game.
@Karrius: Yet, that is what makes DotA what it is.
It is a cruel game that gives no quarter as it is learned, and even then continues to have depth and surprises.
This coming from someone who is grudgingly dragged into playing it and usually gets facerolled.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy DOTA. But that doesn’t mean that it’s well designed, and that games that don’t directly copy it are worse games. The fact that you have some idea of what an opposing Demigod is going to do against you is a plus, as it allows you to plan strategies, as opposed to just randomly doing whatever you feel like.
I love them all, save for perhaps Sedna. I’m a terrible healer.
I really can’t pick favorites; it depends on what I want to do. Lead the charge into the enemy, an army at my back? Oak. Rapidly dive into a fray, vaporizing anything in my path in a flurry of damage? Unclean Beast. And so on.
I can’t say I’m personally in any hurry to take my act online – I’m having fun just experimenting with the Demigods, learning their quirks and how to build them up. I’m not exactly looking forward to going online and getting bitched out for not using the right moves, or right build, or doing the right thing. I find in strategy games strategic growth seems to get into a rut after a bit.
That and it doesn’t seem like DoTA’s community would do the environment any favors. D:
edit – also, reading the above comments, DoTA sounds like it has far more overt complexity – while that can be fun for some, it makes a game far less penetrable to newcomers, which would be terrible for a new game like this. Demigod’s approach makes absolute sense.
DoTA strikes me as a game made by gamers, so to speak.
@Karrius: I didn’t say it was well designed, or that it inferred bad copies.
As @AIC says, it is overtly complex. After a month or so of playing it, you’ll know what to expect from each and every hero, including variations in item builds.
(Edit: Ok, Probably more like a year or so…)
@AIC: As far as newcomers go, they’d go a long ways to go to the forums and read the guides.
@The real topic: Perhaps when the multiplayer issues are worked out, I’ll nab a copy of Demigod- I’ve been looking forward to it too.
I love RPS articles about old games, i’ve discovered quite a few gems reading them, but when they are about new games, err… its just sad. This obsession about Demigod lately confuses me, the game is instantly forgettable, technically flawed, hopeless devoid of content and i’ve never played a game that felt old and repetitive as this one, the two guys trying to test it have found nothing other than failure, why do they keep ranting about it ?
Save your money for Starcraft 2, or if you really really have to go wipe the dust out of Warcraft 3 (or buy it for 5 bucks) and try out some mods you missed, you’ll have a much better time with that
personally i love Demigod. for me, the patch that was released on day 2 largely repaired my connectivity issues so i’ve been able to play quite a bit of multiplayer. its a great experience, lots and lots of fun.
however, i can easily understand how the game is not everyone’s cup of tea. its a competitive multiplayer game and the depth and interest of the game comes from the dynamics of playing against human opponents.
if you wanted a narrated campaign, its not there. if you wanted a big base building empire building experience, its not there. the game is really nothing like what alot of people expect an RTS game to be. this is a Hero Arena game with much more in common with Team Fortress 2 than a traditional RTS like Starcraft.
but for what this game is, its fantastic. the graphics and sound are a true pleasure. the gameplay is fast paced and intuitive. easy to learn but hard to master. the teamwork elements of the game are the most crucial element to winning and losing so ultimately the game is social and competitive. you have to enjoy multiplayer team gaming or else you wont enjoy Demigod. thats all there is to it.
I’ve found playing Oak like a mini-Assassin works wonders. He brings in his store-bought minions while I dump all of my skills points into his attacks and buffs, and suddenly I can outfight every other General and make a nasty surprise for many an Assassin.
Though I think the Heavy-Hitter Oak build might be getting some recognition, so he’ll be less of a surprise in the near future.
DotA was a lot more annoying to play and felt more than a little unbalanced from my time with it–I’d usually rather play vanilla WC3 instead. It’s a great idea, and apparently a lot of fun for its supporters, but at least with Demigod I was able to figure out workable tactics and variations thereof in the first hour of play without having to chase any outside information. At least every build manages to do something. And that works in Demigod’s favor.
(However, I’ll always have Warcraft on hand for some Dark Deeds action. Multiplayer Harvest Moon with Werewolves-and-then-some! That’s just something you don’t see. Even if it is broken to the point of hilarity.)
And honestly? I really don’t want to get finger-wagged by DotA grognards just because I’ve got different tastes.
It’s all about Erebus for me. I pile everything into his minion powers and personal health/attack, and once you hit about level 13, he becomes a force of nature, constantly regenerating health and minions alike with the only mana cost being his minion Idols.
Silencing him in this state has no effect as he doesn’t use any abilities, but rather relies on his horde, and WHAT a horde. Once you level up that branch of the tree enough, you’re almost guaranteed a new minion every time you kill something. He’s aces :D
@Jeremy
“In chess, you only have to know how 6 pieces move”
Five pieces. Plus pawns. [/chesspedant]
@mejobloggs: I don’t have screenshots, but I’ve played it on both maximum settings and low settings (on my gaming PC and laptop respectively), and must say the game still looks quite nice in low settings.
As an Oak, I find Sedna to be the most vulnerable opponent. Not sure why, exactly, but if I’ve got a choice of two demigods to go after, I’ll always go for Sedna.
My new favorite is the Unclean Beast. I always fall in love for the most OP things.
Sedna’s very squishy when faced with some decent burst-damage – especially vulnerable to auto-attacks (low armor). If you can get her to heal herself, you’ve already won a victory for your team, because that’s one less heal on a demigod that can actually do some damage to you.
Somehow Demigod reminds me of Archon way back on the C64.
Despite only having a sole online game under my belt, I really love this game. Can’t figure out how to play the torchbearer without sucking, mind you.
The torchbearer is a nuker. Upgrade his nukes, and use these to rain on your enemy. Since you can kill wholes armys, it upgrade really fast. Is maybe the 2th best demigod, before the unbeast, that is OP.
Torch Bearer is disappointingly weak when specced frost, but shines in Fire. Let them burn!
I first played Queen of Thorns as assassin, closing only to resummon shamblers and cast bramble shield, rest of time i spent in open form, killing things with AoE. Concept of buying more minions was unknown to me >_>
Torch Bearer has bad dps as Frost; you have to invest heavily in getting his normal attack damage up, but it’s the debuffs on his abilities that make him good against Demigods, as well as the Shatter combo.
That said, I never go Frost without also taking Fireball so I can get the Fire and Ice skill for more damage in the combo, plus I have a long-range nuke for when they are running.
Full-hybrid play of the Torch Bearer is currently very ill-advised.
Wasn’t I saying in that other thread (where I was almost ripped apart by fanbors) that a peer-to-peer mp model for a game like this was a big mistake and that it needed to be client/server? So now they’re changing it.
Day 6 Status Report
Hopefully mp – the core of the game – will get better now.
If you are looking for some general gameplay tips here’s a shameless plug – http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347388
@dsmart – It’s a hybrid, no? Still p2p unless one person can’t connect and then they’ll switch over to a proxy server. Personally my connection issues disappeared on day 2.
Even without multiplayer, I’ve been able to play some games with friends over lan. Single player was fun, but going 2v3 or 2v4 in co-op with a friend is an absolute blast. The only problems I’ve had with that is theft. Can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve shouted “QUIT STEALING MY KILLS, HEATHEN!”
@Jim: I’ve found Regulus to be my favorite god as of late, and if you don’t believe me, play some 1v1 and start on level 15. With only a few artifact items you can have even nightmare opponents cowering. Ashkandor will DESTORY! (ZIP-CRACK!) Also nice however is the more affordable Cloak of Flames, giving you an often overlooked +30% attack speed! Combined this is almost unbeatable for damage/sec.
I find that the best way to learn what demigod I like is to start on lvl 15. It’s not how the game should be played, but for exploring skill trees you can’t beat it. Glad they made that an option.
Thank god this game falls under the Gamer’s Bill of Rights, because it means Stardock will accept returns.
And I am returning Demigod. Choosing a peer-to-peer connection model was, as another poster on another forum so eloquently put it, a huge fucking rookie mistake on the part of Stardock. For some reason they thought a host having a 50-100ms advantage was a problem worth attempting to wrestle with the travelling salesman problem over.
As a result, instead of playing multiplayer games with one player having a slight advantage over the others, we get to play multiplayer games where the idiot torrenting porn in the background on his Pentium 2 brings EVERYONE down to his shitty level of performance. That is, when you can actually even get a game going where everyone can sync with everyone else. In my experience there’s roughly a 10% chance of that happening.
You can torrent porn ?!?!
@ Serondal
Yeah, thats right. Act like you don’t know. lol!! :)
@ Kestrel
Nope. Ignore what Brad is saying. He (not being the developer of the net code) probably doesn’t understand it. There is no “hybrid” in p2p versus client/server. It is an all or nothing situation. For them to come up with this “hybrid” of both, would be a matter of months, not days because being a multiplayer ‘centric game, the underlying game code would have been specifically tailormade for p2p.
My guess is that they’re leaving some parts (which?) in p2p.
However, unless they go full bore client/server – not an easy undertaking when you’re coming from p2p – it is going to keep having problems. But in the long run, everyone will get to live with it and in a matter of weeks, we’ll all forget this ever happened. At least until the next game.
If this game were not specifically multiplayer, it would be a different story. But even the single player is really multiplayer against bots. Pretty much.
As I already stated, the problems go way – way – beyond being unable to connect, pirates bringing down the network. I called it. Here we are less than four days later and they’re already talking about changing the multiplayer model.
okay you caught me !
Biggest advantage of DotA over Demi-God.
1)It free
2)If you get tired of it, you can instantly play a totally diffrent game mode by just picking a diffrent map ;)
Sure the origonal map be more complex but why is that bad thing? You have a lot of options for the hero you want and what you want to do with them. You don’t have to be perfect and you’re not always going to be playing against a hard core DotA player. Of course with Demigod you can play against the computer easier I supose.
Is it going to have a ranking system where you’re matched up with people your skill level ?I dunno, I uninstalled it and put it in my game rack of eternal doom from which games never return (instead of my “I’ll probably play this in the next 6 months rack which includes UC and the like”
@Serondal.
On the issue of 2): This is true. Then again, it’s not so much a strength of DotA as it is a strength of WC3. And on the issue of 1) I bought WC3 for more than what I paid for Demigod at the time of its release, so actually getting to the point where I could play DotA was not, in effect, “free” for me. It was only free for download after I’d shelled out my money for another game entirely. You can say it’s quite a bargain, even more so now that the price of the base game has been heavily discounted, but don’t pretend that none of us have actually played Warcraft 3 when it first came out. After all, it’s freaking Warcraft.
Also, insinuating that people who disagree with you are simply worse gamers than you are isn’t a good way to get us to see your point. Just because it’s probably true doesn’t mean ego attacks have any place in an ostensibly reasonable discussion. So let’s all be A Fine Gentleman, eh?
Don’t be insulted at the idea that somebody got rid of the problems of DotA, polished the core gameplay up, and then sold the result as a commercial product. Competition is a good thing. And the official DotA commercial release is on its way, so look forward to that to give proper competition to their, er, competitors. Granted, it’s neither free nor is it a simple map variation for a base game, so those two points become moot.
The only thing that will matter is which one is the better game at that point.
@Dorian Cornelius Jasper
I never insinuated that people who disagree with me are anything at all. I even said “You don’t have to be perfect” I never said /I/ was perfect or that anyone else was lesser than I. There is no ego attack there.
In getting rid of the “problems” of DotA they’ve created other problems that DotA did not have, so I’m not sure it was a success on that front. I don’t care for gas powered games, I think their name is more apt than they realize . . . I do like Stardock however and I hope this game is a success for them as I’d like to see a lot more from them in the future. There are like my white knight versus the black knight EA :P
I’m guessing the DotA is not going to make an offical DotA game since it is based on WC3 unless Blizzard is going to give them rights to make a spin off title. Otherwise it will probably be some kind of origonal IC so that may be interesting. Uh, did Natural Selection 2 ever come out ? Lol
You did say that playing Demigod against the computer would be easier, and I guess I read too much into that. Sorry. Gentleman Hat back on.
I’ll agree that the Demigod multiplayer netcode was shot several times and left on a curb, but the core game itself seems to make a lot more sense to me than DotA did. Accessible, and a lot of fun for a DotA washout like me.
And I’d heard that there really is going to be an official DotA independent of the WC3 map as its own game, its own IP and everything. Well it’s actually by the DotA Allstars guys, and it’s called League of Legends.
Here’s the relevant RPS story.
AHhhhhh, I see what you mean. When I said “playing against the computer would be easier” what I really meant is this.
In Demigod setting up a skirmish is easy to do.
As far as I know in WC3 you can’t set up a skirmish in DotA against other computers, you can only play the map solo without other heros.
So what I mean was it is easier to SET UP a single player game against the computer ^_^ Didn’t mean to offend anyone.
Demigod has a lot going for it I just don’t think it should have been full price for the amount of content in it. Then again Sins of a Solar Empire had no story line either and it did well (but it was a bit more epic in and of itself)
Will have to look into this league of legends thing.
One grip I have against Demigod is that they didn’t polish up the the thing enough. It still seems like WC3 with a new coat of paint. The stores are very smiliar ect, it seems like they could have increased the immersion made it more origonal if they’d given the player a diffrent way of getting items, maybe ALA Diablo where you gotta equip them. THEN it’ be neat if killing enemy demi-gods made them drop their gear or money sometimes ;)
any how no I really hope Demigod does well for stardocks sake. I want to see a Galatic Civ 3
“The battles can be quite frenzied, with hundreds of causalities on either side.”
That’s one of the most philosophical typos I’ve seen. “Help, I’m trapped in a Newtonian universe!” Many godlings must feel this way.
I don’t get it
Definitely looks like it could be fun, but as I said before, polish is important. The link dsmart posted suggests gun-slinging cowboys trying to patch left and right. I don’t begrudge them being proud about being able to put proxies in so easily so quickly, at least something must be well designed. But not seeing this problem coming in any way, shape or form doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their ability to not completely mess up my game experience regularly.
@Serondal, to clear up Jarmo’s joke:
Causality is the relation between cause and effect–the very concept underlying the notion of a rational universe, as opposed to one governed by, say, magical or ineffable principles. Hence the philosophick-Newtonian joke.
Not to be confused with casualties.
Also: I see your point now, thanks.
@Jarmo: Excellent, sir.
if you are having trouble connecting, forward your ports. its that simple.
Impulse and hence Demigod use RakNet for the NAT punchthrough. RakNet has recently just announced a UDP proxy feature where NAT punchthrough failures (mostly to symmetric NAT routers) are proxy’d. So it is sort of a hybrid solution, in which some players are connecting to other players like the following ‘player->proxy->player’ and other players ‘player->player’ depending on whether NAT punchthrough was successful.
As the change is in their middleware (RakNet) it may well be a drop in solution software wise, and most of the time involved will be to get large enough capacity on their servers to handle the extra proxy traffic.
RakNet announcement of UDP proxy was done last week:
http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/forum/index.php?topic=2408.0
The game rocks offline, so I dont care about MP. Good stuff