Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Demigod demo has finally, suddenly emerged from the storm of patching that was post-release Demigod development. Siphon its 598mb from here.

While we’ve not been back in recent weeks, we’ve had a few reports that the connection issues are now largely solved, making the internet multiplayer of the demo a rather interesting prospect. Will the demo kick off a second wind for the game? I hope so, as it was a fun time. Anyway, this cut-down version of the god-thumping strategy features a single arena, called The Cataract, and four of the eight Demigods (Regulus, Rook, Sedna and Lord Erebus.) No Oak, alas, for he is a splendid being. Still, you’ll get a kick out of Rook and Erebus. Additionally, you can check out the four game modes (Conquest, Dominate, Fortress and Slaughter), which are all contained therein.

I’ll try and revisit Demigod over the weekend and see if we can’t get some more idea of how the battle for the pantheon is going, all these months on.

Ack, how did we manage to miss this? Oh yeah – it must be because we don’t care about PC games one jot. So did you see that Ratchet & Clank XII, eh?

Pfft. SupCom 2 is a fascinating endeavour – partly because it’s a sequel to a game that scared away half of the people it wanted to appeal to, and partly because developer Gas-Powered Games teaming up with Square “…” Enix is about the most improbable match-up since Howard the Duck and Lea Thompson. Uber-hardcore RTS meets incoherently self-indulgent auto-mythologising: whatever will happen?
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That there wasn’t a demo of a game that proved so hard to describe in a single sentence is one of several perplexing decisions around the launch of Gas-Powered Games/Stardock’s action-strategy thingy Demigod. Stardock’s Brad Wardell has shoved up another of his irregular state of play updates, and alongside another apology for those awful multiplayer problems in the game’s first week, he reveals plans for a demo and two new Demigods. Waroo!
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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.
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As Jim alluded to in the comments thread for our Demigod discussion last week, one of the many interesting issues around writing for the web instead of for print is that a verdict passed on a game doesn’t have to stay static in the event that game’s problems improve/worsen. Demigod’s a fine example – if one of us had written it up on compressed tree-matter and shoved a number at the end, that number would reflect its enormous netcode screw-ups, and would sit as a faintly damning judgement upon it for all time (of course, damnable parasite-site Metacritic means that problem still exists for a lot of web stuff too).

While releasing a game that was problem-riddled in the first place is scarcely something that should be condoned, as GPG and Stardock (I’m becoming increasingly confused as to who’s really in charge of DG now) have been frantically racing to patch the thing up over the last week, such a judgement would already have been innacurate. Especially as it appears – oh dear – piracy may have significantly exacerbated DG’s multiplayer problems….
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Gas-Powered Games’ (with a little help from Stardock) Demigod enjoyed an unexpected early release yesterday, thanks to a silly snafu by Gamestop. Jim’s feverishly working on a full verdict on it to be posted in a few days’ time, but unfortunately it’s been held up by the release version suffering some pretty flaky netcode. It wouldn’t do to judge a game that’s almost entirely multiplayer only on the strength of its offline skirmishes, so while we wait and pray for an ultra-patch, Jim and Alec had a brief chat about their impressions so far… If they both seem a little surly, it’s because their clever brainwave to try and get the damn thing working in LAN mode over Hamachi had also just failed miserably…
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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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The mighty Brad Wardell of Stardock has done a lengthy narration of in-game footage for Demigod, and it’s been hosted over at GameTrailers. I’ve embedded that after the jump for your eyebrow-raising consideration. Wardell is playing as one of the demigods we’ve not seen before: the Oak, who has some splendid necromantic talents. The man from Stardock also talks about the Pantheon, which is Demigod’s “persistent world” battle tracking system. That will basically allow you to put your efforts into fighting for a particular faction, pushing one of the demigods towards ascension to full godhood.

Anyway, go take a look. Demigod is due to ascend to digital retailhood in April.
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Seems like a bit of an odd hook-up, but it’s apparently to do with top Japanese publisher Square Enix’s “goal of increasing western development efforts aimed for the global markets”. They’re going to publish the sequel to Gas Powered Games’ long-zoom RTS, Supreme Commander, on an unspecified date. Yeah, there aren’t really any other details at present, but I’d anticipate there being enormous robots, and even more enormous maps. We had a crack at the original game on our LAN the other week, and I had meant to do a little write up about how surprisingly good the multiplayer actually is for a bit of a mess around with super-weapons. (I found the campaigns to be something of a drag.)

Cheers to Acosta for the heads up.

After the jump there’s a straight piece of game footage from Demigod for you to ponder. No flashy intro or blathering producer for this piece of the game, instead it shows you one of the smaller gods using his powers on the heavenly battlefield. Demigod remains one of those games that’s unconvincing when we look at it over the internet, and yet having seen it in action earlier this year it’s something I’m quietly looking forward to, at least as an antidote from the mainstream of strategy titles, or the predictable perturbations of the RTS genre. The structure of monster-spewing conflict you conjure up on the battlefield is entertaingly complex, and one of those stragely abstract moments when you see just how weird videogames are as a form of entertainment…
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