I just made a post about this in another thread but the post is not showing yet - oh well. In short, cross pollination and networking are very important for successful products and collaborations beyond cursory affiliations.

Considering Stardock has seen it and (obviously) remains interested, and knowing their fascination with strategy games that are a bit heavy on the "strategy", I suspect Demigod is not shallow.

But yes, I'd agree for the average consumer, there's no way to be able to tell whether an individual will like it or not. Which is one reason why I miss the old days when you didn't know years in advance what was on the horizon. It was somewhat more exciting to be in your local store and be surprised by what magically showed up on the shelf.

Ah, teh tubes of teh Internets. What they've done to us.

-HM

One comment:


EPIC WIN

Now I hope they put FA on this service. (FA= My favorite Game of all time, followed very closely By Sins)

You are not alone my friend. We are legion.

Anyone who is not excited about this game has not played DotA. Go buy WC3, and try to find a game of DotA on Bnet, and you'll see the enormous potential of this game-play concept.

If you're not a DotA fan, then you probably won't like this game either.

Do you know how often people say this? Pretty much every single time criticisms are levied against something that hasn't come out yet. I didn't start following games yesterday, and this is far from the first time I've had pre-release criticisms of a game. From the descriptions, screenshots, and promotion thus far, I can infer a lot. The game being shallow is a big one. Structures get auto-placed, you don't build units--they're built automatically, and you play as big colossus thing whose sole intent is wipe out the enemy colossus and base. Doesn't sound like much to me and reeks of repetitiveness. Maybe control of a few strategic points is mixed in, but the game sounds awfully shallow and way too short. At worst it'll seem excessively short like Rise of Legends, and at best it could be short or take a while like in World in Conflict's multiplayer.

I don't really care who Chris Taylor is and I do think he's an idiot now. It really should say something when the developer of Unreal Tournament figures out that people play the singleplayer against bots more often than they play multiplayer, if at all. This applied to all versions of UT from the old UT to the new UT3. Ok, so Epic does doesn't polish or support their products or customers anymore, respectively, but at least they figured it out that even predominantly multiplayer games see a ton of singleplayer action. GPG should be paying attention here. That segment of the market cannot be ignored. Battlefield 2 has always been annoying to play online because of all the cheating, base raping, stat padding, low-ticket servers, and so on. I had my most fun with it playing the singleplayer 64 mod with unlocks 123 turned on.

Again, another PC developer that doesn't understand their PC audience. These people are a dime a dozen these days. It doesn't take an industry veteran to come up with a great game.

Tossing aside strategy games that are strictly single-player (GalCivII, MOO, etc.), what strategy game's single player campaign ISN'T a training ground for multiplayer. As far as gameplay goes, a single-player campaign eases a player into the rules of the game, progressively teaching him or her more about the game and slowly peeling back the layers of the game during the entire process.

Remember Starcraft? You had three types of units during the first mission: marines, SCVs, and vultures. You had one resource: minerals, and you couldn't do much with the units you had. The second mission ramped this up by adding gas and firebats, and soon after you had goliaths and various defensive structures. At the end of the Terran campaign you had the entire tech-tree under your disposal, but they certainly didn't drop that all on a new player right from the beginning.

IMO a single-player campaign in a multi-player game fails if it doesn't teach the player how to play the game. It definitely also exists as a device to tell a story, but whether a developer takes advantage of this is up to them.



None of the UTs have had a particularly engrossing story, and neither the UT or Battlefield series' have had strong single-player campaigns. Your examples are perfect examples of single-player "training grounds," so I don't know where your complaint really lies.

Don't get me wrong, a single-player component is really important to me. But if you're talking about a campaign and not just a sandbox or training ground, a single-player mode MUST train the player about the rules of the game, especially in strategy games where the emphasis is almost entirely on the gameplay.

I think people want an engrossing story to get them to play the game, but good single-player AI and multi-player keep people playing.

Frogboy.

Not just one of my favorite game company people, one of my favorite people. ;o


I just hope This Demigod being pushed back to Febuary is just to make it better not to add a bunch of single player..

The head developer months ago said Single Player would basically just be training and that it's a primarily multiplayer game.

So... ZJB... Simple gameplay =/= simple game. Chess. Really simple gameplay. Anybody can learn to play in one day. But it's a bit complex, when you get competitive.

Halo. Simple gameplay. Incredibly complex game.

Interestingly enough, often times the complex deep games can become quickly marginalized, and the gameplay reduced to something incredibly simple. LRM spam anybody? Zergling rushes?

So, again, go play DotA. Then come back and talk about it. I agree that you can infer a great deal from reading pre-development material. But if you haven't played the 'spiritual successor,' as I can only assume you haven't, then why bother commenting at all?

Also, stardock has stated that they intend to do something about shifting a bit more focus to single-player. So again... Don't jump the gun, you'll sell yourself short.

Wait for the game to actually get out in the wild before making too many guesses on what it's like.

Also, Brad has said now that Stardock is involved, to expect more of a single player component than was originally mentioned in preview articles.

-HM

I personally have no use whatsoever for multiplayer. I play to have fun, and being repeatedly ganked by what appear to be cheating, foul-mouthed, over privleged, under-mannered eight-year-olds is not my idea of fun. Even if the game in question isn't infested with smacktards, I'm not very likely to win anyway. (I like games a lot, but I'm not, unfotunately, particularly good at them. In RTS games, any AI setting above "Normal" will usually stomp me into the ground in fairly short order.) Also, at the moment the only Internet access I have is through a fairly slow dial-up connection. My options for broadband access are limited to the following; A) pay about $700 for equipment and installation, and then nearly $100 a month for a digital satellite-based system that would be useless for gaming anyway, and move to an area less techologically backwards.

That said, if a game is multiplayer only, I have no reason to play it. I can appreciate that it takes time and resources to develop a single-player campaign. But if you aren't going to include one, the skirmish gameplay had better be absolutely awesome. I'm probably in the minority - it's hard to say, since people who rarely or never go online are obviously not being accounted for in online polls.

For me, another worrying trend is the push for online-only distribution. I can't reliably download a file that's more than about 50 MB in size - my ISP tends to "accidentally" hang up after about seven hours. (I've called to complain about this, and they swear they have no such setting. I've found seven hours to be suspiciously reliable.) Due to all the problems with bandwidth pirates, very few sites seem to support file managers and resumed downloads anymore. In most cases, I can get large patches by taking my ancient laptop down to the wi-fi hotspot, a mere 40 miles away, but that only works if the patch is hosted on a fairly normal file-server, such as Fileplanet or an actual FTP site. For services like Steam... well, the point at which they release a truely huge patch for HL2 will be the point at which I can no longer play it, obviously. (My laptop is a 300 MHz IBM Thinkpad with a staggering 156 MB of onboard RAM. It won't even run Linux, at least not any version with a GUI.)