So I got 3 games in at PAX, they had 3 demis for play (Torchbearer, Regulus, Rook.) and 6 machines, 3 network 'co-op' machines, 2 machines where you get one demigod on a team with the other two, and one where you could play on the lava map. The opponents were Queen of Thorns, Vampire Lord, and Unclean beast .(The generals units were oddly missing, they said they were mainily showing off the assassins.)
Now I have a critical eye, I spent quite a bit of time at the stardock booth (but I checked out a lot of other cool games), now I don't have video as I don't own a camera, but I read quickly and have a pretty much near photographic memory so I'll do my best. Games lasted like 10 mins, as it was pretty tipped in our favor (we start at level 15 with tons of money, and the AI was a little daft, people died more by the defences then the enemy demis)
Levels: (They said shipping with 8)
Objects: Tower of light(like prisms in RA), Arrow tower (Weak), Portals (Captureable with flags or destorying it?), Gold mines(Captureable with flags or destroying it?), Forts (fatter arrow towers, will eventually upgrade with catapults according to a dev who's name I didn't catch), Item shop, and of course the strong hold(goal), and a strange little crystal in the back of the base.
Flags were doted around levels, as you stand near them you capture them and things linked to them(?, because I only observed this partially I don't know, but I do know some how a player captured a portal and gold mine on a side lane (changed art styles)) . Also there were War Banners (like flags) that increased the spawns you get.
When I say defenses, I mean 2 Towers of light and 2 Arrow towers. (Towers of light are also dotted through the map)
Waterfall level:
Each side lane has a portal with a gold mine and some defences and a flag, the middle has a war banner that the creeps don't go to, and the middle lane goes, defences, fort, defences, item shop, stranghold (with ToLs(Tower of Light) dotting around the stranghold). Creeps travel from their port to the middle, run by the strong hold, take a left and then a right (meaning two lanes, and a middle with out creep support), and then follow the path of the enemy creeps (meaning they hit the strong hold before the portals)
Lava level:
A 1v1 or 2v2 map according to said dev (^) the level was partially finished (gameplay wise), there was one creep wave, that takes the 'middle' path, the top path has a war banner, and the bottom 'lane' between the two bases has a flag with a gold mine. defences were 2 forts, 2(or 4?) ToLs, and 2 (or 4?) archer towers.
Also mentioned Tyo/Frogboy were a level with a giant wheel, and in an air bubble underwater.
Creeps: Creep waves get bigger over time, the pecking order (*I think*), minataur, archer(seraphimy thingys), priest (i.e. fat guy on floating chair), catapulsars, angels, giants.
Heros:(Shipping with 8, and more soon after)
All demis have a skill 'tree' with level requirements rangeing from 1-10 and 15, also each demigod has an 'attribute boost' which give health, damage, energy, energy regen, health regen, ect. ranged about 10 levels I think.
Each demi has 4 abilities, one achivement item (the progressive mode thing, kinda like tf2 acheviment items I think, not game breaking but more flexibility), and 3 consumebals, I'll get to items in a sec.
Rook Abilities: (ability names are most definetly wrong most of the time, active first then passives)
Hammerslam: Slams the hammer dealing extra damage (like a third of QoT health) and aoe damage.
Building Sucking: Heals health by hurting a building, long cd.
Rock Roll: Rolls a rock which causes weaker units to go flying, and stuns stronger ones.
Summon tower of light: Rasies a defencive tower of light, long cd. (Can create chains) (ultimate like, high levels)
Gods weapons: Damage bonus 50% a level 4 levels. (passives now)
Sholder Towers: I think these were seperated, because we had 10 pre bought abilities, I don't really know much about these abilites.
Torch Bearer Abilities:
Rain of ice: Aoe rain ice, non channleing (*i think*)
Permafrost: Stun on unit or tower
Frost nova: Aoe frost
Relive the Immolation: Enters fire mode for 50 seconds
Rain of fire: Above with more damage
Fireball: Damge nuke
Fire Nova: Aoe fire
An ability I never got as I won too quick.
Regulus Abilities:
Snipe: Nuke
Wings: Fly up and aoe burst damage (dodges QoT's thorns )
Mine: Damage dealing proxy mine
Stun mine: 'Ultimite' (need high levels) like above but stuns
Maim: he aims for the knees and does something (damage I think) (passives now)
Range Increase: .. duh?
More I think
Items:
There were only a couple of items, according to Tyo he has 150 items to choose from 50 about of which will be in game (hopefully we get to choose some of those), we have tabs according to frogboy in the full build.
Consumeables were mana, health, scroll, and some sort of orb that does more damage.
There were also 5 slots on the demi for permanent items, like gloves with attack speed, an 'all fathers' ring which gave hp and regen.
Other things:
When you died you dropped a one use consumeable, unclear on wheather its from your inventory or not. But health potions and mana scrolls.
Vampire Lord: Because we have no pics of him yet: he's vampire likeish, with armour that has something like tubes on the shoulder pads, in very red armour. Ok i'm a horrible describer, i'll stop now.
It allready looks to be an interseting game, and lots of people were like "OMG that game's awsome looking" or "it's gunna be awsome!" and they were selling pre-orders, so hopefully and influx of more people.
I also heard one staff say that beta starts thursday.
I asked and they said they planned only 8 demi's for release.
Controls: QWER are abilities I didn't check the items. Arrows are camera, and spacebar, holding it, rotates the camera.
When you hover over a unit it shows the health and portrait at the top of the screen. Your health and mana, as well as xp, were at that bottom of the screen, meaning you can allways see it, also there is 'heart beat' when you get low health.
Also the maps don't use 'tiles' they are sculpted like a model.
Chris Taylor (maybe frogboy) said it cost $100,000 dollars for a demigod's art assets. (and if you think about it, all that software and the hours)
So how's that for a hands on?
p.s. Frog boy seemed suprised that I knew all 8 demi's
It was only for demo purposes.
probably meant that for the PAX demo so it was kinda escaladed play
The final version is scheduled to release FEBURARY 2009
jep +1Karma from me
That is awfully soon to put in two demigods.
Cooley35 wrote:
[quote] The final version is scheduled to release FEBURARY 2009[/quote]
I'm not sure what you meant by this Cooley35, did you mean you are unhappy for it to be delayed any longer, or that they still have a lot of time to add in more Demigods?
By that I am saying that is in 5 Months, They may or may not have time to add more heroes.
i was stating a fact. thats all
I agree the heroes skills sound a little Vanilla.
Rooks tower skill is good, hammer smash is very basic but sounds nessisary, only half sound like keepers.
The Regulas skills all sound very BLEHHH to me.
Torchbearers sounded nice but.. it didn't sound liek there where any obvious combinations of skill chains to use.. Skill chains are good.
I mean look at pudge. Hook someone in close, rot for close aoe DoT(Which damages yourself too!) and devour to deal damage and keep him in place on your rot.
With 10 skills instead of 4.. they coudl do alot of combinations.
Like "1,2,3 work together well. So does 4,5,6. But 2,4,5 also works really nicely instead, or 1,2,6 and 7,8."
I see no inherant combination except for freeze people, switch to fire, deal fire damage, and rook boulder stone then smash with hammer.
I don't have as big an issue with the 8 heroes as long as the 8 heroes have REALLY good set of skills.. Like Diablo2 meets dota meets guildwars type stuff.
All the devs need to play Guildwars.
It has the best skills :/ Though they work how they do because there are hundreds of.
But still you can only use 8, close to the the most you can get in Demigod (8.33__ IIRC).
Your skills should be like a deck of cards that all work together.. not just does this much more damage, has this much cooldown, has aoe or doesn't have aoe, is dot or isn't..
Guild Wars really had the best skill system. The problem was that it got way too in-depth after expansions due to the cross-classing. I see no reason why it'd be so hard to balance more skills per demigod when guild wars did it for 8v8 and about 90 skills per class that could be cross-classed as well.
90 skills per class in the original i thought?
More have been added and how many per class i think is uneven. The original 5 has more skills per class i think.
Like you could do bulls' charge/bull's strrike wich will knock down your target if you hit them while they're moving, then do an attack that has a bonus effect if it hits a knocked down foe. Then use a skill that'll knock them down, followed by another knock down bonus skill or high damage skill.
If you did the normal knock down before using bulls charge/strike it wouldn't work as well because you'd have to knockdown-damage-wait for them to run before you can knock down again-damage. So you'd want to start on someone running away.
And you had like.. necromancer where you could transfer all conditions from an ally to yourself, and heal yourself for each one. And you could use contagion ontop of that so every time you do that you would spread all those conditions from yourself to every nearby enemy.
Since Contagion makes you sacrifice a % of your health each time you use it, you can use dark aura which damages nearby enemies each time you lose health.
Really that build isn't very practical because dark aura is melee range, BUT it's a good example of all the sorts of combinations there are, the skill synergies.
If skills are just ___ mana cost, ___ damage, ___ cooldown, and some small things like aoe or not, DoT or not, then it's really simple to just do the math and figure out which skills are best by being the best at killing, or most mana effecient. Those are the skills people would use, and the rest would be neglected.
GW's has THOUSANDS of GOOD builds(granted, like 30% of the skills are basically worthless. but 30% worthless still leaves 600 good skills) because the skills aren't just measured alone, but how they work with other ones in a combination..
Without combinations it's much more likely that everyone will pick the same skills.
I was estimating and basing it only on the original, which was the best version IMO. The others became 'okay' with time but vanilla had best gameplay imo.
Yeahh.
Those core classes are predominant in PVP.
The added classes didn't really fill any role that needed to be filled..
It had the Healer(monk), Tank/melee(warrior), bowguy(ranger), anti-things and disrupter(mesmer), nuker/spiker(mage),
Only the Necro didn't really fill a needed role, except for like hexer and being a caster that was less "worry-free" with the life leaches(monks needed to spend less energy healing em.)
And all the classes added.. where sort of like the necro, a mix of two roles, not doing any really well.
Only new one who turned out to work well in GVG was the Paragon. Assassins sort of as runners since they could kill the other runners.
It would of been better if they didn't up it to 10 classes.. and instead just added more skills to the others and stuff.
I hope GPG are willing to basically entirely throw out a classes whole list of skills. From mooeys list it sounds like the Regulas an entire redo. :/
Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated and it convinced me to pre-order the game. Can't wait for the beta...
Well I'm sure there's a "hotkey bindings" options menu, no?
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