Gamespot Review
My beta review was 6/10 i guess Gamespot feel the same way.
First of all, there's no reason to be offensive, so ease up. A forum is no place to forget good manners.
Secondly, not everyone likes multiplayer to the exclusion of all else. If you do, then that is fine, but that is no excuse to denigrate others who enjoy a good single player campaign. I myself prefer single player campaigns as a method of getting to know the game. I also like a good story - which this game does not provide in the form of a single player campaign.
Now, I admit I didn't do a large amount of reading about this game, but nowhere did I see any company representative from Gas Powered Games mention that this game will primarily be a multiplayer game, which is why I am a little disappointed in the single player component. So if there was mention that this was supposed to be primarily a multiplayer game, I certainly did not see it, thus my disappointment.
As for gamespot's review, well...I don't put a lot of stock in their reviews, but this is one of those times I'd have to agree. Sure, the game may be good in concept, but a multiplayer game that does not work very well due to connectivity and synchronization issues upon its release is a symptom of a much larger problem in the industry as a whole, which is the penchant for companies to release games before they're done.
Sure, you can cite other games as having a good review but having similar problems - especially World of Warcraft - but I'd like to think that we have raised our standards since then, and have set the bar a bit higher. After all, when WoW was released, the MMO market was just starting to come into its own. Now, several years later, I'd have to say the MMO market has matured quite a bit, along with our knowledge of how to create stable multiplayer games...and yet we still think it is ok to release mutiplayer games that perform horribly due to connection issues. How embarrasing for us!
Being the president of my own IT company that regularly contracts with some regular clients to develop specific software in .NET, I can tell you that a product that does not work right is typically something that tends to discourage repeat business. The gaming industry is the only industry I know in which its clients are so forgiving...and instead of being grateful and working aggressively towards improving the status quo, it seems these same companies are content to continue releasing products that are still experiencing some rather debilitating bugs.
So yes, a game that is geared towards multiplayer play that does not perform well in a multiplayer venue is grounds for a bad review. I wish Gas Powered Games could be fined for releasing this game too early. It obviously was not ready for commercial release. This coming from an avid fan of Chris Taylor stemming from his involvement with Total Annihilation. I loved supreme commander, and enjoyed is sequel, but his last two games...meh. He can do better.
I agree with the post above^^. You make a very good point there sir.
Wasn't really the most offensive post, but whatever I want to respond to what you said
You're right, but some people do like multiplayer only, I'm a fan of both single and multi games. Honestly though in all the material i've read about this game one thing I never heard about was an epic single player campaign, or much bout single player at all. They would release tons of information about how their multiplayer tournys were gonna work etc, but not much info about the solo play. Which gives me the impression that Demigod is a multiplayer focused game and not a singleplayer focused one.
IMHO games that focus too much on both single and multiplayer play suffer because of it, either the single player component is stripped down (Like Demigod) or the multiplayer offerings are pathetic (I can name countless shooters here).
Neither do I, Gamespot's lost a lot of credibility as of late, but to say Demigod wasn't ready is just incorrect. The game itself is rock solid stable when you get into a game, and the connectivity issues are more to do with server load and not netcode issues. Honestly with any system of this size you can't predict what's going to happen once you go live, especially when you find out that 5x as many pirates are playing the game as legit pre-orders. They set up the servers to handle the load from pre-orders, and not the much mroe numerous pirates. Should the pirates have been let on at all, probably not, but they're pretty much gone now and the connectivity has improved significantly. The amount of communication we get from Stardock on the issues is staggering too, they're honest, own up to their mistakes are are working feverishly to fix them. 48 Hours after release there was another patch that fixed 75% of the issues I was having.
You are correct, but in the business environment you know EXACTLY how many users the system is going to be using, so you can account for this and scale properly, and come deployment/release day you don't find out there's going to be 5x as many users as expected; or alternativly if you do you can't expect the system to be working perfectly on day 1. Honestly it really sounds like you're saying your devs can produce bug-free perfect code on the initial release, and if you promised me that and I was on the other side of the table I would laugh at you and go find someone who's going to be honest with me. I'll say it again too, server load issues are not bugs, and as of the time of this and your writing most of those were gone. Yes there are a handful of connection issues still, but the game itself does work.
Sorry, multiplayer really is functioning, there's some small hiccups, but they're getting fixed. It is fair to say that a game should be reviewed on the content of the game itself when so many others have been forgiven for their server connectivity issues and not punished to harshly in a review. Sure it would be nice if a multiplayer game functioned 100% on release, but we don't live in the land of magic internet fairy dust that makes every possible piece of internet/networking hardware works perfectly, and servers can handle 5x the load they were designed for, but it doesn't exist.
Sorry for the huge post, but i'm more then a little bored at work today .
In my opinion, this game is a lot less broken than the recent Total War iteration and IGN gave that game a 9.5 and Gamespot gave it an 8.5. I have stopped playing that game until they patch it because of save game issues and the fact that it crashes to desktop every 15 minutes. This game should be judged like the Unreal Tournament games not like Warcraft. I haven't played long enough to give it a score but I wonder how they can justify giving Total War such a high score when it it the buggiest game I have ever played, yet trash Demigod.
What really bugs me is that both those reviews were written by the same person, he also gave Fallout 3 a 9.0, which after 6 months of being out AND 2! DLC packsstill crashes at random intervals, and after upgrading my computer started crashing when I used VATS. He also gave Dawn of War 2 an 8.5, despite the fact it had a balance breaking population cap bug, which finally got fixed on April 13th,2 months after its release.
The same guy gave Age of Conan an 8.5.
Well, you always have to keep in mind that some issues don't happen to everyone. Fable 2 was almost unplayble buggy for my mate, I didn't have a single issue.
However, very few people managed to play DG online in the last fews without problems. So, the reviewers are pretty much guaranteed to experience those issues, but who knows what happened with those other games (like TW: E).
What rly bug's ME is the fact that Multyplayer in a Multyplayer game is so full of bug's that it seems like a ant hive @_@
Giving Conan a 8.5 if you didn't play it to the higher levels is EASY, the game realese in europ was good the game makes fun at the start but the lake of END GAME CONTENT makes it sucky......so it's easy to give that game a high rank if you don't invest 80 hours into testing it @_@ it's also easy to give this game a low rank if you can't play mutlyplayer and got no singel player campain @_@! only cheating AI!
Oh come on. Age of Conan was fun for about the first 20-30 hours. Most reviewers didn't play the game long enough to get a true sense of the game's problems. http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/927504-age-of-conan-hyborian-adventures/index.html
Yup, got to 30 and content started getting sparse, got to 40 and the content vanished, got to 50 and realized that the next 30 levels were gonna be a total grind to get to 80. On top of all that when i got to around 50 I found out my female character did less damage then an identically statted and equipped male character (A LOT less).
Here's the IGN review:
http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/974/974110p1.html
mostly IGN USA and UK are reviewing a game, maybe the second review will be a little better...
I've never, ever played a game with multiplayer connectivity as screwed up as this one. As promising as the game is, it shouldn't have been released like this.
6.5 seems pretty nice of them considering how this game was built around multiplayer, and right now it is awful.
I've tried to get in to about 30+ games in pantheon and have yet to play 1 with another real player.
Let's not compare these two games. There was a huge issue with DoW 2, yes, but in every other respect, DoW 2 was delivering bang for your buck; much closer to the quality level of Sins than of DG.
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