Man, im so disapointed in Gamespot.....
6.5 for a game that will last for a 10-15 years...this will be a tabu game, must have for serius gamer, like diablo, starcraft, and wc3...
They rated this on basic like - problems with online playing (that will be ofcourse fixed i belive with next pach), and couse this is pure Multiplayer game for relaxing brains and nerves...
Im so so so disapointed with gamespot
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/demigod/video/6208019/demigod-video-review there u go watch the review and post comments
To those who say the review is fair:
I would agree with you if this was the fault of the developer or publisher. The only way they could have avoided this is by adding heavy DRM to stop the pirates along with DRM for enforcing the street date. Sure, that would fix the multiplayer, but Stardock would also lose one of the assets that makes them so popular in the PC gaming world: their fight against draconian DRM.
It's a lose/lose situation, and it sucks.
As all of you who know me from gaming or from my other posts, I am not one to blow up at all. But this Gamespot review is utter garbage. It is such a bull shit review. And the problem is so many people look at that review before they purchase game as, the BAD: on the gamespot (lower case "G" thats right, doesnt even deserve a cap) review listed "Connectivity Issues" "Lack of Single Player story" and "8 Maps" ......................................................
Connectivity issues - Fixed by STARDOCK (ALL CAPS YEAAA!!! ) within a few days time!
Lack of Single Player Story - I can honestly give them this grip...
8 Maps - I think EVERY PC Game/Xbox 360 game has released new maps post-release... No valid point here. And the Maps we have are great maps.?
So we give them the lack of single player... ok.... 6.5????? gamespot is losing its credability as far as I am concerned... somehow garbage games from big name companies are getting perfect 10's on gamespot, and suck. Gears of War 2???? THAT MULTIPLAYER WAS GOD AWFUL AND GOT A 9.0........................ ARE YOU KIDDING ME???????
This review is utter crap, and we all know it. Disregard. That is all.
-Mord
PS: It must be the similarity between the names... Gamestop, Gamespot.... both have been befuddled in everything related to Demigod....
The Gamespot review hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned.
It gives Demigod the credit it deserves for its uniqueness and fun factor.
There is so much potential for an awesome campaign in the Demigod world it's hard not to be unsatisfied. The SP is nothing more than a place to practice and try new strategies or builds, as the AI is very unintelligent and takes away from any satisfaction gained by killing them. Well, coders forgive me. The AI isn't that unintelligent but in a game like Demigod or Dota it really doesn't fit to play against bots.
The lack of campaign is something we were all aware of so it shouldn't have stopped anyone from purhasing the game, but when you compare it to other games, Demigod loses value. Look at Warcraft 3 for example. It is an RTS and most people bought it for the multiplayer (and later, for mods alone). Yet it still had a campaign that was actually quite good. It had little to do with the actual MP aspect of the game but it told a story, and increased the value of the product.
Well I just overelaborated on stuff that isn't really my point. Moving on, to make up for the lack of campaign, the MP setup needs to be excellent enough to rival battle.net or the steam portal that TF2 runs off of (wow, did I just say it needed to be good like STEAM?). And it needs to have a very indepth ladder/stats system to keep track of how well we and our clans do. These would be excellent components of an only MP game, and should be essentials according to our expectations.
You can't just say "We'll add it all later, so give us our 9/10 now".
Yes, I believe it's a fair review. It's accurate on the date we posted it and it's based on the same version of the game that people are paying money for right now. You might not be aware of this, but we actually implemented an "After the Fact" feature that we use to update reviews as games are being improved (or in some cases, finished) after they arrive in stores. If and when Demigod's current problems get fixed, we'll be sure to add an update to the top of the review stating that, thus giving potential buyers an opportunity to make their decision based on info that's as up-to-date as we can make it.
Oh, and @gaping_maw, you're absolutely right, doing this doesn't get us a lot of "clicks" - but we do it anyway.
Justin Calvert, Section Editor, GameSpot Reviews
I'm not sure why Stardock didn't kindly ask Gamespot (and other sites) to delay the review by a week with the current state of the game. A reviewer should review the build of the game as it is and not on any future promises. Some games (Age of Conan) promise "miracle patches" that fix everything wrong with the game that never materialize even months/years after, so you can't expect a reviewer to review a game on what it will or won't be in the future.
But for multiplayer-heavy games, usually MMO's, it is the norm to wait a week or two to see how the game stabilizes before a formal review so Demigod should've been given the chance to stabilize a bit to see if the early-issues get fixed promptly.
Personally I'm liking the gameplay of Demigod, although I do wish it was a full $49.99 title rather than $39.99, but that the extra price would've brought in more polish & content (eg. 12-16 demigods on release, # maps I think are adequate, a better strung together single-player campaign for single-players, a quick voiced tutorial walkthrough of the game. So I can somewhat understand why the gamespot reviewer feels the game is stripped down a bit.
I'd be surprised if more reviews aren't in the 7-7.5 range or even less, until the online issues are resolved.
Afraid Gamespot is right. Movies are reviewed based on what the customer can see now, not on the Director's Cut. Games are the same way. I'll decide if Demigod is worth my Best Buy Gift card after the demo. Haven't missed a Stardock retail level game yet. Lost the old GalCiv key when I changed emails, game thinks I'm a pirate but it still works.
Frogboy, you should have just paid off the reviewers like the big publishers do.
Props to JCalvert for coming here to defend a their review.
Gamespot has had its rough times but I have always watched their reviews and I have to say that lately, biases in their ratings are hard to come by.
Ya well i'm not buying it until the game works and still has a userbase left.
Ok, let's put some perspective here:
When Sins of a Solar Empire launched (Gamespot score: 9.0), the multiplayer services of the game consisted of a single EXE (Ironclad Online) running from the Startup folder of ONE machine.
However, unlike with Demigod, Sins didn't instantly have 140,000 bumping into it. Instead, it had a few thousand. Over time, as the userbase grew, Ironclad continued to improve it and we were able to provide more infrastructure.
But with Demigod, the game's street date (18 hours ago now) was broken and while only a few thousand legitimate copies got out there, it turned out to be a favorite of pirates resulting in 120,000 (yesterday) connections at its peak.
Visit: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ and click on View Steam players per game to get a comparison. That means in a 24 hour period, our servers had to deal with more users than all the Counter-Strike servers combined had to deal with. Our system wasn't set up to handle 140,000 users. It was setup to handle a fraction of that.
Now, this isn't something that we can't address. We can slowly eliminate the pirates from using the resources but we have to do updates to do that and we have to make our NAT connector not so dependent on those resources. But it's not something we can do overnight, it may actually take a full 24 hours from the official street date to address.
At the end of the day, your position simply makes the case that it was a mistake to send Gamespot a review copy early. If we had sent out the game on release day via 2 day Fed Ex, you would have gotten it tomorrow and all the connectivity stuff would have been largely contained.
One can only imagine what the fate of Sins of a Solar Empire would have been IF its launch day resulted with tens of thousands of users connecting at once rather than a few hundred at once and the review was a snapshot of that moment.
"I would agree with you if this was the fault of the developer or publisher."
ROFL are you serious? network coding being bad is NOT the fault of the devs, but pirates??? or gamestop?
FFS these problems have been in the game since BETA, how the hell does that make it pirates/gamestop faults????
I am wondering what the fanboys are gonna say if they are unable to get the problems solved this week (just because devs say they will does not mean it happens) are reviews suposed to wait 2 weeks? then 3 weeks? when are they allowed to review the game with a broken netcode?
I'm slowly beginning to have an idea about the network issues. How does prate copies able to get access to online services? The log-in should have screen out those pirates, shouldnt it?
Are the options really either 12 hours from street date versus 2 weeks?
What about say, 48 hours from release? Would that be too much?
Wow I'm really getting sick of the Devs blaming Gamestop and peoples routers for a multiplayer problem that should have been obvious from the moment of conception. Face it the launch problems are of your own design and your own problem, not anyone elses. The fact is the Gamespot review is 100%, low content high price, buggy networking. Don't blame gamespot for being honest.
If I'm not mistaken, its not that they necessarily have access to playing online, but more or less that their copies are still communicating to the server to verify online accessibility/patch versions. It's the same principle as a denial of service attack, this just wasn't planned.
I do.
The guy in the review was basically pretty dead on with all the information. He said it is sad that it does not come with more content, which is quite true. But like he said, you need to wait a few patches before playing, this is with all games.
While the Gamestop review may live forever, Gamespots reputation is well known and so is their content. Getting a good score can mean the difference for some folks.
About the maps, I believe this was mentioned SOOOOO many times in posts, I even mentioned it in my review I believe and several other posts. With the amount of RTS games out there and previous ones, 8 arenas will not cut it for a release of a game.
I really do not care about the campaign, but afterall the hype about Gods fighting for that spot and nothing to back it up with? Sort of pointless story, eh? Tuturials are a thing of the past, tooltips and a few games of offline practice against the AI is all it takes. The guy who reviewed it is pretty stupid for saying that. Supreme Commander, C&C, Warcraft, Starcraft, all those type of games really are the same.
The connection thing is pretty bad, does Stardock not have the resources to take on such a server load or? While it may be an easy fix, just sucks for such a thing to happen. Glad you realize it is happening and fix it however.
Ill be honest with you I lost respect for Gamespot (along with many thousands of others) back when the whole Gerstman firing happen. I was a paying subscriber of GS from day one. I cancelled because of that. They fired a guy because he gave a bad review to a crappy game and the publisher got mad because they were paying a ton of money in advertising.
So as to not ramble...the integrity of the site tanked. Then losing the other senior reviewers just confirmed it. Alex Navarro etc etc.
Anyway to get on point...They should have waited at least a couple days. In fact they should not review any game until at least 4-5 days after release. In most cases that probably does happen. Just in this paticular case they hit it immedietely.
You can tell by my member number here ive been a fan of Stardock a fair while. I think this game is incredible and really look forward to the potential updates and expanded content to it. I connected to a multiplayer game just fine last night. It was alot of fun. Ran like silk. (Even though I suck a bit and got beat lol)
I really feel that solely on that fact that Gamespot should have heard the issue with Gamestop breaking the street date and you guys being put in a difficult position that they should have given you the benefit of the doubt and gave you at least a couple days before releasing the review. Just seems like it would have been the decent thing to do.
Really? Perhaps there should be some adjustments to other games then. Let's see, I remember being unable to play Half Life 2 for a couple of days after I bought it at the store because of the early Steam issues. Clearly, a 100% honest review of HL2 would have been a 6.5 right? Heck, you couldn't even play it single player.
What about Empire Total War? I bought that at the store and still can't reliably play it on weekends not to mention it's buggy in the real bug sense. Where's the honesty there?
The problem with the Gamespot review is that it's a going to be an accurate picture of the game. This isn't a game that was released riddled with bugs or something that's going to take months of patches to make playable. This is a game that came out and had a bad case of server overload. A fairer review would have given the game a few days to see if the server issues are really a release day problem or if it's systemic to the game's basic design.
Gamespot has lost most of its credibility anyway. I find it odd that some other titles that were released several weeks ago still dont have reviews... These are seemingly the big game companies (namely EA) that the games themselves were poorly made overall and GS simply wont give out a bad review until after the company has made its profit. This suggests that various companies are "paying" for good reviews or to hold off on bad reviews and, further, GS reviews are up to the highest bidders.
I generally look at metacritic scores (which gamespot is typically way to low or way to high depending on the publisher and not the game). When demigod is working properly, it is a decent game that I would rate around 8.5/10. The quality of the game itself is top notch. Only things it really loses points for in my book is limited story lines (which the game doesnt necessarily focus on anyway), the fact that its primarily MP (as I've never been much for MP beyond a few friends playing together... personal preference), and the fact that I though the assassins would be controlled differently (the generals are as I expected, I just though the assassin generals would be more in the thick of things with an over-the-shoulder camera and maybe some hacknslash action... but then again I didnt read too much info on DG prior to purchase because I wanted to be surprised as stardocks products are always top notch).
Long story short, ONCE the SD has DG's multiplayer fully operational (tournament stats and all), it will be grand. I hope we get DLC of more premium well balanced maps as well as a few more DGs (the ones in there now are decent I just like wide varieties of characters to choose from .
I had to laugh after checking out this review. Apart from the multiplayer issues, the reviewer complained about no single player campaign and a lack of maps. That's funny... I seem to remember when Sins was released, it had no single player campaign and not a whole lot of maps, and it got a 9.0 from Gamespot!
I can see being disappointed if the only thing you're looking for is multiplayer, but look at the other parts of the game. The art design is fantastic. The audio, including the voices, is great. I've been trapped offline with the game due to the retail serial number problem that several people are having, but tonight I had as much fun playing Demigod as any game I've played in years. It's been very solid for me, and it looks and feels great.
It's ludicrous to say that Demigod isn't a commercial quality game, as the Gamespot reviewer did.
Oh, and one more thing--downgrading the game for having no tutorial is also silly. If the reviewer had bothered to crack open the manual, he would have realized that there's a couple of paragraphs in there that tell you everything you need to know to start playing. The game is really easy to learn because of its pace, and because of the progressive nature of the gameplay. At the same time, it offers a lot of depth with all the different demigods, abilities, items and minions.
Gamespot review was so biased to the connectivity issues. They NEVER let those issues influence their review scores in the past, take a look at Age Of Conan, World Of Warcraft, Empire: Total War.. all these games had nasty problems with multiplayer which persisted from hours to days after release. Yet these issues were ignored and the games were reviewed on content alone. Gamespot review however takes a huge chunk off the score due to an issue that will be fixed. They should have kept the review based on the content, gameplay, graphics, sound etc.. because that would be consistent with their past reviews. So why the double standard for Demigod? After reading the review it seems to me like they couldnt decide between a high score (game score without connection issues) vs a low score (game score influenced by connection issues), and just gave the game a 6.5.
Someone needs to review reviewers, its so easy to review and critique someones work, if the employees at gamespot actually developed any games instead of just playing them they may have taken into consideration what a huge impact some factors make. In this case Stardock had no control over gamestop releasing the game before easter, it also had no control of 120k/140k warez users who logged in and bogged down the servers early. Can you honestly blame Stardock and not factor in this huge issue? Pretty amateurish for a professional review site if you ask me.
I used to be a hardcore gamespot fan, since 1997, over the years my opinion of them has pretty much inverted, and not for the better..
"Granted, the gameplay is intrinsically fun, the various demigods offer variety, and the number of options you can tweak help keep offline battles fresh."
"The colorful visuals and fantastic sound effects merge wonderfully and make the battles between minor deities seem oddly authentic. The pounding of drums, the calls of wood flutes, and even the strum you hear when mousing over the game menus contribute to the atmosphere of polytheistic bloodlust."
"The varying play styles of each demigod, as well as the numerous tactical upgrades and items, offer fulfilling strategic breadth."
Fuckin gamespot. There probably just pissed stardock didn't throw down the cash for a nice big ad like fucking Kane and Lynch. GOOD JOB gas powered games for making me like video games again.
To be honest on the other side of my post above...
If I had one complaint I agree with on the Gamespot review...its the limited number of maps. I can live with the MP stuff being worked on for a couple days. I can live even without a campaign story mode option. But in all honesty 8 maps is VERY lite for a release. The game should have came with about 12 maps minimum. A couple more 2vs2 maps in particular.
Also maybe one more game mode would have been nice as well. Like a king of the hill or something.
razattack raises a good point here. There are a multitude of other games with similar/worse launch day issues that haven't affected their scores to the same degree. Hell, Empire: Total War deserves a negative score for making every other game on Steam unplayable for 24+ hours, right? MMOs might as well not get reviewed, since they're mostly unplayable for the first week plus.
On the other hand, I do believe that the review is factual. That I'm not debating. On the other hand, I don't think that it's consistent with other game reviewing conventions, and that is not apparent to the Gamespot reading masses. All they're going to see is a giant 6.5 and click away. While I applaud the reviewer for his desire to present the game in it's present totality, I also think that his own personal frustrations probably affected the review more than they should have. Dawn of War 2 (an 8.5 from the same reviewer) had plenty of matchmaking problems of it's own at launch - you couldn't play a ranked game against anyone even remotely close to your own trueskill rating. It made the game terribly unfun - much like Demigod's rather unforgiving matchmaking system.
Granted, DOW2 had a singleplayer campaign to back it up, but ...
Mines of Moria (8.5, same reviewer) Age of Conan (8.5, same reviewer) and Warhammer Online (8.5, same reviewer - Side note, noticing a trend with his MMO scoring yet?) were all absolutely awful launches. I mean, just god-awful. They weren't playable for days either at launch, and they're both SOLELY multiplayer experiences that were not docked at all for the score. They actually have functionally less singleplayer content than Demigod.
EDIT: All of his other reviews for online only games were posted weeks after release. Why is this one literally 24 hours after and judged to the same standard? The problem here is consistency.
My point is pretty simple. Online games are always, always, given an "ironing out" period to get these things functional. This is normally not reflected in the review, and yet it is here. Why is that?
This is a fair review. Releasing a multiplayer centric game with networking problems is horrible from a professional standpoint and really shakes the crediblity of quality that stardock has built up over the years.
I've bought every galciv, 2 copies of sins (1 for myself and my friend) and demigod. I've convinced my friends that stardock is awesome and told them that demigod would be a dream with two awesome development groups like gpg and stardock working together. Not only am I extremely disappointed with the bugginess of the release, but releasing a mutliplayer centric game without a match making system that allows you to pair up with your friends? You're making relic look good at this point for having the decency to release with only 1v1 and 3v3 maps.
I can't understand how there's so much positive feedback and moral support on these forums after this debacle. It's almost like they're deleting critical posts or something..
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