I'm a big gamer.. been gaming for umpteen years and I have seen games span from seemless releases to show-stopping, game ruining flop releases. A lot of the bad releases are with innovative games that were reaching into uncharted territory (Ultima Online.. I still laugh at the aniticipation of waiting for my avatar to take that next big step.... 2 minutes later, I would be lucky to get 1 more step in.)
I want to like this game. I really do. It's a visually stunning game, for the most part. I'm a huge fan of online competition gaming, be it FPS', RTS', MMO's and most any other game that pits you against human opponents. If this had an elaborate single player campaign, most likely I wouldn't have gotten very far into it as I have become spoiled on multiplayer gaming. This game coulda been close to having the secret sauce that makes people wanna sneak away and 'play one more game before work/school'.
I'm not sure I'll ever know if this game will get there. Each time I wanna start a game I grow less and less likely to. If it isn't the poor connection/match-making proceedure, now it's the random game drops and de-syncs when other players leave. Why did GPG have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to connecting to other players? I have been playing games for YEARS that have been connecting 4,6,8,10,50 players at a time with less problems. Frogboy and his peers are tireless workers, I get that. I see that. But this game was simply released too early. Tons more testing and polishing shoulda been done. It shoulda been released with more demigods, more maps, more variety.
And these new ideas that are being tossed around... letting someone leave within the first 3 minutes of a game without penalty.. no AI opponent when someone drops.. makes no sense to me. Those are both game spoiling ideas if put into practice. I don't have to tell most of you how 4v3, 3v2 or 2v1 games usually turn out.
Anyway, feel free to flame.. I'm sure I touched a nerve with a few of you. I love the dedication the demigod crew and frogboy are appearantly putting into to correcting the problems. But I'll bet they were prodded by the powers that be to push this out the doors for economic reasons before maybe they would have liked to.
Hmm, maybe this is a bad time to ask this... but Can I get into the Elemental beta? Lol.....
I share your frustration. When we released the game, we were set to party down as we (both Stardock and GPG) felt very good about things.
But clearly, the multiplayer part of the game experience has been just disastrous.
In the last 3 weeks, I had to pull people from Impulse and Elemental to go onto Demigod to solve this stuff. I had never in a 1000 years imagined that we would be stuck having to write a network library for a game AFTER the game was released but that's basically where we're at.
I guess the good news is that we can use all this new stuff in future titles but like I said, it's been not just frustrating but heart breaking because Demigod is such an awesome game.
I have no doubt that despite all the problems, DG will be a commercial success. The opportunity that was missed was DG had the potential to be a BLOCKBUSTER. I know hindsite is 20/20 and that SD and GPG have been working hard to make the best of these unfortunate events. Nevertheless, I keep seeing that fly ball towering toward deep center field, back, back, back and then bounce off the cushion. Well I'm sure SD/GPG are happy to have the triple. We'll now see if they can bring in the run (I'm sure they will).
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