Well, the day has come for me to move on from Demigod (or retire, as zen_god once put it).  As I’ve always been pretty vocal on the forums, I thought I’d take a moment and thank some people and reflect instead of just fading away.

IMO, Demigod has the best game play in its genre.  That’s why I’ve been playing as long as I have and I’d wager those of you reading this feel the same.  Stardock and GPG created a truly excellent core game that’s easy to pick up and play, but difficult to master.   The game design is superb and the balance is reasonable. 

But then there are the problems.  Game killing problems, unfortunately.  Most, if not all of us, have felt the pain of an invalid game state ending a game abruptly.   Or the same feeling when someone on your team crashes and now it’s a 2v3 and there’s slim to no chance of a win.  Nothing is quite as fun as putting 20 minutes into a game and having it turn from a win into a loss because of technical issues.  There’s no “real” matchmaking.  The stat system is broke and easily exploited.  And the community generally frowned very heavily on forming teams to raise the level of competition.  In short, those elements that could have made the game a competitive masterpiece simply don’t exist and never will.   You can have a sense of competitiveness against individual players, but no decent way to measure it. 

So, on one hand I have a brilliant game that I love; on the other hand are technical woes that dried up our community to a paltry number.   I felt like this game could have become the next counterstrike/team fortress 2 with a reasonably sustained population; but that’s just not possible due to those technical issues.  Anyway, the networking isn’t going to get any better here in Demigod, so I don’t really see a big surge in population in the near future.  What I do see is us long timers slowly moving on.

And so, that’s what I’m doing. 

Brad and everyone at Stardock and GPG – thank you for creating such a great game!  It’s consumed hours and hours of my time and brought me quite a bit of enjoyment.  I’ve had substantially more fun than frustration .  I do hope that we’ll hear something about a Demigod 2 or a “spiritual successor” sometime soon as I’m sure I’ll be back for that. 

Thanks to everyone on the SD staff that took time to answer my questions and respond to game issues, etc.  You’ve been great at helping out when problems arise and its always been good to know that you folks would update us.  Not a lot of companies handle things the way you do at SD, and I’m grateful for it. 

Thanks to everyone in the modding community that took the time to create great content.  My personal thanks to peppe and the_hunger (AI mod), miriyaka (uberfix and coaching other modders), exxcentric (enfos and favor mod), bman (ui mod), and lord orion (balance and moba mods).  You all made Demigod a better game and future players of Demigod owe you a debt of gratitude for all your hard work simply for the love of the game (or the love of modding, for that matter).  Thank you all!

And last – thanks to those of you that play or played the game and participate on the forums.  I’m grateful to have met you and thank you for giving your time to play some enjoyable games with me.  I know I’ve done my part by trying to organize tournaments, etc, but without you folks being diehard fans of the game and choosing to participate, even that wouldn’t have happened and perhaps we’d have moved on some time ago.

To anyone that stumbles upon this post sometime in the future having just picked up Demigod – yes, the game does have its problems; but it is a gem.  I hope you enjoy your time with the game as much as I have.

Cheers,

pacov