http://projectw.gaspowered.com/
Age of Empires online development is done, and this is GPG's next thing.
I like GPG and can't wait to see what it is.
DG2 only in my dreams
Does Stardock work with GPG anymore? RPS just posted an interview and the guy blamed Demigod's publisher for it's failure. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/09/interview-nate-simpson-on-comickybook-nonplayer/
From that post:
"In the end, our game was hobbled by the publisher, who insisted on handling the networking code on their end, but didn’t have either the time or the manpower to do it right. They ended up just shipping it broken. So we had this great multiplayer game that nobody could actually play when it shipped. That pretty much killed us."
Is Demigod a better looking game than LoL - hell yes. Potential to be better than lol? Same. Are the networking complaints accurate? Pretty much. But it was never designed to be a game like LoL. Its not a realistic comparison. DG is a beautiful game, but it followed the norm (at the time) for pc game development. Its going to be released, be patched, and perhaps get some expansion packs. End of story. LoL is designed to last... well... close to forever. I don't regret my time with DG. Loved that game. Could it have been something amazing and more widely adopted? Yup. But poor connectivity saw to the end of that. It could have been revamped into a F2P game, but the investment required would be... well... a lot. I'm pretty sure SD saw a positive return on their investment at any rate.
Back to the OP - I'm curious as well. I've loved a good chunk of the games gpg has cranked out. Hopefully this is actually a teaser for something good and not some rubbish game they are cranking out.
When they said how much it would cost to make a new map, I was dumbfounded.
Not a long lasting game when you cripple further development by completely ruling out additional content through prohibitive cost.
It also lacked a huge amount of features core to moba games, such as recipes and special map monsters to kill for buffs. The places you could jungle were extremely limited because of map design and the areas in between being practically empty of stuff. But we did get some capture the flag.
For the record, I was active in the open beta of Demigod and I played it when it was released. As far as I can tell, the judgement expressed against Stardock is extremely accurate. The netcode didn't work during beta, despite two months or so of us telling them it was not working. They worked hard on it, don't get me wrong. But in the end, so many still could not connect so what choice do I have but to say it was a failure?
Which is not to say it was the only reason for Demigod's failure. It absolutely lacked the final polish on most items, merely being well balanced isn't enough in what should be a super-competitive game. And the final release shipped with 6 heroes (correct me if wrong) with 1 or 2 more released after. They said it was basically because they didn't want to re-use stuff over and over, but look at other MOBA games and see how successful they were at implementing interesting characters. Increased replayability through diversity of strategy.
What Demigod had was jaw-dropping graphics for its time. I don't know how they did it (I really have no clue) but monsters felt like they literally had 3-4 times the polygons. Combined with the tightly designed lanes with little jungle danger (who even called MIA in demigod?) you really felt like a god striding through the battlefield. To this day my favourite feature was checking out replays in slow motion, just to see that awesome Rook hammer drop, or that flying archer guy go into his uber mode.
It was a fun game, it just wasn't the next MOBA and the netcode and the business model cemented its decline.
Went a bit off-topic there. GPG is a top-notch dev and I can't wait to see what they have up their sleeve next. After the disappointment of seeing Sins of a Dragon Age cut its only unique feature, I am ready to be excited for a far-off game again.
A true successor to DS2. Please-
That is a ridiculous, inaccurate statement. From top to bottom.
Let me put one fact out there that should put everything else in perspective: Stardock became the publisher of Demigod less than 9 months before it shipped. The game had been designed and largely developed long long before then. Perhaps a software developer can chime in to help explain to others the significance of that.
First, when Demigod was designed and being developed, there was no League of Legends. It wasn't on the radar. Demigod was designed as an RTS with gameplay similar to DOTA. Here's the announcement they made. What little metagame it had was not part of the original design but added, later, by us.
Second, Stardock did not write the network code of Demigod. I've seen non-technical people on the net say this but never anyone who should know better. Demigod uses the same network code as Supreme Commander.
What Stardock did write, late in development, was a proxy server that would help connect those who didn't have a direct connection and do match making. And it worked fine until you got tens of thousands of people on it at launch time. The infrastructure and coding was expanded and within a few weeks that had largely eliminated that problem.
Suggesting that server overload at the launch of a network heavy game is what kept it from beating LOL is a tremendous insult to League of Legends. Nearly every network game, including LOL, suffers teething problems when they first launch. The bulk of Demigod sales occurred long after the launch. Designing a MOBA style game does not, in itself, make you a realistic competitor to LOL, HON, or DOTA2. There's a lot more to it than the game design.
League of Legends has been a spectacular success because it was designed, from the ground up, to be what it is: a massively multiplayer competitive league game. Demigod was not. And it shows.
Unlike LOL, Demigod uses peer-to-peer networking like all of GPG's other games. That's very common design for RTS's and not a criticism of GPG. And it works fine when you have 1 on 1 or 2 on 2 games (or you're on a LAN). But 5 on 5? All 10 people have to connect to all the other people? And they might be in other countries?
Moreover, Demigod's network code, which worked fine with Supreme Commander, passes Lua scripts back and forth. Try doing that when you have 10 people playing and that all 10 have to respond before the game can tick -- and where some of those people might have +400ms ping times.
I'm not faulting GPG for doing this. Demgiod wasn't deigned to compete with LOL because there was no LOL when Demigod was being designed. It was an RTS with a designed inspired by DOTA.
And even if none of those technical issues existed, the fact is, LOL has an immense league infrastructure that none of us ever envisioned at the time. GPG and Riot were not competing to make the world's first dedicated competitive online game. Only Riot was. And that means they had a business model (Free to play), a content stream ready to go, a worldwide network of servers for handling match making, scoring, rankings, team rankings.
Certainly, we tried to tack on more meta game features to Demigod after release. And we paid GPG to make two additional demigods. But Demigod, a very good RTS, couldn't compete with a game that was explicitly designed to be a competitive league game on a massive scale.
The fact is, League of Legends is so successful because Riot Games has done an amazing job on it. They put together a business model and a design specifically to create a massively multiplayer online competitive league game and have executed on that plan spectacularly.
Rather than blaming us, the proper and accurate thing to do would be to congratulate Riot Games for doing a good job.
Looks like someone fudged the mail send-out, got mine before the counter was up. No links work yet though, but sufficient to say it looks wild.
Is it Wildman?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/01/14/wild-man-a-kickstarter-from-gas-powered-games-and-chris-taylor
Looks pretty effing awesome.
The kickstarter video is a good first place to learn about what the game is about if you are having problems reaching the main site.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gaspoweredgames/wildman-an-evolutionary-action-rpg
Chris, as always, is a goofball when he does his videos.
Is this wild man SP or MP?
Also, bah to RTS
So happy to hear them throwing around Demigod as part of the kickstarter. The $20 gets you a copy of the game does make me think they might have a low target price for the game. Which also makes me a little nervous with all the concepts they are throwing around. I'll likely kick in $20 at any rate. The teaser video really didn't provide a heck of a lot imo. I'm also really, really, really concerned about MP. I think it sounds like fun and could certainly work as SP though.
edit - ah - just saw this in the faq;
"We haven’t set a final price yet, but its initial price will be higher than what we’re offering to Kickstarter backers. We got your back."
I love the idea of playing an RPG character in a real RTS environment. A couple of games have had it, but it just hasn't felt right so far to me, mostly because it's just button-mashing until a meter fills up and a boss appears, or protecting some objective for x time. I really hope they aim for a larger scale, say 200+ units fighting at the same time to really push the genre forward.
yah - hoping someone bumps this thread as we get more info.
Play Warlords Battlecry if you want a RTS/RPG hybrid.
Yeah, that's what concerns me, I hated Battlecry
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/14/chris-taylor-on-gpgs-prehistoric-rts-rpg-wildman/ interview
"GET. OUT."-Sheldon Cooper
This is a good clarification. I was also confused by the allegations that Demigod was "killed" by Stardock. He can't claim it was shipped broken because, as I recall, the problems weren't even discovered until the the game went live (which happened early because retail distributors released it before the contractual launch date). Furthermore, it was packaged and sold as a retail game, and was reasonably successful, rough launch aside.
I didn't even hear about LoL beta until after Demigod launched. Riot's whole business model was visionary at the time, they were in it for the long haul, not to just ship a product and move on to the next game.
My odd take on this interview is here is a guy who has been dabbling in many mediums casting about for success and looking at other intellectual properties that were wildly successful and saying, "Why not me?" Instead of being proud of his contribution to Demigod's great art design, he is pointing fingers to add drama to his personal backstory.
/end thread hijackAs for Wildman, it looks interesting, but I think they are missing the mark. I think making a caveman the main protagonist is going to limit them. They have a lot of competition in the MOBA and action RPG department, and I think people like to identify and individualize themselves with the in-game avatars. If the game is good, it will appeal to niche, but they are limiting its overall appeal.
If I were to take from the info available online and offer some rampant speculation on the game. (not just the video, but the text too)
1) RTS elements: What units to build, what tech tree choices to make, base building and the ability to lasso SOME units from the main automated army into squads under your direct control
2) RPG elements: Typical Character progression (stat choices, levels, abilities), itemization and loot drops.
3) MOBA elements: Army is automatic and there are "lanes" where the armies meet, strong early defenses to be overcome and points of strategic interest to capture for benefits.
Throw it all into a neat package (Chris is a good team builder, the staff he puts together go off and do their own great works afterwards) with a single player action RPG adventure (not a "campaign) a co-op mode (Imagine doing a Diablo boss run, except you and your friends who party their unique characters up together also bring their own unique armies) or a vs mode (an arena moba game, or imagine 2 teams competing against each other to do the Diablo boss run)
If that is what Wildman can be... I am all in.
Well I was on the fence but if GPG is going to be throwing around that kind of disinformation then I definitely won't be supporting any kickstarter of theirs.
The person who had the negative comments in the RockPaperShotgun article has no current affiliation with GPG, they just worked on Demigod, (I think as art director?), so you can't really hold the comments against GPG.
nt
The person on RPG isn't affiliated with GPG anymore and when he was, he was an artist. I don't think Chris Taylor publicly (or privately) would say something like that guy did.
I hate seeing Demigod painted as if it were some sort of failure of a game. It did very well and was very popular in its time. There is a wide margin between being LOL and being a failure. Demigod was and still is a great game. It just came out before the whole F2P thing took off. Just bad timing.
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