Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
When people remember Demigod, mostly they recall Rook, the character with castle towers for shoulders pictured above. That's fair, he's great, but Demigod was fun across the board.
]]>Gas Powered Games wants $1.1 million of your dollars. I also want $1.1 million of your dollars, but - instead of spending them on a mansion made of trampolines and a pony that's also a rocketship - the Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander dev is hoping to bring an RTS-RPG called Wildman to life. It's about prehistoric evolution, but with an amusingly silly twist. "What if men, when they evolved into the homo sapiens form, what if other creatures also evolved, and other creatures had sentient minds? You could fight, say, a giant fly creature, or a lizard creature, or wild animals. What if there were thinking cats and things like that? Insects that are just creepy, that grew and were vying to take over the planet," explained Taylor in an interview with RPS. So it's part exploration-based hack 'n' slash, part troop-commanding RTS, and part fly monster. Got it. Video after the break.
]]>David Valjalo swings by to talk to game industry veteran turned comic creator Nate Simpson (Demigod, Supreme Commander) about his MMO-themed graphic novel that was conceived on the toilet, how everyone thought Demigod would go toe-to-toe with League Of Legends, and why he believes game addiction is real, and coming for us all.
]]>Yesterday saw part one of our brief history of the games which followed in the lanes of DOTA. Part two looks at what happened next.
]]>The precision-piranha of the games press, VG247, strike again. Analysing a small fragment in a video interview with gamers.fr where he alludes to the possibility of a Demigod 2. “We’ve got a lot of interest in a sequel to Demigod” he says, before moving on hope of recouping the money they invested in the first one. And sending children to college. Go to VG247 for all the rest of the quotes, including some eye-rolls at pirates. The video's below, with the Demigod related stuff 2:40 or so in...
]]>Having just moved house into a place with broadband speeds that harken cruelly back to circa 2002 - the cost of living with normal people rather than fellow, bandwidth-hungry tech-nerds for a change - the last thing I'm going to be doing until I've begged, borrowed or stolen more mbps is playing games online. Which means I won't have the chance to take Demigod's newest Demigod for a look around in multiplayer just yet. It's the second freebie semi-deity granted to the once-beleagured game, which is an excellent thing for Stardock (publisher, marketeer, explainer of Demigod) and Gas-Powered Games (its developer, yet peculiarly silent about the game throughout its life and pre-life) to have done. But, as with all things Demigod, new chap Oculus' birth has not been uncomplicated.
]]>The v1.2 patch for Demigod is out, and it can be picked up on Impulse. It features a new character, the Demon Assassin, as well as a bunch of other fixes and features, such as AI options and a mod-manager. The second scheduled demigod, Oculus, will apparently appear "in the coming weeks". The full change log for the patch is here, along with some videos and screens of the new demigod in action. I really should go back and play this online at some point, I'm pretty sure I've promised to about half a dozen times. That said, my guilt is assuaged by the fact that I've managed to get snared by another Stardock game, Sins Of A Solar Empire, while playing it for a retrospective last week.
]]>Stardock are an unusual company in a whole load of ways. One of them is that despite being a privately hold company, they do a report to the public. No financials, but there's a mass of transparency here. The full document is worth at least a skim read, but there's plenty of information worth picking over for industry watchers. The details on Impulse's success are fascinating, but the fact which most immediately screamed out was that only 23% of the people who actually bought Demigod even tried to play online multiplayer. I stress tried. If you attempted to log onto the server, you're part of the 23%, not matter whether you succeeded in actually playing a game or not. I've quoted the section below in full...
]]>The Demigod demo has finally, suddenly emerged from the storm of patching that was post-release Demigod development. Siphon its 598mb from here.
]]>That there wasn't a demo of a game that proved so hard to describe in a single sentence is one of several perplexing decisions around the launch of Gas-Powered Games/Stardock's action-strategy thingy Demigod. Stardock's Brad Wardell has shoved up another of his irregular state of play updates, and alongside another apology for those awful multiplayer problems in the game's first week, he reveals plans for a demo and two new Demigods. Waroo!
]]>What follows can't really be said to be a review. The plan was that I would write up a "Wot I Think" discussion of Demigod for the week it was released, but that didn't work out. Having suffered quite a bit of upset on launch, Demigod - which has been heavily patched and continues to evolve - remains troubled. The trouble is nothing to do with game design, it's to do with the internet. A technical issue. I've only been able to connect to a single online game in countless hours of trying, troubleshooting, tweaking, crying. Alec seems similarly blighted. What follows is therefore is the incomplete account of an unhappy soul. But it should also be clear that I think this - in spite of it all - a brilliant game.
]]>As Jim alluded to in the comments thread for our Demigod discussion last week, one of the many interesting issues around writing for the web instead of for print is that a verdict passed on a game doesn't have to stay static in the event that game's problems improve/worsen. Demigod's a fine example - if one of us had written it up on compressed tree-matter and shoved a number at the end, that number would reflect its enormous netcode screw-ups, and would sit as a faintly damning judgement upon it for all time (of course, damnable parasite-site Metacritic means that problem still exists for a lot of web stuff too).
While releasing a game that was problem-riddled in the first place is scarcely something that should be condoned, as GPG and Stardock (I'm becoming increasingly confused as to who's really in charge of DG now) have been frantically racing to patch the thing up over the last week, such a judgement would already have been innacurate. Especially as it appears - oh dear - piracy may have significantly exacerbated DG's multiplayer problems....
]]>Gas-Powered Games' (with a little help from Stardock) Demigod enjoyed an unexpected early release yesterday, thanks to a silly snafu by Gamestop. Jim's feverishly working on a full verdict on it to be posted in a few days' time, but unfortunately it's been held up by the release version suffering some pretty flaky netcode. It wouldn't do to judge a game that's almost entirely multiplayer only on the strength of its offline skirmishes, so while we wait and pray for an ultra-patch, Jim and Alec had a brief chat about their impressions so far... If they both seem a little surly, it's because their clever brainwave to try and get the damn thing working in LAN mode over Hamachi had also just failed miserably...
]]>Well that cocks up my release-day review, doesn't it? Thanks to Gamestop inexplicably releasing the game early at retail in the US, the release of digital download versions of Demigod have been brought forward to yesterday. Brad Wardell explains the kerfuffle over at his Impulse blog, as well as pointing out that this whole mess should, in theory, "maximise" piracy rates:
]]>The Rook is clearly going to be the first demigod that each of us try in Demigod. It's a giant brick golem with castles for shoulder-pads. It also has a hammer. Lead designer Mike Marr shows it off in the walkthrough below, and although he cackles at one point, he doesn't sound excited enough for me. Gas Powered should totally get the Black Prophecy trailer dude in to narrate their videos. THE ROOK IS DESTINED... TO SMASH!
Demigod is out soon, and we're going to review the crap out of it.
]]>The mighty Brad Wardell of Stardock has done a lengthy narration of in-game footage for Demigod, and it's been hosted over at GameTrailers. I've embedded that after the jump for your eyebrow-raising consideration. Wardell is playing as one of the demigods we've not seen before: the Oak, who has some splendid necromantic talents. The man from Stardock also talks about the Pantheon, which is Demigod's "persistent world" battle tracking system. That will basically allow you to put your efforts into fighting for a particular faction, pushing one of the demigods towards ascension to full godhood.
Anyway, go take a look. Demigod is due to ascend to digital retailhood in April.
]]>After the jump there's a straight piece of game footage from Demigod for you to ponder. No flashy intro or blathering producer for this piece of the game, instead it shows you one of the smaller gods using his powers on the heavenly battlefield. Demigod remains one of those games that's unconvincing when we look at it over the internet, and yet having seen it in action earlier this year it's something I'm quietly looking forward to, at least as an antidote from the mainstream of strategy titles, or the predictable perturbations of the RTS genre. The structure of monster-spewing conflict you conjure up on the battlefield is entertaingly complex, and one of those stragely abstract moments when you see just how weird videogames are as a form of entertainment...
]]>So the left over footage from PAX includes a few minutes of Demigod footage with some detailed developer commentary. The explanations highlight your demigod's character development as you play - the big old central unit in your battle will grow stronger and expand in powers during each bout against another demigod. So it's that whole RTS-but-ooh-we-have-RPG-stats-for-heroes thing. The footage also give you some idea of how the game plays - a fairly fast-paced action RTS, via way of the tower of Babel and cosmic battle-chess. It's looking good.
The limited beta, which should begin any day now, will be available to folks who pre-order via Impulse.
]]>Gas Powered Games' battle-of-the-gods title, Demigod, is looking appropriately awesome. It's actually a little more sedate than this trailer, as I explained in my first look at the game, but I think this gives you a good taste of the thunderous tone we should expect. Go watch.
]]>This is an interesting one. Gas Powered Games' deity-bashing RTS, Demigod, which we previewed a few weeks ago, is to be published by Stardock. The game will now arrive in 2009, and will feature no DRM at all. Fancy that.
Full release details after the jump.
]]>Recently I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with Gas Powered Games' John Comes, lead designer on Demigod, and have him show me what they've been up to. What is this game they call Demigod? Comes explained: "Demigod is a team based action game with RPG, RTS and fighting game elements. The story behind the game is that there's an opening in the pantheon of Gods and you are a demigod fighting to take the spot. You're fighting with your brothers and sisters, other demigods. It's an action game at heart, so everything is fast-paced. A game lasts between twenty and forty minutes." Sounds good, and looks good. Could it be "good"? Lots more heavenly information after the jump.
]]>It's good to have a nice brag. 1UP, courtesy of their real world organ Games for Windows, are having a nice brag about announcing Gas Powered Games new game, Demigod. And who can blame them? We'd have a nice brag too if we had a proper exclusive like that.
While most of the details are being saved for the magazine, the game's based around the famous Defence of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III, where you power up one hero through adventuring and try and wipe out the opposing team. It's primarily a multiplayer game, with the single-player primarily as a place to learn how to move around and level up and... FUCKING HELL! LOOK AT THAT THING WITH THE TOWERS ON ITS SHOULDERS. THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME.
(Hopefully)
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