Brad's first impressions of BETA 3

Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2419

Brad's first impressions of BETA 3

Real quick

I plan to write a more formal report on Beta 3 shortly but here are some quick thoughts after spending the day with it with friends.

Briefly:

FUN. It is fun. It could use more balance and some pacing and some anti-cheese stuff but I feel pretty good about the fun level of the game.

BUGGY. Oh god it's buggy. Forget playing multiplayer unless you close the game (exit to Windows) between each game attempt. The Pantheon is basically a non-starter in this build. I have had a high degree of success in connecting to other players but it only takes ONE player who's behind some nasty firewall to try to join your game to wreck it for everyone. This needs to be fixed asap. Lots of places where the UI locked up.

OVERALL.

High confidence in Demigod being a hit provided the following things are fixed:

Connectivity MUST BE BULLET PROOF. If you can't reliably get into games, Demigod will fail.
The Pantheon stats need a lot more data. We need a "Skill Score" (ala Boneyards and SupCom) as a way for ranking better.
The various bugs of course mus be fixed.
We need to pay very close attention to balance and cheese tactics reports in the forum. I will be looking for posts that say [CHEESE].

So that's it for now!

demigod

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

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Quoting mjolk,

reply 25

Quoting Frogboy, reply 18Since we can get 5 on 5 games going in a mixed network environment with people from around the country, you may want to seriously look at your network configuration and work with us.

on "going" i hope you mean getting a connection.

the performance is awful with more than 4 players per team as it lags all the time

We had pretty good performance on our 5 on 5 games. YMMV.

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do you know how much bandwidth is needed per peer?

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B3 Opinions

It's a LOT more fun will all 8 Demigods in play. It got boring quick before when there were double or triple of the same DG's in play. First of all omfg yay prison is back. It's the most popular map and It's probably because it's small in size. You don't have to walk for several minuits to your health crystal or shop and so on. Maps such as brothers may look great but they are way to big (even for 5v5's). More smaller maps like prison would make me happy.

What bugs me the most is the overpriced Artifact items, There will never be a serious game where I can save 20,000+ gold for any item. It takes about 10 minuets to save for one of the cheapest items which is priced at 8,000 gold (ish) and 10 mins later the game is over. No Item should be priced over 10,000 - 12,000 gold unless you never want the item to be bought.

Unclean Beast:
With the correct item build or backup from teammates he is unstoppable only thing I would change about him is the ooze ability. It's rarely used and I wont go into the why's because I will bore myself with it. Just get rid of it or change it dramatically

Torch Bearer:
Ice mode is my personal favorite mainly because of the shatter thing and because he helps team mates greatly.

Rook:
Very strong DG, hammer is no longer perfectly easy to get a hit with but if you do it does great damage.

Regulus:
Lots of ways to play him, very popular DG.

Generals
I'm not sure how these DG are suppose to be played but at the moment they play as assassins with the optional minions. Probably the least played DG is QoT, Not sure why. I have rarely been killed by her but she is a good team supporter.

Game breaking bugs such as the cast bug where you attempt to cast but instead your DG stand's there waiting for orders, This needs to be fixed or no go retail. I think the bugs are more of a problem than ballance.

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I had almost 40,000 gold in a serious game. Practice more and you will improve TerroR.

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Quoting jeffwads,

reply 4

I had almost 40,000 gold in a serious game. Practice more and you will improve TerroR.

Well baring in mind start of game items and the much needed citadel upgrades...

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Quoting ,

quoting post

BUGGY. Oh god [Beta 3 is] buggy. Forget playing multiplayer unless you close the game (exit to Windows) between each game attempt. [...] Connectivity MUST BE BULLET PROOF. If you can't reliably get into games, Demigod will fail.

Impressive lucidity from the CEO of Stardock Systems!

I have yet to be able to join one single game, and my cable Internet connection is usually very fast and stable.

The CEO wrote that on February 21. I would be very surprised if Demigod was ready to be released, post-Beta, for April 21, because of the Internet MP issues.

If it were just a single-player game against A.I. bots, it might be released next week, but as an Internet MP experience, it seems to be far from being "ready for prime time", unless you are one of the privileged few who seem to be able to "stress-test" MP games without any connectivity problems.

Understand me well : I like that game very much, but I have yet to simply join one single Internet MP game. That's all I ask for : one successful joining.

« BULLET PROOF » !?! I think we are far from that.

I played my very first Internet MP game in 1999 : it was Heroes of Might and Magic III. On "Kali", there never were problems related to hosting or joining a game, and we rarely crashed. TEN years later : I cannot even join one single Demigod game.

Who am I to complain? I'm a nobody : only "The_Monk" undertands the esoteric, hermetic, and arcane gnosis and praxis of Internet Networking.

/time to shut the f**k up

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 4

Quoting Gir92, reply 2Yes I agree that the game itself is amazing.

I'm still quite puzzled by why they went with P2P connections instead of through a server. Most of the people that I'm connected with have a ping of 150+ and it makes me lag horribly bad in game.

If it was client/server, the lag would be 300. Client/server doubles ping. That's why it's peer.

Ahh I see. Thank you for clearing that up.

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yo, I say the pacing is slow, like I wait a lot for my guy to get from base to lane, or lane to base, the TP scrolls are good, but not enough... speed up the game entirely, also I say cut all things in half, not spells/abilites, but the size of the DGs, the Towers, the STUFF, making it more of a dodge game kinda, could be a game mode, small mode or something

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Quoting CyberMage,

reply 6

I played my very first Internet MP game in 1999 : it was Heroes of Might and Magic III. On "Kali", there never were problems related to hosting or joining a game, and we rarely crashed. TEN years later : I cannot even join one single Demigod game.

TEN years later, Stardock/GPG is trying to circumvent router/NAS issues that plague hosting games for most people.

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Odd that the first server for multiplayer were actually well done Battle.net ftw! lol

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CyberMage reduce the bolds/italics/underlines/caps - it burns my eyes

And I am very suprised you havent been able to join one game. I can join nearly every time now....(apart from when it crashes).

However I do agree with you that the games release date should most probably be pushed back unless we see HUGE improvements in the connectivity between now and the release (which there might be) as, yes, it is far from bulletproof.

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Gerry, during the early times of battle.net almost nobody had a router and routers are what cause all the pain. If you check out starcraft or diablo nowadays you will notice that it works far from perfect with routers and even Warcraft III isn't that good with them - I can't play custom games with my bro in the same game for example despite having all configured properly.

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