The fact thyey've said they expect to ship with 8 playable demigods(for a 5v5 game) scares me enough into walking the line to cancel the pre-order. If i hear something else i don't like i'll just cancel it. I got fucked over in supcom with a lack of patching serious bugs, and i got fucked over in FA with patching serious bugs. Baseball players get 3 strikes and GPG is walking the line in my opinion.

With only 8 demigods, I'm already ready to cancel my pre-order . I hope I'll be able to do that with GPG.

I don't mind having 8 for beta, but I hope we'll get at least 16 with the release in 2009.

IT also limits what you can do with the new heros abilities in order for it to balanced to the "core" ones then..

I wasn't expecting 20, but i thought there'd be 12 or so.

REgulas' skill list also sounds extremely lame.

Micro expansions are a much better solution IMO.

I would rather pick and choose what I want.  You can be sure that users will also hae the choice to simply purchase the compilation later too.

I'm trying to understand this.  8 is a LOT of Demigods.  That's like saying Starcraft is lame because it only has 3 races.  A Demigod is an extremely unique entity in the game.

So when you play Starcraft does it feel chintzy in a 5 on 5 game that there's only 3 choices of who to play as?

I think some of you are taking the Dota comparisons a little too far.   If we wanted to, we could crank out 100 Demigods by just reskinning the Demigods and tweaking their stats and such but the idea here is for each Demigod to be very very unique and be a compelling gaming experience. It's not equivalent to a Dota hero other than in the most high level way.

Since we're arguinging with devs thought I'd pitch my arguments:

Well first of all games with 'races' have a lot more art assets, like you guys maybe have a race worth of art assets, like what 6 units and 8 heroes, with probably like another 8 units for the generals?

On the fact that a demigod is an extremely unique game entity? Give me a break, of the three demigods I played there were 3 click to hit nukes, that did damage to one target, half of regulus's abilities were mines, and the other two (an aoe and a nuke) were very simple as well as his passives, increased range and maim? seen that as have I seen all the others as well, well maybe the tower of light rook thing was decently unique (RA2 had it) but the rest meh. If you want unique abilities look at maps like AotZ, DoE (http://forum.valor-zeal.org/), or HoSK (http://www.hoskmap.com/), a lot of those abilities are more unique than the one's I saw at PAX. How hard was it to copy torchbearers ice stun and make it a damage hit? Or the fact that each demigod has the same skill that takes up a third of their levels?

(Hell even SoaSE had more 'heroes' with rather unique abilities!)

And on the same topic, DoE and AotZ, are made by one guy. He skins and codes the entire maps (ok the skins are also done by other people), but they're doing it as a hobby, for a couple of hours a day. You guys have a full fleged game company, doing it as a job (and therefore working on it a lot more), with money to back it!

HoSK even has customizebal heroes! And these maps have only a about a dozen heroes a side.

So, I love the game so far, but don't give me this BS about extremely unique when one man teams have come up with more unique abilities and hero concepts. Escpecially when your 'unique' demigods are rather bland in their game play aspects (but the story is damn good). This sounds rough but see my much more positive post as well. (Also I understand the game Isn't fineshed yet, which is why I plan on being in the beta, to help make demigod the best game yet)

That's like suggesting that in Sins of a Solar Empire, we should have had 50 capital ships for 32 different races. Then it would have been just a totally awesome game.  Right?

I mean, in Galactic Civilizations, we have 12 unique civilizations with the ability to create your own custom civilizations from scratch. Therefore, Galactic Civilizations must just be a lot better game than Starcraft, Sins, and Supreme Commander combined right? I mean, isn't that what matters? How many units there are?

There are two primary reasons for limiting the # of Demigods.  The first is gameplay. On paper, having a gazillion Demigods to choose from probably sounds super l33t awesome.  But in practice, it would be painful to properly balance and trivialize the uniqueness of each Demigod. 

Second, there is the cost.  Creating all the assets for a Demigod is incredibly expensive. As Chris said, a single Demigod costs well in excess of $100k to make.  In a free mod, you can get away with reskinning units from WC3 in multiple ways (storm spirit vs. battle master for instance or holy knight vs. Moon rider).  But in a commercial game of 2008, players expect very stark, very apparent differences not just visually but in how they move and function and play.

Moreover, we have to balance test each of these Demigods on many different maps to make sure that their powers, size, and other capabilities work well with what we put on the maps.

But I heartily agree that anyone who is going to be flaming us for "only" having 8 unique Demigods on release should absolutely get out of the beta now and preferably stick with Dota because that is not the direction we want to take. 

It would be like someone saying that Counterstrike "sucks" because they "only" have a handful of differnet types you can play while some freeware mod or whatever lets players choose amongst dozens of different types. 

But like in Counterstrike, Demigod focuses less on the # of types and more on the equipment and items you obtain for your Demigod.

After all, I would think it would be pretty obvious that if we wanted to just go for quantity of heroes that we could easily crank out 100+ Demigods using the same 8 bone structures we've got now. But that would dilute the uniqueness of the Demigods.

Yea, you'd almost think you had played a pre-beta of the game or something...

I don't think most people would agree that the rook is "bland" or the queen of thorns (to name two examples). But YMMV.

Remember what we've been saying on the forums: Do not judge the final game based on the betas. This beta is just that - a beta. If you're thinking you're getting a game to play that's going to be fun and in a near-finished state, then you should drop out of the beta now as you'll be disappointed.

I'd hoped for more than eight as well, but it does take quite a bit to make those kinds of things.

More skills would also be nice, but even those would require more balancing and any new movements would have to be added to the animations (And also effects/sounds/etc.). 'Tis a sticky issue, this.

I sure hope so, Id imagine that more demigods would be added just like PATCHES, it would really be a cheap move to sell them.

if 500,000 copies are sold... the companiy makes $2,500,000 thats a lot of money... even if it costs $10 per disc they still get $2,000,000... and that more then covers any cost paid to make the game! For example SOaSE has sold 500,000 copies, and IMO the campaign/storyline they gave is crappy, all it is is skrimish.

My point is, are they cheap enough to make us pay MORE, the values I listed are for 1 game... They will make more and make a lot more money as well!!

Depth and breadth, when taken to similar extents have analgous effects. If you can make it so that my queen of thorns and the other guy's queen of thorns play radically differently if we make different choices, then I'm completely fine with that. I start getting pissy if you don't have either, and I'm confident that the demigods will be deep. We shall see.

That's fine for me.

I simply hope you will not make the mistake of releasing booster-packs 1-2 months after the game ship(instead of delaying it). It would sound to me like an unfinished game that the company try to sell the game parts by parts.