After the praise I gave Demigod as being a far more nearly finished game than Sins, it occurred to me that I hadn't tried out online yet, so I decided to give it a blitz when I had some spare time over the holidays. The online community seems about the same size, though it was much quicker to get games with Demigod, perhaps because the Sins community is obsessed with 5v5 at the expense of other matchups, while the biggest Demigod game I had was 3v3.
Though I avoided the 'no noobs' games I sometimes wasn't made to feel welcome, with some players openly urging that I be kicked from games, especially after I answered that I had no other account. I began to stick to games marked noobs only. Two other problems with games were lag, which just ruins Demigod games when it happens, and players who were repeatedly killed. However both were rather less of a problem than I had anticipated. I tried to enter the Pantheon a few times but every time I was told that I was the only player. Is Pantheon not considered a pleasant way to play? With there having been so many Pantheons, is there going to be any community effort to finish the last one off?
I quickly realised that I hadn't been able to learn much from the single player game. I had triumphed at the higher levels of single player mainly by flag capturing, buying upgrades and portal stealing, which tend to be much easier against the AI. Also, you can get a substantial amount of points even if defeated in games in single player tournaments. If your team had to win a majority of victories I doubt that I would have won any tournaments to date. Having read some forum posts I was aware that not all the favour items are considered equal, and some items and demigods are considered superior to others. Yet the game was patched recently- are there still more patches coming? Will Demigod ever be patched for ten-sided tournaments, rather than the current eight? If the developers just concentrated on balancing what exists rather than new stuff Demigod could be a real jewel. Sins has a lot of content that just doesn't function well at all at the conceptual level, where I have the impression that if there were slight tweaks to the numbers of some Demigod items they could add more variety in play quite easily.
I didn't get to play as many of the maps that I wanted to play- most of the games were on Cataract, with a few on Prison and Crucible, and one on Brothers. I saw a few on Ziggurat but didn't get to play on it. Are the other maps not as good- hadn't they been fixed in the recent patch? I'm sure that one problem that has been mentioned was that Oak can take down citadels early, but that hasn't happened to me, was it fixed? The entire range of demigods were played, however, with Unclean Beast and Torchbearer by far the most common, though I played some Torchbearer myself. The least played seemed to be Erebus, which was something of a surprise. I found the early game easier to play with all of the demigods I used, but began to struggle later on. Games like ten-kill slaughter single player games over in a few minutes as the nightmare AI destroys your weaker team hadn't accustomed me to picking up artifacts at all and I scarcely know what any are, or even the higher end items or powers. However, virtually all the players I was in games with seemed to have demigods that were more buff than mine, even earlier on- is it just good practice to focus on bonus health items? How does armour work in Demigod?
I had fun in many of the games, anyway, including some epics. One feature I missed was chat, there seems to be very little chat. Also, I only discovered how to chat to all, rather than to allies, by accident when hitting keys in frustration after a game finished. I suppose I can always take it out by making posts to the forum...
