Yeah I sort of just disapeared.
I came to the conclusion that it's futile. The reasons are rather simple..
A year ago is when I started following Demigod. I preordered within an HOUR of when it was availible. I thought Demigod was going to be a great game. This was back when Scathis was the lead developer.
Way back then we were all-but-promised a highly competitive game with lots tournaments and such. Supcom was a pretty competitive tournament game. It wasn't counterstrike or DotA level, but it was much much more so than your average game. So I thought "oh, yeah this could be great". I like the idea of dota, but I was never that crazy about DotA's execution.
I also had some trust in GPG.
Stardock becomes publisher.. Stardock isn't known for competitive games at all, but Frogboy even said "The counterstrike of RTS". Well.. that's saying quite a lot, but okay.
Beta1 comes; potential, but lots of problems. It's just an engine test.. well fine. I played tons of games in it. I was quite good.
Now Beta2. I got bored of it quickly because it's hardly an improvement over beta1.
Oh sure, it has generals. It has citadel upgrades. It has more flags, maps, But it's still the same core gameplay. The problem is with how the basics is rather flawed. If the game doesn't play well with a single demigod, it isn't going to become much better with more of them.
On top of this, what happened to that whole "white boxing"? I though the gmae was being developed for years without art assets to be made fun before adding the models, animations, textures, effects? I don't really see how this took place. IF that was the case then skills would be better developed and such, and there would be better input. IT seems like everything was made in the last few months and the white boxing was just "Okay I can click the ground and my box moves there. Enemies come from portals. I can click them to do damage and push. It works!" I hate to say that, because it's harsh, but it seems the case.
I have stopped posting any suggestions or feedback because I know it'll take all the effort just to make a mediocre casual game by May/April, let alone making a well developed timeless competitive game. There is no chance of any suggetstions being implemented. There is no chance of feedback being used to make the game require more precise input. The game is going to be what it's going to be regardless of what the competitive community says. They're just focusing on some balance things, making multiplayer work, and getting the single player done since that's what most of Stardocks current customer base wants.
It takes to much testing and reworking things to get them right. This is why SC2 has had a like 2-3 year private beta consisting of many paid SC pro's. It takes so much tweakign.
I thought stardock wanted Demigd to attract a different kind of gamer to Impulse and to Stardocks games.. So I thought they'd be sure it's right. But it seems to be being made to appeal to their current customers.
And it's not like the game could be fixed after release with patching. It has fundamental flaws. It'd be like redoing the game after release like was done with Star Wars Galaxies. Even if it's redoing things for the better, the people that bought and play the game would be used to a certain way.
It would be like adding a rocket launcher and first-person mode to Hello Kitty: Island Adventures. It might bring the competitive players to it, but the people currently enjoying Hello Kitty: Island Adventures would get ticked off.
Or another example.. adding those riot shields to Counter Strike---It total changes the game.
