Platform: PC
Genre: Action Roleplaying, Hack and Slash, RTS
Developer: Gas Powered Games
Publisher: Stardock
DRM: None
1) Overview
Demigod is three things; Defense of the Ancients (a popular Warcraft 3 mod), Diablo, and Dawn of War.
Defense of the Ancients:
This is, by far, the biggest influence on Demigod. In fact, from what I understand, Demigod is practically just an updated version of DotA with upgraded graphics and more balancing. I’ve never played DotA personally, so I can’t comment on the differences between the two games, but I know for sure (from glancing over the Wikipedia article for DotA) that the two games are very much linked.
Diablo:
The Diablo-clone-ness of Demigod may very well also come from DotA, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is, in essence, a Diablo clone. You have a hero, you point, you click, you kill. Gain experience, upgrade your skills, point, click, kill.
Dawn of War:
This is a tougher one to place. The RTS aspects of Demigod are subtle, and if you aren’t looking for them you may very well miss them while looking at the DotA/Diablo features of the game. But the RTS mentality is there, and anyone who’s played Dawn of War will feel it.
2) Gameplay
By now we’ve covered the basics of what Demigod is. Provided you know the above games, you’ve already got a good grasp over the Demigod concept. But let’s dive into the details specific to Demigod.
Each map has two teams. Each team consists of a group of hero units (each play controlled). Each team has a base which contains a Citadel, an item shop, and a healing crystal. The Citadel is your main base and is the goal of the enemy team. In the main game type the goal is to destroy the enemy’s Citadel. The Citadel also allows you to purchase upgrades to benefit your team. The item shop sells a typical assortment of items and armor; more advanced items can be purchased from an artifact shop which is located someplace on the map. The healing crystal will heal your hero unit and it where you will spawn after death.
The maps themselves are setup RTS style, small (compared to a large ‘open’ world like Diablo) bite-sized maps suitable for a skirmish. Each team’s base is positioned on one side of the map. Around each base are sets of turrets, which become weaker towards closer to the center of the map. Scattered throughout the map are Flags (or better known as Strategic Points). Each Flag has a bonus associated with it, and the team that controls the Flag gets that bonus (such as -15% to cooldowns, or +20% experience).
A particular Flag to be aware of is the Gold Flag. When you take control of a Gold Flag your team controls one or more surrounding Gold Mines. The Gold Mines produce Gold which is dumped directly into your team’s savings. (I don’t know if the money pool is shared between all players or not, but I don’t think so.) Gold is the only ‘resource’ to manage in Demigod. It is used to buy items and equipment for your character from item shops and it is also used to purchase team upgrades from the Citadel.
Near each base there will be one or more Portals. These Portals summon AI controlled reinforcements for the team that controls the Portal. These reinforcements are basic units that run along predefined paths on the map. Whenever a batch of reinforcements encounter an enemy batch of units, an enemy Demigod, or an enemy turret they stop and proceed to beat on the enemy until they are victorious or die. These predefined paths will take the units straight to the enemy Citadel, but only after all obstacles (turrets mainly) along the path have been destroyed.
As the game progresses your Citadel will increase in power. It will become visibly larger and will (I think) gain more hit points and defense. Also, as the Citadel grows the type of reinforcements that are summoned from the portal will become better. There’s an announcer who will say when each team’s Citadel grows in strength and when new unit types are being summoned from the Portals.
While playing a game you will be in control of a single hero unit, which the game calls a Demigod. This is your primary, and in some cases your only, unit that you will control. After selecting your hero you can click to move around the map, click to attack enemies, or use abilities or items that your hero has. This is where the Diablo-clone gameplay is.
Heroes gain experience for killing creeps or other heroes. As you gain experience you gain levels. With each level you receive one skill point. The skill points are spent to gain new abilities from the skill tree. Each hero’s skill tree has several paths to take in order to gain the highest level abilities. New skills are unlocked on the tree as your hero progresses in levels, and as you purchase the prerequisite skills with skill points. Each hero has four main abilities, which are located on an action bar at the bottom of the screen. None of the abilities are available for use until you purchase the skill from the skill tree.
Heroes also have stats and are able to use equipment. You can open the character info window to see your stats and your currently equipped armor. Equipment can be purchased from item shops that are located at various places throughout the game map. Equipment provides stat bonuses and also sometimes have activated abilities.
There are currently eight different heroes available to play. Rumor has it that two additional heroes will be made available in a patch due in the coming months. The heroes are split up into two categories, Assassins and Generals. Assassins are powerful single units and are played just as outlined above, D2 style. Generals, on the other hand, have the ability to summon minions. This allows a General to create a sort of mini army which can be controlled RTS style.
There are three types of minions, melee, ranged, and support. Each General may summon two of each type of minion at any one time. When starting a game a General will need to purchase ‘totem’ items which will allow them to summon minions; the more expensive the totem the better the units summoned. Minions can be selected by dragging a box over them or by clicking a hotkey on the keyboard. There aren’t any hotkey groups (ctrl+number in most RTS games), but that isn’t such a big deal since you never get a ton of units. Instead you can select all minions, your demigod, or all minions and your demigod through three different hotkeys. Then you point at some bad guys and click to set your minions attacking.
In the end, if you like RTS and micromanagement, select a General. If you like D2 and you just want to bash in some faces, select an Assassin. Both are viable and effective (Assassins tend to be stronger on a one to one playing field since they don’t get minions to support them).
As of right now there are only eight maps available for play. They range from 2v2 to 5v5 and the size of the map scales with the number of players. Hopefully more maps will become available, either officially or from the community, since eight maps isn’t a whole lot.
3) Gameplay Modes
Demigod lacks a single player mode. There is no campaign; instead you may play skirmishes against bots. For me, personally, this isn’t an issue since I’m typically disappointed with RTS style campaigns, and the game isn’t designed for an open Diablo style campaign. But I know that many people do enjoy single play campaign, so it’s definitely not a good thing that this is missing.
Multiplayer is the main focus of the game. Both online matchmaking and LAN play are available. I haven’t tried any online play, but I’m pretty sure that its skirmish only, just like any RTS.
Skirmish games have four different game types.
Conquest – The default game type. Your team must destroy the enemy’s citadel.
Dominate – This is a point control game type. You win by taking and holding the Flags that are scattered throughout the map.
Slaughter – Kill enemy Demigods to win.
Fortress – In this mode you must destroy the enemy’s Fortress to win. I haven’t played this mode, so I’m not exactly sure what a Fortress is, but I’m assuming that it is the Citadel + Turrets.
The replay value is the same as it is for RTS games; you come back again and again for the challenge of winning the skirmish.
There are also a number of Achievements packed in. Most of them are pretty basic, like ‘Win ten games with character xxxx’, but there are some interesting ones , like ‘Kill 100 enemies with fire.’ The interesting thing about achievements is that you gain points for completing each one. These points can be used to buy items in game which persist between matches (I think, at least). These items can also be turned off though, so that the balance isn’t thrown off if a long time player is facing off against some nubs.
4) Graphics/Sound
The graphics are good. They’re very nice and clean, with high quality textures. The character models are also fairly detailed and look fantastic. I haven’t seen any graphical lag or hiccups on my machine with all of the settings maxed out. The only exception is that one time I happened to catch my Citadel while in was upgrading; the animation was jumpy and stuttered, but it appeared to only affect the animation of the Citadel upgrading.
While playing the game you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. The nice thing about Demigod is that it allows you to zoom very close or very, very far. The zooming doesn’t take long to get from one extreme to the other and it is a very smooth process. The closest zoom will put you in the middle of the action, while the farthest zoom let’s you see the entire map. Personally I appreciate this since most games lock you into a fairly close maximum zoom, which always aggravates me since I prefer to be a bit further from the action so that I can see more of the map.
So far I haven’t been wowed by the music. It isn’t bad, but I’ve never heard any music that made me stop to listen. It’s all fairly typical background, fantasy music. Demigod doesn’t fail, but it doesn’t exceed either.
An another note, the voice acting is pretty good, particularly the announcers. They have a nice strong voice, and the cues they give are useful. The characters have sound bites that they spot out randomly when getting selected or doing abilities. These little bits of audio aren’t bad, but they are cheesy sometimes. I got tired of hearing the archer exclaim ‘This would be easier with wings!’ when I told him to move after the fifth or so time.
All of the games files are packed into a measly 2.72 GB of space, which is something I find amazing considering the high quality of the graphics. I suppose that with only eight heroes and eight maps that they must not have much to store, but the number is still surprising. Given the amount of hard drive space that is available nowadays the small file size isn’t a big deal, but it’s just something noteworthy.
5) Summary
In the end, Demigod is a bunch of RTS maps with AI controlled units that need your Diablo-clone hero’s help. The graphics are good and the gameplay is good. Demigod’s beauty doesn’t come from the individual genres that it includes, but how it meshes them together into a cohesive whole. The initial learning curve is relatively low if you’ve played Diablo and/or Dawn of War, which makes it easy to jump into. Also, it diverges from the typical RTS gameplay style which creates an environment where we might get more people to play (I’m looking at you, DoW haters).
I haven’t got to play it a ton, but so far it’s been a very good and interesting game. I can’t say if it’s better than DotA, but Demigod is certainly able to stand on its own.
The game is out now and costs $40. Is it worth $40? I’m not so sure about that, just yet. The lack of a single player campaign is a significant downer, even if most of your time won’t be spent in single player. There also isn’t any sort of tutorial; this isn’t a big deal, but the game is just a pinch overwhelming at first. It took me a couple games to figure out the achievement points can buy special items. Also, I hear that the matchmaking online isn’t all that great and it’s about on par with the aging Battle.net service from Blizzard. If Gas Powered Games keeps good on its supposed promise of giving patches with new Demigods and more maps I could see the game being worth the $40 price tag. It is definitely something that everybody should check out though, and I think it’d be a fantastic LAN party game (we have too many damn FPS games!).
My recommendation: give the game a try, it has something for everybody.
Interesting side notes:
Gamestop released the game several days early. Since there’s no DRM it was pretty easy for pirates to get a copy of it up and online. Apparently Stardock didn’t bother to add any protection to the multiplayer servers; no DRM and protecting your multiplayer servers from pirates are two totally different things. Plus, there wasn’t a demo available of the game and the game is a small file size (and thus a quick download). All of these factors lead to a crap-ton of people (about 160,000) that downloaded the game off the net and pounded the online servers; online servers that were still test servers since Gamestop broke the game’s street date.
This created a mountain of problems for Stardock/Gas Powered Games as they struggled to get the real servers online and limited to legit players only. It also happened to be the time when people were reviewing the game. These problems lead to a number of reviews taking several points off for the ‘terrible online support’ offered by Stardock. This is a shame, considering it was a whole bunch of things that went wrong all at the same time. Plus, Stardock has supposedly already fixed the majority of the issues, about one week after launch.
No long lasting impacts, but it’s interesting. Was the piracy because of the lack of DRM or the lack of a playable demo? Everybody is always fighting for no DRM on games, since DRM is a piece of crap for the people who got the game legit, but are these the consequences of being kind to your players and killing DRM altogether? (But like I said above, not protecting your online servers from non-legit copies is just stupid.)
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