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Post by Crumpy Six on Feb 11, 2016 13:10:19 GMT
I've just been watching the Godus Wars trailer on the Steam store page. I know advertising rules for Early Access games are basically "say whatever you want, who cares" but it is surely misleading to have this marketing material on the store.
Claims include:
"Conquer an entire world" - In fact we have access to just two continents, both of which provide a near-identical gameplay experience.
"Thousands of cards and powers" - against a backdrop of someone in-game, choosing from their selection of, er, 22 bonus cards and 5 attack buffs, which is perhaps MORE than what is currently available in reality.
"Fight brutal battles" - We do have this. Hurray! That's one.
"Fully modifiable battlegrounds" - This is rather over-egging the land-sculpting mechanic
"Deadly god powers" - Set to the backdrop of the meteorite power, which (as far as I can tell) is not available in the present game. I completed both continents and never came across it. Besides this, the available god powers are extremely underwhelming. I never got beyond casting blight on little bits of land. Not terribly 'deadly'.
"Epic troop buffs" - For some reason they picked the Speed+2 card to illustrate this. Attack+5 is kind of good I guess. That's as epic as it gets.
"Available now on Early Access" - This is what it finishes with. But all of this is NOT available on Early Access. And some of it (seriously, thousands of cards?) probably never will be.
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Post by militairensneuvelen on Feb 11, 2016 17:03:54 GMT
Thousands...?
Dis gunna be gud!
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Post by 13thGeneral on Feb 11, 2016 20:37:32 GMT
Instead of "fully modifiable background", which is both misleading and somewhat deceptive, they really should have said "highly transformable landscape" simply because there are limits, as well as some non-malleable objects.
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Post by Gmr Leon on Feb 11, 2016 20:43:29 GMT
Instead of "fully modifiable background", which is both misleading and somewhat deceptive, they really should have said "highly transformable landscape" simply because there are limits, as well as some non-malleable objects. Limits which, it should be remembered, are thoroughly arbitrary and almost inarguably arising from poor direction... Edit:
Was reviewing some old posts here and it's kinda funny (and might be sad if not for everything else) how the AI developed for Godus Wars appears to have made little to no strides since we last spoke with Konrad.In particular: "We have no 'meta AI' ie; something that could simulate a player/god working against you. Again performance is a non issue, its the large coding workload. We will be looking into improving the behaviors of combat followers themselves as much of the work has already been done. We can also use scripts to give pre placed enemy settlements some basic behaviors such as reacting to attacks and sending out raiding parties etc. It should be sufficient for the purpose of turning enemy settlements into obstacles and blockers to overcome rather than an enemy that can destroy you completely. This kinda falls under the purview of design rather than coding so I may invite input on the lua scripts themselves when the time comes." It's kind of disheartening that they no longer seem interested on input into this. |
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Post by hardly on Feb 11, 2016 21:41:11 GMT
Instead of "fully modifiable background", which is both misleading and somewhat deceptive, they really should have said "highly transformable landscape" simply because there are limits, as well as some non-malleable objects. I don't see what the point is of sculpting in GODUS wars. If you both sculpt in your own interest then you both sculpt at the same rate which cancels out. If one sculpts offensively and one defensively you both sculpt at the same rate which cancels out. If you both sculpt offensively then it cancels out. Therefore I don't see how sculpting is in anyway interesting. The biggest challenge of sculpting is the inaccuracy of sculpting. If you watch any video reviews of GODUS you can see the sculpting is awful. It's always been awful. It's central to the game and 22Cans refuse to improve it. This is why they fail. You know I really wish that 22cans would offer some defensive/justification of their design decisions that shows a sense of pride or ownership of what they've done. When they do try to justify their designs it tends to be "this is all we could manage". I've never seen a game, now games, so universally panned. 22cans just seem to ignore the feedback and plod on regardless. I realise the experience must be depressing and demotivating for people who are working hard on the game but to break the cycle they need to commit themselves to listening and not repeating not the mistakes of the past. When I have some time I'm going to try and drege up some of our comments from a year ago to see what we warned Konrad about because I suspect we warned him about these very issues with turning GODUS into a bad RTS. |
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Post by mindless on Feb 11, 2016 22:08:32 GMT
You say sculpting is awful, but how do you suggest it should be improved?
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Post by hardly on Feb 11, 2016 23:15:02 GMT
You say sculpting is awful, but how do you suggest it should be improved? Easy. The sculpting not tools in the editor are much better, just move those into the game. Take a look at the simcity terraforming tools - different brushes, a dig brush, a raise brush and a flatten brush. One of the problems with GODUS is that there has never been an complexity to the landscape that you want. They always incentivise a carpark style of sculpting which means that they then want to restrict how fast you can do it. What I've constantly said they need to do is require you to create different levels of terrain for different resources. If they did this the player would have to alter the terrain in different ways to create a multifaceted enconomy instead of a single faceted one and it would be interesting and more challenging. 22Cans have it around the wrong way. They create a complex world and ask the player to flatten it. What they should be doing is creating a flat/empty world and asking the player to populate it. Imagine you start in a desert with no trees, no rocks, no hills, no animals and two people. Then you sculpting the land, spawn the plant life, seed the animals and watch your people flourish. Sound familiar? Yes it's the story of how God created the earth. Who would have thought to use that as a basis for designing a god game. Here you go 22cans there is more constructive feedback to ignore. |
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Mandrake
Master
The Vault Boogeyman
Posts: 113 
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Post by Mandrake on Feb 11, 2016 23:52:11 GMT
You say sculpting is awful, but how do you suggest it should be improved? Godus' sculpting really only seems to have charm on mobile when you're using your finger like a god etching away at the world. On PC it's a horrible abomination of an interface mess, especially when you might have mis-clicked a unit order. Check out the terrain tools of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Two sculpting modes, Spray and Drag (which is more like Godus') Selection points of 1-2 corners of a grid square or the whole square at a time Brush size selection Freeform sculpting and shaping Snap alignment to neighboring tiles Snap edge alignment Flatten Flatten to height at pointer Tile smoother/revealer Tile averager for ultimate smoothing Create Hill/Mesa/Mountain/Ridge/Trough/Crater/Canyon Incremental versions of most of the above To me, RCT3's sculpting tools feel like the logical extension of what was in Populous while Godus' feels like the knock-off brand's clone offering. I also could feel more like a god in RTC3's sculpting, as with a wave across the screen - mountain range in seconds. In Godus, to do anything of the sort, I feel a kid with a plastic sand pail and shovel... |
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Post by greay on Feb 12, 2016 0:21:46 GMT
You say sculpting is awful, but how do you suggest it should be improved? Assuming it's the same in Wars as it was last time I played Godus, it's maddeningly imprecise. So many times, rather than selecting what was directly underneath my mouse, it would select something a few layers off. And making stairs or a path for my followers was always a nightmare, because of how limited the sculpting controls are. |
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sjoerd93
Wannabe
Posts: 20
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Post by sjoerd93 on Feb 12, 2016 1:32:04 GMT
What about re-introducing cliff sculpting? Heck, just make it default already. This is a really big one for me. Cliff sculpting makes the experience infinitely better. You may complain that it is too hard to pull one layer at once. But there must be plenty of methods to select the layers, we even had those cards for that in the past. (Frankly, I think making it default without cards is best. The mouse is really precise enough to do this. The only device where this is a problem is mobile touchscreens. But as Godus Wars is PC only anyway, this shouldn't be a problem, right?  ) Also, just making us able to just 'paint' with the sculpting would help as well. |
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Post by hardly on Feb 12, 2016 2:09:31 GMT
The fact is 22cans have had the same feedback for over two years on this issue and they choose to ignore it. So they get videos and comments ripping them to shreds. Colin will say how we are trolls and how it makes the devs feel like shit reading the vitriol. Well I'm sorry but you dug your own hole. If you want to fix the situation lets talk about what an improvement will look like.
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Post by militairensneuvelen on Feb 12, 2016 8:19:33 GMT
You say sculpting is awful, but how do you suggest it should be improved? Easy. The sculpting not tools in the editor are much better, just move those into the game. Take a look at the simcity terraforming tools - different brushes, a dig brush, a raise brush and a flatten brush. One of the problems with GODUS is that there has never been an complexity to the landscape that you want. They always incentivise a carpark style of sculpting which means that they then want to restrict how fast you can do it. What I've constantly said they need to do is require you to create different levels of terrain for different resources. If they did this the player would have to alter the terrain in different ways to create a multifaceted enconomy instead of a single faceted one and it would be interesting and more challenging. 22Cans have it around the wrong way. They create a complex world and ask the player to flatten it. What they should be doing is creating a flat/empty world and asking the player to populate it. Imagine you start in a desert with no trees, no rocks, no hills, no animals and two people. Then you sculpting the land, spawn the plant life, seed the animals and watch your people flourish. Sound familiar? Yes it's the story of how God created the earth. Who would have thought to use that as a basis for designing a god game. Here you go 22cans there is more constructive feedback to ignore. That would work perfectly in combination with all the resource suggestions we made. Some resources appear under the right circumstances (bush, bush on a slope, bush next to river, bush next to sea, bush in dry area. All different types of bushes could appear etc.) But hey, the good ideas went missing while compil ating them I guess And repeatedly reminding 22scones about them was futile as well (since they were so focussed on MOBILE and not a PC version...) And they "keep on keeping on" (not listening and doing silly* stuff (LIKE PAYWALLS)) *Silly = understatement |
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Post by hardly on Feb 12, 2016 8:25:36 GMT
Easy. The sculpting not tools in the editor are much better, just move those into the game. Take a look at the simcity terraforming tools - different brushes, a dig brush, a raise brush and a flatten brush. One of the problems with GODUS is that there has never been an complexity to the landscape that you want. They always incentivise a carpark style of sculpting which means that they then want to restrict how fast you can do it. What I've constantly said they need to do is require you to create different levels of terrain for different resources. If they did this the player would have to alter the terrain in different ways to create a multifaceted enconomy instead of a single faceted one and it would be interesting and more challenging. 22Cans have it around the wrong way. They create a complex world and ask the player to flatten it. What they should be doing is creating a flat/empty world and asking the player to populate it. Imagine you start in a desert with no trees, no rocks, no hills, no animals and two people. Then you sculpting the land, spawn the plant life, seed the animals and watch your people flourish. Sound familiar? Yes it's the story of how God created the earth. Who would have thought to use that as a basis for designing a god game. Here you go 22cans there is more constructive feedback to ignore. That would work perfectly in combination with all the resource suggestions we made. Some resources appear under the right circumstances (bush, bush on a slope, bush next to river, bush next to sea, bush in dry area. All different types of bushes could appear etc.) But hey, the good ideas went missing while compil ating them I guess And repeatedly reminding 22scones about them was futile as well (since they were so focussed on MOBILE and not a PC version...) And they "keep on keeping on" (not listening and doing silly* stuff (LIKE PAYWALLS)) *Silly = understatement Do you remember the what are the top three things you want in GODUS thread? You know the only with like 30 pages on constructive suggestions they ignored. I think a game where that encouraged you to create a diverse landscape and that your people organically populated and exploited would be really interesting. It would certain allow people to be creative which is something GODUS has to date not managed to do. |
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Post by militairensneuvelen on Feb 12, 2016 8:42:26 GMT
Do you remember the what are the top three things you want in GODUS thread? You know the only with like 30 pages on constructive suggestions they ignored. I think a game where that encouraged you to create a diverse landscape and that your people organically populated and exploited would be really interesting. It would certain allow people to be creative which is something GODUS has to date not managed to do. I remember resources coming up in requests several times (not entirely sure if it was a top 3 item though) P.S. People are asking for a resouce (system) right now (just read 2 posts on the Godus forums about resources). |
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Post by hardly on Feb 12, 2016 8:58:31 GMT
Do you remember the what are the top three things you want in GODUS thread? You know the only with like 30 pages on constructive suggestions they ignored. I think a game where that encouraged you to create a diverse landscape and that your people organically populated and exploited would be really interesting. It would certain allow people to be creative which is something GODUS has to date not managed to do. I remember resources coming up in requests several times (not entirely sure if it was a top 3 item though) P.S. People are asking for a resouce (system) right now (just read 2 posts on the Godus forums about resources). It was mentioned everywhere and by a very large number of people including me. It's one of those repeated things that 22cans have chosen to ignore. |
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Mandrake
Master
The Vault Boogeyman
Posts: 113
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Post by Mandrake on Feb 12, 2016 9:11:58 GMT
I think by now at this point it has been soundly proven by Godus Wars that all of the feedback given to 22cans from those who bought Godus as part of the Early Access program hasn't meant a damn thing at all.
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Post by militairensneuvelen on Feb 12, 2016 9:17:16 GMT
I think by now at this point it has been soundly proven by Godus Wars that all of the feedback given to 22cans from those who bought Godus as part of the Early Access program hasn't meant a damn thing at all. Feedback. Don't make me laugh. Godus Wars was one item finished on the KS list. **** our feedback.... |
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Post by hardly on Feb 12, 2016 9:59:23 GMT
I think by now at this point it has been soundly proven by Godus Wars that all of the feedback given to 22cans from those who bought Godus as part of the Early Access program hasn't meant a damn thing at all. Pretty much. I can't think of an instance where they have significantly adjusted what they are doing to take account of our feedback. |
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Post by militairensneuvelen on Feb 12, 2016 10:37:09 GMT
I think by now at this point it has been soundly proven by Godus Wars that all of the feedback given to 22cans from those who bought Godus as part of the Early Access program hasn't meant a damn thing at all. Pretty much. I can't think of an instance where they have significantly adjusted what they are doing to take account of our feedback. Started with a P and ended with aywall? |
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Mandrake
Master
The Vault Boogeyman
Posts: 113
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Post by Mandrake on Feb 12, 2016 10:52:10 GMT
Pretty much. I can't think of an instance where they have significantly adjusted what they are doing to take account of our feedback. Started with a P and ended with aywall? To be fair, Hardly said "significantly adjusted what they are doing to take account of our feedback" and not "reacted appropriately for being called out by the gaming press on the most asinine design/release yet for 2016 in the video game industry".  |
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