Post by Lord Ba'al on Feb 4, 2016 18:50:27 GMT
Godus is Back and is Still Quite Shit
By Julian Benson
Godus is back but in a different guise. Peter Molyneux's studio is diverting attention from Godus into a singleplayer, combat-focused game: Godus Wars. It will be a free update to everyone who either Kickstarted the game or bought it previously. For everyone else it has appeared on Steam as an Early Access release.
Originally pitched as a massive multiplayer god game, with a world covered in tribes governed by different players who could fight or befriend each other, Godus never panned out. More than a year after release Molyneux's team hadn't managed to deliver on the original version of the game and its backers were pissed off. What was released was more like a free-to-play game for your phone than a spiritual successor to the Populous games Molyneux had made his name with.
Then came the interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun where John Walker asked Molyneux if he was a pathological liar. Molyneux had built himself a reputation of someone who over-promises and under-delivers. Following the interview Molyneux retreated from the public eye. He appointed a CEO to manage his studio and focused on fixing Godus with his team.
"After a couple of days I came up with this simple strategy: I would just be a coder and a designer, and I would talk to the press perhaps about something I had done and had released, but not talk to the press about what I am doing, because that is clearly not working, and redefine my relationship with those people," Molyneux told Eurogamer in a new interview.
Godus Wars still isn't what the Kickstarter promised but it sounds a lot more interesting than the game that's been hanging around on Steam since 2013. The engine of the original game has been reskewed into a singleplayer RTS with a card collecting mechanic. As you complete games you win cards that you can play in later games. Things like increasing your starting follower count or upping the range of your archers. It's supposed to add a tactical edge to the game.
Except, I've spent the last hour playing it and my early impressions are that this initial release is really dull.
When you start a map your villagers automatically go about building homes. Each home automatically generates belief periodically and then when you've amassed 500 belief you can combine your houses into a citadel and train a band of archers. Your villagers rebuild the homes that you collapsed into the citadel and you collect more belief, and then collapse more homes into the citadel to raise its level, and thenbuild more homes and, then collapse... and so on. It's a really simple central loop.
It's also really dull.
Sitting and watching houses accrue a resource is not interesting, yet that's what I spent the bulk of my time with Godus Wars doing. The only control you have over your villagers is by flattening terrain so they can choose to build houses there so it's difficult to get engaged with that side of things. And, because they get swept away every time you upgrade your citadel, you don't get attached to your town. It's also frustrating that when you clear the houses it means your belief production goes back to zero so it takes ages to get that ramped up back to a useful level. Which means more sitting and waiting.
It also doesn't make sense. It's not buildings that worship gods, its the people. So, unless you're crushing your followers into the mortar of your upgraded citadel, the people aren't dead, they've just moved into the city. Your belief rate shouldn't slow down. It should get faster and faster.
Once you've got a citadel and trained a warband you can send it over to the enemy village (that looks basically identical to yours) and start setting fire to the villagers' houses. The enemy AI will continuously build new bands of archers, so as fast as you kill them they'll be replaced. It doesn't cost any resources to train archers, but you're limited to how many you can amass by the level of your citadel.
Essentially the game boils down to repeatedly reaping your town to upgrade your citadel so you can put more mindless archers 0nto the battlefield than your enemy. You will very gradually push into the enemy town until you can destroy its citadel and then set about burning everything to the ground.
If you're lucky it will take you 20 minutes. 20 minutes of joyless, repetitive play.
Before you start a map there's a virtual tombola that spins and adds a modifier to your game. If you're really unlucky then you'll get the modifier that halves belief production. The only thing that means practically is that it takes twice as long to upgrade your citadel. Meaning it the game lasts twice as long. Godus Wars is so shallow that there is no way you can strategise around the problem of reduced belief. You and your enemy go through exactly the same motions just much more slowly.
This is only the first release of Godus Wars and there are a lot of simple things that could improve what's there already—faster belief production, better unit pathfinding, and more intuitive camera controls. What isn't evident in the game at all yet is tactical depth. I can't see how games of Godus Wars will ever play out differently because as a player I don't have the tools to play the game differently. That's something that will hopefully come in future updates.
By Julian Benson
Godus is back but in a different guise. Peter Molyneux's studio is diverting attention from Godus into a singleplayer, combat-focused game: Godus Wars. It will be a free update to everyone who either Kickstarted the game or bought it previously. For everyone else it has appeared on Steam as an Early Access release.
Originally pitched as a massive multiplayer god game, with a world covered in tribes governed by different players who could fight or befriend each other, Godus never panned out. More than a year after release Molyneux's team hadn't managed to deliver on the original version of the game and its backers were pissed off. What was released was more like a free-to-play game for your phone than a spiritual successor to the Populous games Molyneux had made his name with.
Then came the interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun where John Walker asked Molyneux if he was a pathological liar. Molyneux had built himself a reputation of someone who over-promises and under-delivers. Following the interview Molyneux retreated from the public eye. He appointed a CEO to manage his studio and focused on fixing Godus with his team.
"After a couple of days I came up with this simple strategy: I would just be a coder and a designer, and I would talk to the press perhaps about something I had done and had released, but not talk to the press about what I am doing, because that is clearly not working, and redefine my relationship with those people," Molyneux told Eurogamer in a new interview.
Godus Wars still isn't what the Kickstarter promised but it sounds a lot more interesting than the game that's been hanging around on Steam since 2013. The engine of the original game has been reskewed into a singleplayer RTS with a card collecting mechanic. As you complete games you win cards that you can play in later games. Things like increasing your starting follower count or upping the range of your archers. It's supposed to add a tactical edge to the game.
Except, I've spent the last hour playing it and my early impressions are that this initial release is really dull.
When you start a map your villagers automatically go about building homes. Each home automatically generates belief periodically and then when you've amassed 500 belief you can combine your houses into a citadel and train a band of archers. Your villagers rebuild the homes that you collapsed into the citadel and you collect more belief, and then collapse more homes into the citadel to raise its level, and thenbuild more homes and, then collapse... and so on. It's a really simple central loop.
It's also really dull.
Sitting and watching houses accrue a resource is not interesting, yet that's what I spent the bulk of my time with Godus Wars doing. The only control you have over your villagers is by flattening terrain so they can choose to build houses there so it's difficult to get engaged with that side of things. And, because they get swept away every time you upgrade your citadel, you don't get attached to your town. It's also frustrating that when you clear the houses it means your belief production goes back to zero so it takes ages to get that ramped up back to a useful level. Which means more sitting and waiting.
It also doesn't make sense. It's not buildings that worship gods, its the people. So, unless you're crushing your followers into the mortar of your upgraded citadel, the people aren't dead, they've just moved into the city. Your belief rate shouldn't slow down. It should get faster and faster.
Once you've got a citadel and trained a warband you can send it over to the enemy village (that looks basically identical to yours) and start setting fire to the villagers' houses. The enemy AI will continuously build new bands of archers, so as fast as you kill them they'll be replaced. It doesn't cost any resources to train archers, but you're limited to how many you can amass by the level of your citadel.
Essentially the game boils down to repeatedly reaping your town to upgrade your citadel so you can put more mindless archers 0nto the battlefield than your enemy. You will very gradually push into the enemy town until you can destroy its citadel and then set about burning everything to the ground.
If you're lucky it will take you 20 minutes. 20 minutes of joyless, repetitive play.
Before you start a map there's a virtual tombola that spins and adds a modifier to your game. If you're really unlucky then you'll get the modifier that halves belief production. The only thing that means practically is that it takes twice as long to upgrade your citadel. Meaning it the game lasts twice as long. Godus Wars is so shallow that there is no way you can strategise around the problem of reduced belief. You and your enemy go through exactly the same motions just much more slowly.
This is only the first release of Godus Wars and there are a lot of simple things that could improve what's there already—faster belief production, better unit pathfinding, and more intuitive camera controls. What isn't evident in the game at all yet is tactical depth. I can't see how games of Godus Wars will ever play out differently because as a player I don't have the tools to play the game differently. That's something that will hopefully come in future updates.
