22Cans - fully abandoning non-casual gamers, or ambiguity

You can't bait a casual with nostalgia by mentioning old games (they wouldn't be casuals if they played them) and casuals are unlikely to support a kickstarter campaign.

The texts on kickstarter were deceiving advertisement aimed at core gamers.

The game is not. Only the casualest of the casuals will invest bigger amounts of money into a game that is mantained with relatively low effort. It's steady income.

They never intended to create a game for pc gamers, they just needed someone to finance their cashcow.

julians It does read like many of our worst fears, no?

But the positive way of putting it is maybe this is how they are positioning Godus for casual players. Godus for core players is a totally different speech.

To Danjal's point on the Steam thread, though -- not sure if such a balancing act is possible or if it would be remotely fun.

rubgish - I think that they were all deep for their time. 

Populous was the first game where you use indirect action (raising/lowering land, etc) to have the simulation change the behavior of your followers. 

B&W gave you the opportunity to be either evil or good, and the two paths had different means of success

Dungeon Keeper threw the 'dungeon' tropes on their head and allowed the player to be evil. The mechanics weren't particularly unique, but it was the first time I can recall being able to play the other side. And it was done in a humorous, sympathetic fashion.

Sure, today we expect more from our games. But, remember, populous was produced in 1989. when people were still pretty keen on minesweeper's engrossing play. 

I just don't find the game FUN at all. Am I crazy for that?

I failed in my attempt to not incite the Steam board. My self-restraint was insufficient.razz, it was that post that pushed past my 'I can hold off on a response until I see the roadmap' threshold. /sigh

Qetesh I have found Godus to be decreasingly entertaining since the initial Steam build. The "added features" all seem unfun to me.

But I do get a lot of chuckles out of trying to communicate with 22Cans (and I still hold out hope that I might positively influence development. But it is the same sort of hope I have for when the expected jackpot of a lottery exceeds the opportunity cost of a ticket. Sure, I get one, and I dream a little, but I know full well that nothing will change tomorrow.) No, I do not mean that I enjoy torturing Monkeythumbz or Matthew Allen, I truly think that these guys are doing the best they can with what they have... but it is like being press secretary for Marion Barry (former DC mayor who did time for a cocaine scandal, was reelected to city council, and is known for making mistakes that make PM seem positively self-controlled and transparent), a seemingly impossible job.

Alas poor Sisyphus, I knew him well, Horatio.

Did minesweeper even exist back then? At that time I was hardcore into my Commodore Amiga 500 and I think my parents' PC was still an XT. Did it even have Windows? I don't remember.

Microsoft Minesweeper was released as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack in 1990 and became standard on windows with 3.1 in '92.

Mined-out was an early version of the game-type, released for the Sinclair Spectrum in '83. In '89, a PC didn't necessarily have windows. By the release of 3.1 in '92, I believe that Windows was fairly common on new PCs (but this is idle speculation on my part).

Lord Ba'al, Lots of games have aggravation. Going back even further, one of the selling points for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was probably aggravation. I don't think I ever got off the Heart of Gold, because I could never figure out the magic words that the developer wanted me to use. But it was sure fun.

22Cans brings aggravation to the table, where it seems as though the right hand isn't talking to the left hand, so we have different stories being told to other developers than are being told to the community of people who purchased the title -- stories that would clearly have influenced our purchase decisions.

Godus itself, though? It doesn't really do anything. Kind of boring. Which is okay in an alpha game. If there are plans for features that might be entertaining. But did they tell the NZ iOS players that this was an alpha game? Apple takes its walled garden far more seriously than Steam, and deceit there... well... That can get litigious or at least financially crippling rather fast.

Yes and no. I'd say that if you take the overall picture they were pretty complex even though the single parts of them were really simple. Except maybe for Populous but don't forget the limitations of that time, its the oldest of these games after all.

In black and white you could solve quests in multiple ways. Almost always there were at least a good and evil solution but often times there was also a neutral solution, sometimes there were more then 3 ways to solve a quest and each way lead to follow up quests and different rewards. That gave the game quite a lot of replay value.

The creature you had was also a quite complex artificial intelligence that you could teach complex orders if you were willing to invest the time (you didn't had to bother with your creature, but you could. If you search the internet there are multiple analysis of the brain of the creature which is fairly complex).


Dungeon Keeper I was also quite unique and complex. Yes, the number of rooms were limited but it wasn't like other strategy games in which you build a barrack and recruited soldiers, you had to fulfill specific conditions. For example rooms had to be in a specific size or order to lure specific creatures into your dungeon. Every room also had a function beside attracting creatures (training, creating traps, research, torture to convert heroes, store) as opposed to a barracks in age of empires for example. Creatures also acted relatively autonomous, for example they went to training on their own (instead of just investing money to level up your creatures). Thats actually more complex than most strategy games are today are.

Yes, parts of these games were relatively simple. For example to fight you usually just dropped all your creatures next to the heroes in DK and the city building part of black and white 1 was quite simple. But they gave you freedom and room to experiment, multiple ways to approach the game and there was a lot to explore (for example finding out how sacrifices work in dungeon keeper (some of them even had a negative effect) and all the ways you could solve quests in B&W).

Different players would approach and play the games differently. Some would focus on the creature in black and white, others would ignore it. Some would build one big city which influence would reach the whole map, others would focus equally on all cities. You could kill everyone in a city and just taking over it by placing some of your own followers in it. It was even possible to create a undead city using a easter egg. The layout of a dungeon would differ greatly between different players while each one would have different focus and strategy. In Godus instead almost everyone end up with a flat world destroying anything that was once unique in that world.

Godus has nothing like that and it doesn't give you any form of freedom to approach things differently.

Isn't that the default avatar?

So are we suggesting the new hubworld will be called 'Ambiguity'?

I'm pretty sure, that the Pony is not my Avatar.

My Avatar is the lovely Etna from Disgaea!

Edit: Maybe a strangely cached thumbnail?