General Godus discussion

It's kind of funny, I actually prefer Stonehearth over Timber and Stone because there's a slight difference in the art style and character models that makes them more appealing to me. I've not dug into Timber and Stone's features though to see if it shares some of the other features I like (e.g. easy/streamlined custom building construction). There are loads of cool creative games emerging that look to have or aim to have more polish that it's pretty great.

Decided to write an informal review of Godus as-is over on Steam.

PC
Avoid. (Out of: Consider on sale, get it ASAP.)

Despite a pleasant, lighthearted artistic style, the game quickly degenerates into a wait or repeat lemmings puzzle fest. The game steadfastly refuses to generate belief quickly or frequently enough to allow you to enact even the simplest acts of divine power, such as shaping the land or leashing (commanding followers to go to certain points) your followers. Each advance for your civilization through the timeline, which consists of cards that must be unlocked either through stickers (get to this later), raw population or number of farms/mines you have, taunts you with new features while denying their use by the aforementioned belief problems or other resource problems.

The resource system in itself becomes a joke, as the stickers require you to play scavenger hunt with your world (often expending belief to uncover the chests containing them) or play lemmings on the side. The population demands for unlocks might seem to encourage using the larger abodes that can hold more, but in practice, constructing them takes far longer (even with multiple followers building them) and the benefit of more belief is countered by also taking far longer than smaller abodes to generate. Similarly, larger farms or mines might seem like an effective way to quickly unlock cards associated with these resources, however not only do their workers take long periods to be generated, the size of these farms/mines doesn't even matter.

What's more, the mines' generated resources quickly lose all relevance after all the beacons of expansion (used to extend your influence across the world, which allows you to interact with it) have been repaired. Amusingly, the farms' generated resources (wheat) would be without all relevance from the beginning, had they not arbitrarily decided that unlocking farming settlements would prohibit abode construction without sufficient wheat. Which, it should be noted, is contrary to their originally being free prior to this unlock.

As stated earlier, potentially compelling features merely serve to taunt you with their arbitrarily prohibitive resource implementations. Cards unlocked solely through stickers require you to go on scavenger hunts, hoping chests will contain the right stickers to go with your desired upgrade/unlock or play divine lemmings. Cards unlocked through population require you to tediously sculpt the world to build smaller, more quickly built abodes or steamroll it for much larger, more slowly built abodes, the former of which generates less belief but faster and the latter generates more belief but slower. Cards unlocked through farms or mines require you to wait long periods for their specialized workers to be produced, and then also encourage similar behavior to abode construction, except without the benefit of the size of the farms/mines contributing to a card's unlock or of the excess resources generated (since as noted, they rapidly become irrelevant or arbitrarily relevant).

With such an inconvenient resource system framing all the other systems in the game, I simply cannot recommend this game on PC. It reeks of wanting your attention, doing only the most superficial service to this end through the art style, and little else to deserve it. Its systems all appear underdeveloped and speak to the game's immaturity, thinking it can keep you around through whining incessantly with all its prohibitive resource costs and construction/production durations, seeming to refuse to recognize that this is not the sort of friend I would like to play with nor the kind of game I had hoped for.

Mobile
Avoid.

While mobile can provide captivating game experiences, Godus is at the heart of those that seem content to disprove this time and time again. Whereas the inconvenient resource system in the PC version at first may simply seem underdeveloped and poorly thought out, at home, this resource system becomes brutally transparent. The restrictive costs and production durations, the arbitrary introduction of resources, it all feeds back into the underlying desire for a user's money as these are all interlinked with the game's microtransactions. Yes, despite the success of such games as Monolith Valley, Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, The Room 1 & 2, and Republique, Godus decides to go the low road for ease of access to more users.

Despite the ambitious goal of introducing more people unfamiliar with games to games like Godus being laudable, in its existing form, it does nothing to deserve their attention or draw them into more robust games. By choosing to go free to play, the game immediately coats itself in the muck of other such titles, and instead of inviting players' attention, it encourages their skepticism. When it introduces its necessary sign-in and badgers them with its microtransaction adverts whenever nearly any resource (excluding population) runs low, it simply serves to justify their skepticism rather than undermine it. As such, it becomes nothing more than an also-ran amongst mobile games, free to play ones especially, and completely fumbles the potential to attract the mobile audience to what the rest of gaming has to entail.

With this being the case, the mobile version of Godus is as incapable of recommendation as its PC version, which unfortunately does next to nothing to distinguish itself from the mobile version, except add a price tag in place of multiple ones.

One thing I seriously question is why release the game on mobile when they did? Surely this was because they desperately needed the money. Otherwise they would have been better off developing more content before the launch. The game is seriously devoid of content right now because all you do is flatten, expand, wait, flatten, expand, wait. Except there is more waiting. The astari are really the only game element and while the concept is right the implementation is severely off. The point I'm at feels very much like the end of 1.3.

Remember when people (myself included) were saying that Godus performing poorly isn't just giving a bad name to 22cans, but is having repercussions throughout the early access model? Similar as to how titles such as Towns and recently Spacebase DF-9 being "released" has lasting repercussions throughout?

It seems that a number of developers have responded to this, reflecting the same concerns and trying to reduce the worry by the consumers that just because some developers can't deal with the model. That that doesn't mean the model is necessarily a failure.
Devs react to Spacebase DF-9 release: "Early Access is not an 'alternative' development



It would seem that the main problem certain developers are running into is counting their chickens before the eggs are hatched. They take the initial profit margins, base their expenditures on that and start spending like crazy.
They also overlook the need to deliver results, planning for the long haul with all kinds of awesome features they would like to add.
Resulting in a "current version" that is unplayable and thus resulting in a massive drop in sales.

Its increasingly obvious that anyone who wants to work with the Early Access model not only needs to plan their development accordingly so that they can continually have a playable version of their game available and have a consistent stream of communications and results streaming out.
But on top of that, that the developers need to pace their flow of money to cover those periods where income is reduced.
Big updates often directly result in a boost in sales, but a dry spell in terms of updates results in a drop in sales and thus drop in income.
Looking ahead to a period of no updates because you're working on something big? Better plan on setting some money aside to bridge that gap!


Really now? Using a smaller team and maximizing the potential of each individual member results in less expenses overall compared to using a much larger team with specialized roles? Who would have imagined...

22cans - learn from these folks. Some of them may be years or decades younger to "the great Peter Molyneux", but they atleast have their business and financial sides in order.

You're hardly alone in that hardly.
I've seen tons of people that would've considered backing an early access or crowdfunded title before, but who know hold back because of the failures such as Godus or any of the other ones.

Afterall, why pay and run the risk of being shafted, if you can wait 6~12 months and not only reduce/remove the risk - but get a better deal to boot!

Eh they should if they were in it for the long haul - but as with any business, the ones at the top are merely in it to count the profit margins.
They don't care what they create, if one market or well runs dry they simply look for a new one.

Sustainability? Sounds like work... Sounds expensive...
Simply explore new markets, expand into them, exploit untill there's nothing left to profit from and exterminate it so that others can't make money off of the remains. Capitalism at its finest, the pinacle of the imperialist society. Only instead of land, its all about the money.

Think is its insulting to lemmings (both the myth/misconception and the computer game) to refer to the omnishambles of voyages as divine lemmings. Our followers are much less capable than lemmings. It needs it own groundbreaking reference, so that the next turkey is then an homage to Voyages of Godass.

EA   is nothing else  in the beginnin you pay much less  when the game got released it cost more

Weyland cards? Are we going to see an alien invasion in the future of Godus? ;p

Weyland-Yutani and all that.