sweet, so what we see, is only the beginning... (scary, twilight zone music plays)

Excellent post I loved it

Well like I said in the thread about this article posted a few days ago..   :

   "As we went through each Demigod, we came up with ideas that would make that Demigod play more uniquely. Examples included (depending on the Demigod in question), sacrificing speed for toughness, increasing money received from mines, decreasing cool down times on spells, increasing XP gained from killing creeps, increasing damage done to structures, increases toughness of nearby minions, and so on.

    When we put together our first list, we quickly realized that just from the skills, you could make one Rook play quite differently from another rook and that was before we even started messing with items and equipment."

   This sounds okay, on paper.  But in practice, it'll be the term i've liked to use a lot that the balance will be "cracked".

   With skills so simple, anyone who knows how to type numbers, *'s, +'s, /'s, and ()'s into google and copy the numbers into a .txt file can pretty easily calculate what skills are the best.

   It's like in Diablo2. The skills have neat effects and function and all (I loveeee frozen orb! Going out. spinning around shooting out ice circles in a circle around it!) but.. everyone knows what the best combinations of skills and equip in that game is.  It's very simple math.
In DotA theres a certain skill you get first, item you get first, and recipe you get first for each character.

   You look at Guild Wars though, and a group of people can have completely different opinions on whether a skill is good or not, whether a build is good or not, whether a combination of builds together is good or not, and they can argue with each other about it endlessly and never agree.  The skills have so much depth, there are so many factors that change how they perform, they are different in some situations instead of others, and what your allies  are using makes a huge difference on whether your build is good or not.
   GW has like 900 skills, but you can only use 8 of them, so it's not like it has all this deep balancing justbecause of the high level of skills.  It's because the skills work more like the abilities in a card game like Magic:The Gathering more than they work like in a traditional RPG.

   Just because you ALLOW people to play differently, and give them different options, doesn't mean they WILL.
   I think asking the question "What sort of skills can we put on this Demigod" isn't as important as the question of how to get people to actually use the different variaty of skills and not all use the same ones every time they play.

    It's like in FA you might have to play your favorite race differently depending on who you are up against, and not do the same exact build orders each game.

    But in this case instead of build orders you have the skills you pick.

I posted this in the forum for everyone on the 11th.  Thanks for placing it on the main page.  Anyone want to give me a karma boost for finding this on the 11th?

click on the thumbs up beside the report botton

Innociv is right for the most part.  However I think its debatable if Demigod could ever have the depth of guild wars.  Guild Wars has depth but it is also a very complicated game.  There is such a backlash in the Demigod community about anything being complicated I doubt we'll ever see anything on the Guild Wars level.  This isn't to say Demigod won't be fun or competitive in its own right it is just an observation I made.

To me, its like the difference between starcraft and nearly every othe RTS I've played including C&C, SupCom, DOW, Dune (way back when), Sins, etc. 

In starcraft, every race is very unique.  Sure you may say the races have unique things about them in the other RTS, but the unit functions the same in the same category across the board.  There are slight differences (maybe one race has more hit points, maybe one has more damage, maybe 1 is faster), but they serve the same purpose and are countered about the same way.  It makes balancing the game much easier.  Race 1 has unit A, B, and C.  Well lets makes sure Race 2 has A, B, and C and we'll just tweak the numbers and models to make them different.  That way Race 1 and Race 2 are different, but have nearly equal options available and thus are balanced.

This is not the case with starcraft.  Sure, there are units available to each race at different tiers, but they are very unique from each other.  A zealot compared to a zergling compared to a marine.  Range, cost, health, damage, are all very different but they are all fairly balanced.  This means you play each race very differently.  Each race has different tactics and overall strategies. 

The point is, from what we've seen of beta 1 (which we all know is just a glimpse), Demigod is more like a C&C, SupCom, or Sins then a starcraft.  There is some uniqueness in each demigod, but they're all pretty vanilla.  They all have a stun skill, they all have a high damage skill (nuke), they all have an AOE nuke, they all move about the same speed, and really all play pretty similarly. 

Yes, I know they have some differential such as the Rooks ability to put down a tower, or eat buildings.  Those are great examples of distinguishing him.  Also, the torch bearer has his fire mode which is a nice way to make him unique.  Regulus has good passives (range, cripple) and mines, but theres not enough differential between each of the heroes.  I'm not talking about balance which will tweak the numbers (cooldown, duration, damage, cost, etc), but about the actual skills.

Dota is more like a starcraft.  Sure, with so many heroes some start to play very similar (see lion vs Luna or Slaardar vs Centaur), but there is pretty good distinction of play style between the different types (ranged int, ranged dex, melee str, melee dex, melee int).  Throw in a few very unique skills and the game has many flavors to choose from.

This is all based on Beta 1.  Generals are still to be added, more maps, more content, more tweaks will surely come.  But, just looking at the 3 available demi's, models and animations aside, they are too similar at this point.  Just my opinion.

Since the Beta 1 build is not being tested specifically for Demigod skills, etc, I really think it is very premature to be making any judgements regarding the fun factor and how this game plays as compared to RELEASED games.  I do not have the hx of playing all of these others games that many others here obvisously have but I can't help think that comparing this game to specific game mechanics in others games is not necessarily helpful.  If certain game mechanics seem to work, by all means emulate them to a point (i.e - no one will design a new car with tank treads since 4 wheels work so well already) but I think we will have ample opportinities to discuss game balancing and mechanics in the next phases of the beta testing.  I, for one, just can't make any judgements until I see more.  Perhaps it is just my inexperience speaking.

the problem is that will there be more skills? or just a different way to BUILD UP to a full hero?

In DotA there are several builds but in the end you end up with all the skills anyways.
Hopefully thats not what they mean, cause if it is then a limited amount of heroes does NOT mean an unlimited amount of gameplay styles.