Demigod is a beautiful, beautiful game. It was even made off of the foolproof blueprint of DotA.

The problem is, under the hood Demigod is made of duck tape, paper clips, and used chewing gum.

Nothing works as intended in the Demigod source code.

The game crashes consistently. 

P2P connections are mysteriously flawed, and in-game lobbies crash every other time someone joins.

There is a lack of characters to choose from, and the current ones are not even close to balanced.

There are only three maps that seem to be made by rational human beings, the rest have extremely obvious flaws that make them hard to play on.

Ultimately two things really conspired against Demigod.

1. The launch was brutal. It's been covered in a few places just what went wrong here, but the short version is that connectivity was a mess. For a predominatly single player game (like say Civ) that's annoying but not the end of the world, but Demigod is a multplayer focused game.

First of all Gamestop broke the street date, so a pirate version was out even faster then usual. That pirate version was connecting to the servers (in numbers far higher then paid for versions) looking for updates, which brought down some servers. They got that fixed, but then the real ugliness reared its head: player connectivity also didn't work very well. I for example couldn't play at all the first week it was out, and could only play on Hamachi (emulating LAN) for another week after that.

Technical details are also elsewhere, but the peer to peer code along with the NAT traversal stuff didn't really work right at launch. Getting into a game where everybody could talk to everybody was all but impossible for large games, and not easy for small games. Many people just couldn't play at all (like me). Those who could wound up using things like Hamachi and Gameranger (recommended by Stardock at one point) to get around the problems.

This was eventually cleaned up due to a herculean effort on Stardock's part, but by then the damage was done. The community was split into several smaller communities, and many people were just fed up.

2. The game was too pretty. That might sound strange, but it's true. It was a ton of work to add content to the game. The levels in particular didn't use a conventional map editor, they used some crazy 3d software that nobody has. So, user created maps were non-existant. GPG isn't exactly known for awesome post-release support, and they didn't put out much new content. I'm not sure if any new maps came out. They did put out a couple new Demigods eventually, but it took forever.

DotA itself was reincarnated on at least one occasion, and got updates and things changed. Demigod was really static.

IMO a game without the super pretty 3d maps that allowed people to actually create custom maps would have done better. Ditto with GPG adding new Demigods faster.

At the end of the day, the game was pretty fun... but the beta test and internal QA somehow missed MASSIVE connectivity problems (to be fair, it's pretty hard for internal QA to duplicate exactly what happened in a test lab). After that GPG's support was lacking. On the whole, I've got a very negative opinion of GPG and pretty much won't buy anything they put out until its on the discount rack and been patched to the point of working.

I couldn't agree more Tridus.

This thread is Unadulterated Truth.

While what most of what has been posted here is true...

I don't see alot of the people here who are commenting on balance and map viability actually playing Demigod consistently.

And as Hedgie is saying, DG is balanced.

My 2 cents

I recall a few months back some post on GPG forums, iirc, about SD approving another patch to the game. Looking forward to it.  Unless it was just rumours and lies.

I liked the single player game quite a bit and still periodically fire it up, so if there is going to be another update to the game, I'm all for it.  As for MP, I think my fellow players think the greatest enjoyment from the game is when you get to call the other players "idiot" or "fucking n00b".  At least that was my experience when I gave it a go a few times during the first season after launch.

Above is all true. Sadly. My experience with the game:

Shortly after I bought it I loved it. Played a few single-player games and was enthralled with it. Playing single-player was a real joy. But I knew that online was where the real fun would be. And it was for a brief period of time. Never really had any bad experiences. Hooked up with a couple of guys who were good at the game and learned a lot. Had the most fun in games where there was real competition between the teams, with no name calling or taunts. Just 6 to 8 folks having fun creaming each other in a sportsmanlike manner. Went through quite a few attempts at getting into games because of connection issues, but I had patience with it (in the custom games anyways).

However, I found frustration in waiting 30 minutes to get into a Pantheon game and so after a couple of attempts never tried it again. Then there were endless patching woes and complaints about those patches. Then I got into some games where the hoster just wanted to up his precious 'stats' so he would exploit the disconnect bug thingy which gave him a win and everyone else a loss; even though the game was up for only 5 minutes. It seemed like the multi-player community was just going to pot (with the exception of some good (patient/kind/helpful) individuals).

I think what really broke my back over the game was the patch that tried to introduce the Demon Assassin and Occulus into the game. If I remember right there were a lot of hoops you had to jump through in order for them to even show up in your game and play them. Something about logging into multiplayer, creating a game, then restarting your client, and then you could play them. There were a few different suggestions to get them to work and none of them worked for me. Later, much later, I went back to play a single-player game and (after a patch) saw that they were now working. I didn't quit the game ONLY because of that issue but that's what finally did me in. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to play something in a patch. Especially, when after jumping through those hoops, it still wouldn't work.

There is still merit in the game. It is a quality game taken by itself. The absolute BEST experience with it is playing it with friends. Meaning, playing at a LAN party or online where you know everybody . No AI involved.

Next best, IMO is single-player. Crank the AI difficulty up and you will have a hard time of it, especially since you have AI teammates and they make some dumb decisions (although they have gotten better with patching). It's possible that if a person only ever plays single-player and never gets into a multi-player game (where they see how the game SHOULD be played) then they would have IMMENSE enjoyment out of it (I envy those people). That's one of the problems: MULTIPLAYER REVEALS HOW DUMB THE AI IS. If you never play multi-player you're blissfully ignorant at how dumb the AI is.

Next best would be to find a patient/helpful player online that you can buddy up with from time to time, learn the game, and play it multi-player custom games. Just watch out for stat-whores, foul-mouthed oppenents that like to berate you, and those who try to exploit bugs. Sadly, from what I can tell (and I haven't been on in quite a while to even check), the multi-player community is shrinking to near nothing.

Which means that the item balance needs help.

In a game with so many items - if only 10-15 are good, that's a problem.

The fact 10 or 15 are so much better than the rest seems to say the others are too week (so not balanced).

Imagine if Elemental has only 5 techs that are worth something - or like people are/were saying archers are overpowered.

Should we pretend the rest doesn't exist?

If I have to pretend things don't exist in order to achieve balance, imo, that means the balance is off.

No kidding. Once my friends and I figured out the game, I was like "geez, the AI is awful" and set about to try to make it better through modding.

It's better - but it still makes silly mistakes and has weak recognition of threat/DG health, etc

I'd already stopped playing by then, but I read about that. A friend of mine patched to try and play as the new people, found they weren't included in the patch, and got really confused.

I don't understand what they were thinking with that process.

The items in the "good" subset are balanced. Because you can only have a very limited amount of items, it doesn't matter that much since you cannot simply equip every item you want (like in Elemental). There is poor item _variety_ in Demigod. There is excellent balance.

The ONLY underwhelming character is DA. Reg may struggle in 2v2 or 1v1 or 3v3 but he's fine for 4v4. Queen is the opposite, doing better in 2v2s than larger game modes. Queen is T1 on Prison, just like Sedna is lolirific on Levi. This game is fantastically balanced, and the only real flaws are metagaming flaws.

Well, if one of your biggest issues was the idiots on mp, you should get on vent (that is if you still want to play) as of now we have nightly games of DG and people are actually, dare I say it, polite?