I know that this is now an "old" game, and that this is a game that turned out to be fiasco. I wonder if anyone actually liked it?
In another thread we talked how Startdock has a game division to do what is their passion - games. We know that both GalCiv and (in a lesser degree) SOSE were a success.
Shortly after that Demigod came around. The bulk of Demigod was not produced by Stardock, it was done by Ironclad, but Stardock published the game, and I think was responsible for the game infrastructure. Shortly after the game launch it received devastating reviews, mainly due to the fact that single player was not the focus of the game and multi-player didn't work well, it was almost impossible to connect for more then 2 players. This was a real shame, because unlike Elemental, I liked Demigod a lot. I still think that Demigod had a lot of potential and could have been a famous game, should they executed it correctly. Who knows, may be if it filled the niche the would be no League of Legends... Anyway, they explained this failure, by the fact that they didn't know that for a multi-player game to work successfully one need to get a decent network engine, or otherwise face doom. Their multi-player model was peer-to-peer without central server, and required each player to be connected to each other player, which in practice didn't work too well.
So this is about Demigod. Then the Elemental development were in full gear. And Brad was talking how he would like to make sure, that something like what happened to Dimigod does not happen here. But the game saw the same fate. This time this was not network engine. This was graphics engine. They developed it in-house and then they realised that it was not impossible to them to test in on the whole range of hardware (all the graphic cards), that users have.
In both case Demigod and Elemental, the games were made stable eventually. But while with Demigod I felt that it was a great game that could not reach its full potential, with Elemental it looked more or less as Civilization clone for me. They did try to bring some fresh ideas to the game, but somehow the game didn't feel like something new and exiting, on the opposite, it felt like something I played before many times.
It's funny how some games give you this feeling and some do not. For example Hellgate : London should have felt like something I'd played before, yet it did not. It was fun while it lasted.
