Ive been an avid DotA player for a few years now and have of late become tired of the quitters, whiners, and noobs in DotA. So, when I heard that Demigod was inspired by DotA, my first thought was 'About time!' and I quickly preordered the game. Now that Ive finished a few rounds of the first beta of Demigod, I wanted to share my thoughts on Demigod for fellow betatester and non-betatesters.
There are cliff notes at the bottom for the lazy.
Gameplay:
At its heart Demigod keeps true to the basic of DotA gameplay; You control a single hero and have to smash your way past the enemy mobs and heroes, destroy their towers, and ultimately destroy their base. For the moment though, thats about where the similarities end. Demigod Beta 1 suffers from two crucial flaws: tiny map size and owerpowered heroes.
Map Size:
The game map is obscenely small and can be travelled across in less than it takes to get to your outer ring of towers in DotA. The tiny map size severly limits the gameplay possibilities. In DotA, you could talk with your teammates and organize ganks on one of the lanes then push down a tower and gain a tactical advantage. The small map size makes ganking nearly impossible and unrewarding and also completely destroys the ability to jungle. The tiny, unimaginative map size is one of the most dissapointing aspects of the game for me.
Heroes:
The heroes in Demigod start out strong, and just proceed to get rediculously stronger as time goes on. Mobs are never challenging to fight, even at the beginning and theres no need to worry about any caution when fighting them since they just easily get destroyed. Compare this to Dota where unwary players could somewhat easily get killed by mobs if they agrroed too many. Sure, in the end playing DotA, you could easily destroy waves of creeps and not take a scratch but that was only after slowly levelling up and gaining more powerful items. The rediculously overpowered hero abilities and heroes are the second most dissapointing aspect of Demigod. Overpowered heroes change the gameplay from a strategic smash-em-up into just a twitch fest to see who can drop the ability that will farm the mobs the fastest so that you can buy better items and kill more mobs more quickly ultimately culminating in a rush to the base where winner takes all. Initial starting hero strength in Demigod is roughly eqivalent to the average level 15 hero in Dota. Theres no challenge against mobs, and there never is. Huge HUGE flaw.
Items:
I havent fully explored all the different items since Ive only played three games so far, but from what Ive seen, the item selection is pretty decent. Its one of the areas that I only have a couple relatively small issues with. The first is the complete lack of item recipes which will probably show up in a later beta and the second is the channeling time on drinking potions. Drinking a potion should be instant or nearly so that it should be thought to be instant. There shouldnt be a 4 second loading bar in order to drink a potion.
Gold:
Gold is plentiful. You get gold passively from your mines and from killing mobs. The passive gold is fine and killing mobs for gold is fine, but when you can easily destroy a wave of creeps with a single ability pretty much right from the start, it gets a bit lame. In DotA, you had to carefully control your character and last-hit creeps in order to get any sort of real income. Also, you could bite into the enemy gold flow by denying your own creeps. Not so in Demigod, if you start to attack it, you will kill it, and get the gold. Too easy and too boring.
Levelling:
Levelling is way too quick. Perhaps Im wierd, but the best DotA games to me are the 45-90 minute games where I slowly level up, become more powereful, work my way across the map ganking if theres a nice target, organize a couple rushes into their base, destroy the enemy barracks, and fight my way inside and then claim victory by destroying the enemy Throne(I dont play Scourge). In Demigod, all thats needed to win is to stay out, not die, kill the mob waves that come your way, grab a few nice items, farm some more, wait till level 15 or so, then own some towers, walk in, and win. B-o-r-i-n-g. Give me a challenge and a longer, harder game.
Performance:
I have an Opteron 165 @ 2.4Ghz with 2GB of RAM and a 4870 at stock speeds with Catalyst 8.8 drivers running Windows XP Pro. Demigod is set to all high settings with 4x AA and vsync is off. Throughout the three rounds Ive played so far my average FPS has ranged between 30-60 average FPS, with drops down to 15 FPS or so when shopping. Im not complaining, Im not praising, Im just reporting. Its a beta, and poor performance is too be expected while the bugs are debugged and the game is optimized. Ive yet to get any crashes.
Final Notes:
I know that some of you are thinking, BUT DEMIGOD ISNT DOTA LOL. Thats fine and all, but from what Ive seen of the forums, the majority of folks that are interested in Demigod chose to preorder Demigod because of DotA. You cant argue with DotA's success. Why try to redesign a game and improve on it when theres already a wildly successful model that works beautifully and draws massive amounts of players...all in a 3MB custom map file for a game that came out in 2001. Change the game however you want, do whatever you want, but in the end the DotA model works. Use it. Abuse it. Give us DotA with a working ban system, better graphics, and more maps and youll please many people.
Cliff notes for the lazy:
-map is way too small, cannot gank or strategize attacks
-heroes are way too strong, mobs are never a challenge
-lack of recipes...nuff said
-drinking potions is a channeling action
-uber powerful heroes make gold too easy to get
-no need to last hit since heroes overpowered
-no way to deny since heroes overpowered
-levelling is too fast and easy
