Greetings!

Tomorrow February 19th we plan to release beta 3 of Demigod.

Before I discuss what to expect, let's walk through where we've been so far.

BETA 1: September 2008.

The first beta focused purely on the engine. In many respects, you could have called it an alpha. It was designed to get a scope of the performance, test out the engine features (fog of war, particle effects, shaders, Demigod models, etc.).

It was explicitly designed NOT to be fun.

BETA 2: December 2008 (intended for November but we ran late).

This second beta focused on getting the Internet connectivity set up. It was not designed (or expected) to be bullet proof but rather to provide us with data. Similarly, while the game wasn't supposed to be fun at this stage, we took in beta feedback and user experiences with connectivity to focus on beta 3.

BETA 3: February 2009

So now we're in the meat of it.  The game mechanics are pretty much set at this stage.  This is where we look at balance.  Players are welcome to suggest anything they want but obviously, anything that's a major game changer would have to wait for a future update or expansion pack.

Beta 3 will have the Pantheon persistent universe tournmanet in it.  Right now, it's forces of light vs. forces of darkness (two factions) each with its own set of Demigods.

We are open to ideas on the pantheon and what other tournaments you guys would like to see in the Pantheon and how you would imagine them working.

So how well will the Pantheon work in beta 3? The answer is not well. It is going to take us a bit of time to tweak the logic in setting up pantheon games.  

Connectivity in skirmish (custom games) should be massively better than Beta 2D but still no where near where it'll be in the final game.

The Pantheon stuff should work just not terribly well.  Between now and release we'll be improving on this dramatically as we collect more data.

The main point of Beta 3 is to test out the architecture, make bug fixes, refinements, and balance the game.

BETA 3 EXPERIENCE NOTES:

It needs to be noted that for Beta 3 that we got the tournament stuff in by the skin of our teeth for this beta. So we don't expect it to work very well in beta 3.  We're going to be taknig in a lot of data and then release beta 3A hopefully next week.