Yesterday, a friend and I tried for no less than forty minutes to play Demigod online together. Let me tell all of you how this went. And as a fun game, see if you can count the number issues the game has!
We started trying to play, having the usual P2P issues we've suffered since beta. Great idea by the way, going with P2P over server-client. I can't get over how terrible of a call that was. Anyway, we started looking for a game even though we knew Favor, one of the key elements of the game and one of our favorite things about Demigod, had somehow broken. We were going through the standard "find a game and hope we both join in less than ten minutes" retardedness when something completely new happened! My friend's game crashed! "Unhandled Application Error" it said, or something to that effect. Boy was that unexpected. Oh well, we thought, the game has been freezing for no reason since the beta, so this is really a step in the right direction since I don't have to Ctrl+Alt+Del anymore. So I leave the "connection" and wait for him to restart the game. When he gets to the Internet sign-in part, it tells him that his username/password is wrong. That's odd since he told the game to save his password and it hasn't changed. He spends about five minutes trying to solve the issue before we consult all-knowing Google, and find out that the issue can be solved by uninstalling and re-installing Impulse. Tedious, for sure, especially since neither of us actually use Impulse to run the game. In fact, both of us disable the application completely. Why would the game need anything to do with Impulse, we wonder? Oh well, time to search for a game!
We're back on a connection screen a little later. We've been through a few because one of us will actually get in a lobby, but the other will get one of a number of errors. Sometimes they'll say the host has abandoned the lobby when he has not, or say we've been kicked from the game we were never in, and of course the good ol' NAT error. Finally we're trying to join yet another game when I, too, get the Unhandled Application error, and can't log in. Great.
I reinstall and get in and we begin the search anew. We're getting all the great connection errors and everything. Finally my friend's game gets the sweet Unhandled error, his password doesn't work, and we're done for the night.
The next night, we try again. This time, my friend's game keeps locking up whenever he tries to hit the Internet button. We can't even get to search for games together!
This game has me addicted. I enjoy playing it a lot. But I'm seriously about to demand a refund. I want to be able to play online with my friends, and most of them can't even get the game to not have graphical lag, even on the lowest settings, when their systems meet or exceed every recommended stat for the game. It's ridiculous.
This game needs serious work. I'm a notorious pirate, but I bought this game even before it was legally supposed to be released (thanks, GameStop!). To me, it's unbelievable that such a popular game would have so many problems after its release. I just want my working game, or my forty dollars back. What will it be?