First impressions on Beta 2 - It's good, polish needed though.

Okay!

I  finally managed to play a little with the arrival of Beta 2 and I'd like to share with you guys my initial impressions, which unfortunately, aren't all overly positive.

In short, If you make the single-player awesome, i'll definitely think I will have gotten my money's worth, but as for multiplayer, a serious lack of depth means I, and probably a lot of others, will tire of it very quickly - Which in turns means that you will have a lot of difficulty in getting that critical mass of online players that the game is going to need in order to be a multiplayer success (which would, in turn, bring more players, make them install impulse, show devs what an awesome platform it is for online play and, of course, profit!)

Main strengths imho:
- Graphics, awesome, nothing to say here, just plain awesomely gorgeous, this will make players look at the box and play a while.
- The zoom, I had a bad feeling about this initially, but you guys managed to pull it off superbly - I dont miss the lack of minimap panning at all!  Slickest fog of war ever!
- No bugs!  My Vista64 system hasn't crashed yet, and, considering the amount of games that bail on me, kudos!  Of course, due to the lack of players, I have played mostly against AIs, but still, very nice.

Sore points:
- Lack of variety, lack of depth:  Do you see any recent fighter come out with 8 characters? no.  *maybe* they are more versatile (though, see below) but any aos has somewhat of an RPG component to it.  Your character (DG in this case), at least until you've plumbed the depths of the game and have become hyper detached and competitive, is also, in some way, your alter-ego.  Variety and customizability and the potential for uniqueness for a give player in a game will make or break Demigod imho, you need to take it seriously and if making a whole slew of new heroes costs (understandably) too much, find workarounds, we'll understand.
- Unfriendly interface:  Waypoints, attack-move, hold positions, these are aboslutely necessary, though I hope you just didn't have time to implement them yet.  A key to see health bars would be appreciated to, and since sides are somewhat hard to distinguing, you might think about adding, while you press it, a little less subtle tint of the team's color on the creeps/DGs.
- l33tness factor missing:  There's not enough skill involved, plain and simple. Teamplay is always cool, and tying, for instance, citadel upgrades to flag control is a sound idea.  But don't forget to also reward individual accomplishments.  Some people play, not to get the feeling of being in a succesful team, but to buildup their guy, school some noobs and play well - It may not be an ideal world, but I you want to hook a whole lot of people, don't reward only team accomplishments.

Some specific things I'd love to see fixed:
- Hide the password field when logging in.
- Allow us to use TAB to navigate fields (like login for instance)
- Ability to set waypoints.
- Abilities that dont reset orders. (for instance if i right-click on a guy, then use ooze, it will cancel my orders).
- A way to attack move, hold position etc.
- Put game messages (hero has revived etc) in a different part of the screen to allow the player to easily filter them - top right, and in a different color would be a good idea.
- When i select an enemy/friendly DG, i'd like to have an idea of, at least, what equipment he has.  If i plan to go in melee and hes built to cripple me and making me unable to escape, i'd like to have an idea beforehand.

- The fadeout effect on the health/mana bars is cute, imho, but hurts functionality.  If some guy is doing a lot more damage than i expected, or if I just missed a regulus sniping me, I want to know right now by seeing my bar, not in half a second, at which point it might be too late.

Some suggestions:
- Make some arenas that allow for some more juking, ganking and wandering around, there's practically no way to be sneaky as of now.
- You've said yourself that you plan on revising the gold system, good idea.
- Reduce the importance of gold mines and tie gold a bit more to an individual player's skill level.  In most aos'es it is tied to creep killing, if you want to use that mechanic here, you will need to make them a lot stronger, because, as of now, for a lot of DG's 1 skill is enough to get rid of a whole wave.

As for the lack of variety in heroes:
As of right now, depth is definitely lacking.  You've said that compared to Dota's 93 heroes you would have eight but that they would be "more customizable".
"Quality over quantity"

I know this is just a beta, but you did say that there would be only 8 heroes, and the skill sets dont look close to big enough to differentiate, for instance, 2 rooks in a given game.  Maybe DGs seem to have more of a versatile vibe to them compared to the degree of specialization assumed in heroes on most AOSes the lack of variety will make pretty much every other game similar to the one before.  Maybe there would be 2 unclean beasts in one, maybe 2 rooks in another, but it will still play in a relatively similar way.

It probably costs a whole lot more for you to actually make a new hero than for some dude to add another wc3 model in a custom map.  I, for one, wouldnt mind different heroes with different skins/animations: ex-Unclean beast would be one, cerberus would be another assassin with pretty much the same model/animation as UB which would, for instance, breathe fire and stuff.  Backstory would be different, skills would be different, and attributes would be different though.

The current state of affairs adds another problem too - people can take the same hero more than once.  This will exacerbate the (somewhat inevitable) imabalances that will pop up during the early days/weeks of the game (as new, "uber" builds are found) and players rush to take the flavor of the month DG.  Also, if one is imba, why not pick five of them?  Given the inevitable (real or perceived) imbalances in the early months of the game, this is gonna hamper the ecolosion of an interesting competitive scene greatly.

Imho, you should think os adding some way of limiting how many times a DG can be taken, ideally, this would be just once.  But with less than say, 15 or so possible DGs, this will frustrate a lot of players that want to play a specific DG when they enter a game.

Also, I found the leveling speed a bit too fast, and the skill tree, was finished too quickly.  Some people said to add more levels to skills, I would say, reduce the # of levels (to say, about 15 or so) while scaling the XP required for each accordingly.  This would present the players with a serious choice, specialize in 2-3 specific skils, or be versatile and dab in a lot of them.  This would also improve variety (of which the game seems lacking so far) by allowing radically different builds for the same DG to coexist in a given game

Thank you very much, sorry to not be more positive, but at first glance, imho, design-wise, this game needs improvement.

O.