Honest Opinion.

[FateWeaver]

Honestly, I feel this Wars version should just be fused into the main game. There are a lot of good things here which I would much rather see in the main Godus game, splitting the game in two like this will only serve to make two mediocre experiences instead of one strong one.
If I could choose I would much rather play one god game that contains war and conquest rather than one edition being entirely about war and conquest, while the other edition is strictly peaceful. Why can't you just stick to the blueprint set by Populus and Black & White? That's what we all want from you. Instead we get this...
Just to name one godlike feature that is missing that everyone would have loved to see, the hand, the hand from Black & White. That was some of the most fun I had playing Black & White, it felt empowering and it really felt like being a god when you telekinetically shaked, and flung people and objects as far as you were able. And the best part was that it was just a default power you had by clicking and holding people, no menus, no hotkeys, just click and hold.
The best godly thing that came out of Godus was the terrain manipulation, that truly felt divine, although rough and cumbersome.

I like how the followers build on their own volition, rather than them waiting for your orders. I wish that was in the baseline Godus to. In baseline Godus the followers feels like braindead automatons rather than people, them building on their own in Godus Wars feels a lot better. As a God we should be influencing and guiding, and occationally force them, rather than being their constant task master.

I like the blood, makes battles feel more impactful, chasing down fleeing civilians, and watching them get filled with arrows only to then sink together in a bloody heap is very dramatic. It could stand to be a few shades darker though. Blood would also look good in baseline Godus.

I also like commanding soldiers finally, and how soldiers automatically get assigned groups.

I honestly wish you would have stuck with the one world idea you originally advertised back in the kickstarter days... I would have much rather liked to expand my influence one landmass, and one tribe at a time on one seamless giant map, rather than than this Risk style territory conquest. The territories don't even feel meaningful, all they are are loot chests, you don't gain any permanent bonuses from holding them. And unlocking them with keys is just as weird as the stickers and the belief silo... Why on Earth would we use keys to attack new territories? Supplies or Reinforcments would have made much more sense.

The god powers are too expensive, and the belief cap is to low, resulting in me only using one cheap power and building citadels with my belief.

The Gods themselves are boring to look at, they look cheap and quickly put together, and honestly it would have been better if you just let us customise our own god portrait and starting power. Take the war god Fearos for example, just a bald man with a long beard, a tunic and a very kingly sword. When I think of a war god I think of spikes, I think of armour, I think of serrated blades, I think of the colours red, brass and black. I think of Khorne from Warhammer, I think of Ares and Kratos from God of War, I think of blood dripping from a blade, and glowing red eyes on a face shrouded in darkness. I get none of that from the war god in this game, he might as well be some greek king with a medieval sword, not some being consumed by rage and fury as the description of him would have you think. Same goes for all the gods, they just look like regular humans, not larger than life divinities.
Moros also suffer from the generic bald man with a long beard syndrome. Honestly, a being overflowing with power is not what I am getting from that little mana ball in his hand. He just looks like generic wizard nr 1679. When I think of a being overflowing with power I think of the Archon from Starcraft or Xerath from League of Legends. He should be posititively radiating power, his eyes should be glowing suns.
And the god's "get ready line" when choosing your powers is boring and wears out its welcome quickly. "I shall be victorious!" How inspiring... Yawn... Zzzzzz

If you insist on continuing with Godus Wars rather than just making a single solid Godus game, then I suggest you give us talent trees to build with so we can customise, and play our gods how we want to.

The Roulette wheel seems to land extremely conistently on half belief from abodes, followers seeing farther, everything being extra flammable. Only other one I have seen is god powers being more expensive. That's my experience in over 12 hours of playtime.

Some very weird design decisions I really dislike. The Pink belief and the belief silos.
Honestly the pink colour for belief has never won me over, power of love much? I mean the belief here is the psychic energy of humans that the gods feed on, so doesn't it make sense for the colour to be one more closely associated with the mind? Like blue or dark purple for example.
And then there are the belief silos... Why are we capturing and worshipping glass silos? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to destroy enemy shrines or temples and raising our own in their place? The glass silos just look silly and out of place, as none of our cultures would have the technology to make such perfect glass containers of such size.

Something I really dislike is the anachronism jokes, "I bet you listen to country music", "You have got a face for radio". They don't fit the time period at all and are immersion breaking, and given that context not that funny.

Another weird design decision is the cheer at the end of a conquest. Your men sound like garden gnomes rather than soldiers, and the fireworks is a bit too much. It would have been much more striking if your soldiers yelled ferociously and started waving their weapons in the air, like warriors do.

Yet another weird thing is how in the loading screen our men are shown wielding a bad to the bone battle standard with human skulls attached, but when we actually get to play we use a boring and very standard battle standard. The barbaric skull trophy one would fit well with a war god.

Maybe it would be an idea to have an Aesthetics Feedback sub forum

Again, it would have been better if you just scrapped Godus and Godus Wars and made a fused hybrid of them. That's my opinion anyway...

You are competing with Crytivo Games and their The Universim, and they are sadly beating you by a mile...

[Redxlotus]

+ I agree with all your points! I would love to see some of these changes make it into the game.

I loved black and white 2 and I wish more of those gameplay elements made it into this game for example: the hand, building your own city with the resources you gathered and making a huge army.

You guys actually have most of those elements already in game... Godus has mines and farms.. All you need to do is add wood as a resource and you have the perfect resource system. (At the moment these resources are kind of useless).

You could use Wood/ore for houses and ore/food for your army. And you keep belief for your spells of course.

22cans. You have made all these nice systems for the game already all you need to do is use them in the right way, but that is probably easier said then done… xD

[Aynen]

That's a very nice review, FateWeaver. Thanks for that! You bring up many great points.
A point I see being made a lot in many places is that the basis for good gameplay is there, but it isn't there yet. Your review also stipulates this. Personally I would think that this is the intention of releasing it in Early Access, because the designers know it isn't there yet, and they want feedback like yours to see if they're on the right track.
So thanks again for writing such a detailed review!

[FateWeaver]

Originally posted by Aynen:

That's a very nice review, FateWeaver. Thanks for that! You bring up many great points.
A point I see being made a lot in many places is that the basis for good gameplay is there, but it isn't there yet. Your review also stipulates this. Personally I would think that this is the intention of releasing it in Early Access, because the designers know it isn't there yet, and they want feedback like yours to see if they're on the right track.
So thanks again for writing such a detailed review!

And thank you for taking it in stride, I was not expecting that, that gives me a little glimmer of hope. I have not given up on you guys and Godus yet, but I have felt let down in the past by you, and I worry about the game's future. I just hope you guys take your supporter's criticisms to heart and try your best to at least attempt to provide a similar experience to what the Kickstarter page originally laid out for us. All we really want is a similar or better experience than Black & White and Populus, I think that should be your aspirational goal post, however lofty. Personally I had always hoped for a game that could be expanded and financed in much the same way as Crusader Kings 2, with lots of optional DLC to customise our experience, but only after a solid base game had been developed. That way you could live off development and continue to support the game, and eventually one day reach something that resembled the Godus idea Peter seemed to have in his head where the company could live off of Godus. Maybe you guys will be forced to make DLC already at this stage in order to sustain yourself, I have no idea how bad your financial situation has become, but if you feel that is necessary it should be voted over with the community or else none will support it.
But in order for Godus to get to that point of self sufficiency, and quality, you should not abandon Godus for Wars, and I hope you wont.
What really needs to happen in Godus is for the followers to begin to feel more alive, and less like automatons who can't do anything without being told to. What everyone loved about Black & White was how alive the people felt, even at such a rudimentary level, which you should be able to improve upon. Honestly, the systems in Black & White were good enough, I honestly don't know why you felt the need to throw out the baby with the bathwater and redo all the mechanics. How the settlements and followers in Black & White worked was just fine, it made sense, there was no need for squished together specialised settlements, there were specialised buildings, and professions which the followers could be assigned to. Back then we chose who was a breeder or builder, and if we later wanted them to work as a farmer then they could. And our worshippers came to worship us at the temple, and we came and collected the belief they generated. The system worked, and it was beautiful.

[𝓣a𝑘𝔞hiro]

Very good Review FateWeaver, i did like Black and White too, the first one more than the second one, because i think it really had the best Creature raising/learning/ai system you could find (maybe even still the best? did someone find an better one?).

I even play'd the first Populous game´s back in the day's, so i still have hope this or more like "Godus" will succeed.

[FateWeaver]

Originally posted by Takahiro Shinsaku:

Very good Review FateWeaver, i did like Black and White too, the first one more than the second one, because i think it really had the best Creature raising/learning/ai system you could find (maybe even still the best? did someone find an better one?).

I even play'd the first Populous game´s back in the day's, so i still have hope this or more like "Godus" will succeed.

Thank you for the kind words, yeah the creature AI was really cutting edge, shame AI innovation in games seems to be very rare nowadays, the hunt for ever greater graphics seems to always win out. One game with creature learning that impressed me is Alien: Isolation, that AI is creepily similar to real life prowling predators, with it continually learning about you from reacting to your actions. I really hope they make a sequel to that game, as I would love to see how they could expand that AI's library of actions and reactions.

[FateWeaver]

Originally posted by Kumaushi:

+ I agree with all your points! I would love to see some of these changes make it into the game.

I loved black and white 2 and I wish more of those gameplay elements made it into this game for example: the hand, building your own city with the resources you gathered and making a huge army.

You guys actually have most of those elements already in game... Godus has mines and farms.. All you need to do is add wood as a resource and you have the perfect resource system. (At the moment these resources are kind of useless).

You could use Wood/ore for houses and ore/food for your army. And you keep belief for your spells of course.

22cans. You have made all these nice systems for the game already all you need to do is use them in the right way, but that is probably easier said then done… xD

Agree, the puzzle pieces are already in place. All they really need to do is remove some of the weird design decisions that their supporters don't agree with, glue it all together and improve and add to it.
Thanks for agreeing with me. :)

[[HD]Splizzlah]

Yeah, this is nothing like black and white 2 though. Its embaressing, So was the 2nd version of black and white. I sold my gamecube to get my hands on that the quickest. And damn i shoulda have read the back of the box instead of false reviews. I totally thought B&W2 woulda been multiplayer just like the first one. Video games should not degrade themselves on the sequals. And the creator is degrading his company everyday with this horrible release that calls itself a video game, Should be in mobile section.

Originally posted by Kumaushi:

+ I agree with all your points! I would love to see some of these changes make it into the game.

I loved black and white 2 and I wish more of those gameplay elements made it into this game for example: the hand, building your own city with the resources you gathered and making a huge army.

You guys actually have most of those elements already in game... Godus has mines and farms.. All you need to do is add wood as a resource and you have the perfect resource system. (At the moment these resources are kind of useless).

You could use Wood/ore for houses and ore/food for your army. And you keep belief for your spells of course.

22cans. You have made all these nice systems for the game already all you need to do is use them in the right way, but that is probably easier said then done… xD

[Redxlotus]

I’m not a huge fan of multiplayer so I did not mind that too much. I really liked the building in black and white 2 though. Being able to put down roads and connect houses to it and I liked the amount of different buildings you could build also a lot of fun to work with, But I do agree that creature part of black and white was a lot better and had more depth to it, especially the creature battles.

This is something I do kind of miss with Godus. I think there should be a bit more variety in buildings you can place and I really liked the idea of having walls around your settlement. It’s a shame that never really worked out to well.

I think adding like special add-ons for you settlements which add like new visuals to how a settlement looks like. For example when you have a settlement all clumped up placing a market add-on will add food stands around the settlement and flags going from house to house. You know like them medieval markets.

Having roads come out of settlements connecting to nearby houses/farms and other settlements with people traveling over the roads with cattle and stuff would be a neat addition.

[FateWeaver]

Originally posted by Kumaushi:

I’m not a huge fan of multiplayer so I did not mind that too much. I really liked the building in black and white 2 though. Being able to put down roads and connect houses to it and I liked the amount of different buildings you could build also a lot of fun to work with, But I do agree that creature part of black and white was a lot better and had more depth to it, especially the creature battles.

This is something I do kind of miss with Godus. I think there should be a bit more variety in buildings you can place and I really liked the idea of having walls around your settlement. It’s a shame that never really worked out to well.

I think adding like special add-ons for you settlements which add like new visuals to how a settlement looks like. For example when you have a settlement all clumped up placing a market add-on will add food stands around the settlement and flags going from house to house. You know like them medieval markets.

Having roads come out of settlements connecting to nearby houses/farms and other settlements with people traveling over the roads with cattle and stuff would be a neat addition.

Yeah, agree, and the weird thing is how our enemies's towns have stuff like that and our towns don't. Their towns look far more lived in and interesting.

[FateWeaver]

Also I think it is quite astounding how the Universim is beating Godus when Godus got $753,364 in Kickstarter funding, while the Universim got $387,345.
22 Cans really needs to step up their game. These two games have the same design goals, and currently Crytivo Games's the Universim seems to be fullfilling them while Godus languishes in what has seemed like development Hell...

[KiwiPete]

When I backed Godus there was no talk of having the combat shoved into a seperate game. I got two half games - which do NOT make a whole game. Uninstalled Godus because it's a poor shadow of what it was marketed as. Have not installed Godus Wars on prinicple.

[Commander AFK]

Originally posted by KiwiPete:

When I backed Godus there was no talk of having the combat shoved into a seperate game. I got two half games - which do NOT make a whole game. Uninstalled Godus because it's a poor shadow of what it was marketed as. Have not installed Godus Wars on prinicple.

Same here. I really wanted this game to be what it was sold as (kickstarter), but at this point, I think we can agree that it will never happen.

Once the lead left the game (original Godus) I knew it was never going to be taken anywhere. To that point, I never even had a chance to enjoy the game as IMHO the original Godus releases were utter trash.

The whole thing of turning it into a mobile port really killed it - or that's how I see it.

Time to move on and check off another kickstarter failure and this is why I have not supported games on KS for many years. It's like throwing money away.

[FateWeaver]

Originally posted by Commander AFK:

Same here. I really wanted this game to be what it was sold as (kickstarter), but at this point, I think we can agree that it will never happen.

Once the lead left the game (original Godus) I knew it was never going to be taken anywhere. To that point, I never even had a chance to enjoy the game as IMHO the original Godus releases were utter trash.

The whole thing of turning it into a mobile port really killed it - or that's how I see it.

Time to move on and check off another kickstarter failure and this is why I have not supported games on KS for many years. It's like throwing money away.

Yeah, this was one of the biggest Kickstarter and Early Access shocks to the system I experienced. I was naively putting Peter Molyneux on a pedestal he did not deserve to be on. After the discontent started setting in for me I started to dig into Peter's past, and oh boy, the man isn't just a dreamer who can't keep his mouth shut. He is a grade A pathological liar who will say anything to sell a product. He even admitted to lying to get his first video games development gig, and he also said in an interview that he will say anything to sell a game.
He literally said that. He is the video game equivalent of a sleazy used cars salesman.
And if that isn't bad enough he is also a bully towards his employees. In my opinion the man has very few redeeming qualities. He has yet to pay the winner of Curiosity anything, he has funds, but he is not sharing anything with poor Bryan Henderson... Not even a consolation prize, or even having the guts to tell him sorry in person.

My only solace is that the games in my Early Access library category far dwarfs my Early Access Failures category...