So what the hell happened? on Skinning the frog, the blog of Stardock's Brad "Frogboy" Wardell has the latest chapter in the saga of Demigod, the action/strategy game from Gas Powered Games that suffered a rocky launch. He recaps the connectivity problems, which he chalks up to one bad design decision and one architectural limitation, explains why these issues took three weeks to fix, and outlines plans to release a patch as early as today to support proxy servers. He also outlines some issues that remain, and what's being done about them, and concludes with a FAQ describing what is being done to compensate users for these woes, plans for a demo (which would probably be out already if they hadn't gotten caught up in fire-fighting), that two more Demigods are being prepared for release, and lessons learned from the whole debacle. He concludes with a frank assessment of the game:

You know the expected marketing answer. But my view is, the difficult launch definitely hurt the game. There’s no way around it. Besides upsetting a lot of people anxious for a good multiplayer game, you also have the fact that those early negative reviews are going to linger. 1UP promised to re-review the game when this mess is straightened out and so I’ll be talking to them this week about that. But still, Gamespot (6.5) and IGN (7.5) are going to linger. That’s the breaks. One could argue we released a game that wasn’t done (we thought it was done) and that’s what you get.

Now, that said, I do think long-term the game is in good shape. First, we will be putting a lot of effort to build the online community. Scheduled games, strong team and clan support, pro tournaments, matchmaker filtering (let people filter out people they don’t want to play) are all coming sooner rather than later. Those things will help immensely.

A lot of Demigod’s long-term success depends, in my opinion, on whether we’re able to “perfect” Demigod’s online experience before a viable alternative shows up. Right now, Demigod has the luxury of being one of the few modern RTS games that is so well suited to playing online. It also lucked out in that Atari doesn’t release it internationally until later this month which means a huge influx of new players.