I have had the gold version for two days (and a gold /day0 hybrid version for a day) and this is my impression....

It is an amazingly awesome game that sucks. The basics are there to make it one of those games that become legends (MOO, Civ, AoW). The problem is that in the current release it is unforgivably.... boring. The AI is largely inactive, so several hours into a session you realize you are essentially playing in a 'sandbox' mode with no competition.

Added to that there is very little information about what stuff does. There is a huge amount of content to the game, but if you have no idea how to use any of it then what point is there to it? I had to ask in the forums about caravans to get any info on what caravans did, and even when one of the developers responded the answer was vague.

This is all stuff that can and will be fixed. Ultimately this will be a great game. The problem is that it should have all been there at release. In the months it will take Stardock to get things in shape people will move on. I probably will not bother to even load the game in two months once it's fixed because I will already have gotten bored with the product.

Brad is doing the whole 'woe is our plight - evil retailers broke street date'. Well, that happens to other games/publishers too but usually their games are still playable. You would have thought that Stardock would *expect* retailers to break the street date, after the cluster-mess that was Demigod when it was released. Demigod was another good game that went down the toilet due to problems at release, and I fear that Elemental is going to follow. Shame on Stardock for not learning from experience. They should have had their servers and day0 patch in place a week or two in advance so that if the inevitable street date breaking happened they could just throw the switch.

Huh, I thought all of Firefly's *retail* releases were what other studio's call 'beta'. I shudder to think of what their alpha must be like. I love their designs, I just wish they could hire someone to write a decent AI for once and do good QA before release. If they could do that they may actually have a hit.

@Cutter

This is Bioware Mythic - no relationship at all to the Bioware developing the SW MMO other than both studios being owned by EA which thought it could whore out Biowares name for some more cash...

@Eldaron Imotholin

I don't know if you were replying to me, but I what I was saying was with PvE in mind...

Could be cool. They have mentioned that every player will in effect control an entire party, so imagine a raid of say 20 PC's and 60 NPC's. The raid objective would be to capture/destroy/disable an enemy site, but the key thing is that several objectives have to be reach in real time simultaneously in different locations. Imagine part of the raid goes out to disable and hold a shield generator which gives another part of the raid a limited time to capture a control room or something.

This would be entire consistent with the Star Wars Universe - in fact it's a key part. In the original movie when they were trying to destroy the death star some fighters had to melee above and away from the trench, while groups would go in for a run to try and 'fire into the hole'. Obi-Wan also tried to shut down the tractor beam while Luke and Han saved Laia, then tried to escape. Examples go on and on.... Someone in these comments mentioned how Star Wars is about a Jedi saving the Universe – that is one way of looking at it, while another is that Star Wars is about a team making sure the Jedi has the opportunity to save the Universe.

This would be a much neater system than the usual tank n spank we see in every other MMO. Let's just hope that Bioware has something similarly creative in mind!

And now we see an important advantage of the PS3 - ME2 could in theory be published for that platform on a single disk (due to built in Blu-Ray). Not a huge deal, but not insignificant either.

No, I'm not a Sony Fanboy. I have a Xbox360 but no PS3. I just thought it was an interesting talking point.

Just so that everyone is clear – you DO NOT have to have an account with EA or Bioware to play this game. I don't have an account with either and I am playing the game just fine, The only reason why you would want to have an account is to have your 'achievements' posted on the intertubes where everyone could admire how awesome you are. I do not know if an account is needed for the DLC.

I am way far from being an RPG'er, but even so I have to say I very much like this game. I find the story interesting, and the voice acting to be rather good. The leveling system is.....interesting.... although I am not convinced about it's design so far (not bad, not kickass).

I find some of the inter-party dialog to be very entertaining, and a good touch.

Supposedly, this game has a 100 hours of playtime in it from the onset. If that is true, I for one can even see the point of DLC. I almost never play any game to it's end, so the thought of spending more $$$ for side quests is a nice option to have but I doubt I will ever find myself needing or even wanting it.

Got 'em all except for Legends. Despite their 'legendary' bad QC I would love to have the pack on digital distro such as Impulse or Steam. That said, while I would pay all over again for the DD, no way am I gonna pay $30 for it. Poke me when it hits $15 or less, kthx!

BTW, last title in the pack came out three years ago and even at that time it was more of an (old) engine skin than a real title. Who are they looking to throw over the barrel for $30?!?!

(All comments here are my opinion only, your millage may vary)

This is disheartening. I don't want an extra helping of drama/politics every time I buy a game. I got enough of that in my daily life. I don't need for my entertainment to go down that dark road as well. Now every time I buy a Stardock product, I have to think about if I want to financially support the crazies. I'm not saying that as a liberal (or conservative), I'm just saying that as a gamer who doesn't want as a package deal political drama every time I buy a game.

It would be one thing if Stardock decided to boycott a company on issues that affect their business, very much a different thing for an owner of a business starting drama over something that has nothing to do with his(their) core business.

WoW has so far had two expansions, in (almost) five years since launch. I remember at one point they said they wanted to have one a year, but they never seemed to have made it.

Good lord, it takes them one year per micro expansion? Sins is a great game, but as I have said before if they are taking so long for such small changes to the game play, maybe they and their fans would be better off if they dumped the whole idea of micro expansions and focused instead on Sins 2. At this rate, at best the third micro will not be out until Q1 2011! For a game that was released in Q1 of 2008!

I love Sins and have played it a crazy amount, but I too have to question the logic behind this particular micro-expansion. It is hard to imagine that it will be nearly as neat as Entrenchment was, or 'game-changing' as the first micro. Also, Sins has been out for a year and a half, and these micros have taken a lot longer to product, beta, publish, and bug fix than they were originally supposed to have. Wouldn't Ironclad and Stardock have been better off kicking into the production of Sins II rather than these micros as soon as they stabilized Sins I? They would be half way done by now!

Demigod rocks, and it is another title I played obsessively for a couple of months. Haven't touched it since, or been all that interested in doing so. I would like to see an expansion with more playable demi's, but more important I would like to see more maps! Some new creep types might also be cool.

@Dean

The Devs have been working overtime trying to patch things. For a while they were putting out 2 bug fixes a week.

The game itself has issues, but I for one think I have spent more time on this title than any other (possible exception would be Sins) over the last couple years.

At any rate, props to the Dev and Pub. I'm sure they are aware that people want a demo, and that can be expected soonish. They (rightly) wanted to resolve connection issues before moving on to marketing issues...

I am still playing the heck out of this thing. With all the man-hours I have played this game I could probably have built my own Honda. ;p

@Verno

You've noticed customers upset about an unfinished product being released early? Yes how dare they complain!

In an earlier thread yesterday you stated your total experience with the game was a session over at your friends house. So you haven't even bought the thing, and probably haven't played it much. Yet every single time this game is mentioned on Blues you comment about all these problems you have seen with it (based on your time at your friends house).

You don't like the game, don't want to play it, and don't want to buy it. We get that. So why the constant complaints? More and more it sounds like you have an agenda, IMO. Your opinion is welcome, but at this point it seems strange.

#3 The Pantheon / Skirmish games create uneven teams and such. This is mostly due to a lack of data for the system to work off of. When it was developed, it had a ton of beta tester win loss data to create balanced teams. Plus, from a "fun" point of view it was designed to try to get a skilled player versus 2 or 3 unski-er less experienced players as we found that pretty fun during the beta but the problem is, with everyone starting out with the same rating, it ends up with some bad results. This situation will iron itself out in the next couple of days on its own but now you know why it's happening.

This is an interesting concept. I had one game where it was me vs 3 other players. I thought initially that I was screwed, but I ended up mopping the floor with them. The game isn't just about kills, it's important to manage resources. They could have overwhelmed me by upgrading their creeps, but instead they just would by potions.

Also, uneven teams (2vs3) are a lot more balanced than one might think. That is because the smaller team levels faster since they have a higher proportion of the creeps they can kill for xp. Levels count for a lot - one lvl 16 player can easily kill 3 lvl 8's.

I'm having a blast playing the game. Best MP I have played in a long time. Only problem is that getting into a game can be difficult.

Arg, I have enjoyed everything Big Huge Games has put out. Sucks to hear they may be going away....

Big Huge Games + Ensemble being closed down = bad news for strategy fans. I guess there is not enough money in the genre even when their titles do well.

This comment was edited on Mar 5, 2009, 10:42.

@LMN8R

Ok, while I did not mention Empire: Total War by name I would have thought the mention of Creative Assembly would have been a tip off. You apparently thought I was talking about DoW2, which I was not.

Steam is normally very fast for downloads, but yesterday it was painful for anyone, anywhere in the world trying to buy and download Empire: Total War from Steam. In my case it ended up taking @ 16 hours. This was after having pre-purchased the game over two weeks before release.

And why couldn't I just pop around and buy it retail? Because as mentioned, I had a pre-purchase it. Just to cancel that requires sending in a form to Valve, and waiting a few days for a response from their Customer Service. But once you start to download, it is too late; no refunds. The catch is that I couldn't have known that the DL rate was going to suck so bad before I started the DL, could I? I mean, Steam is *normally* rather good.

The failure on Steam and Creative Assembly, as I mentioned in my OP, is that they disallowed any preloads. So on release day there were thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of people trying to DL the game from the same servers at the same time. This would have been fair if they thought to warn people, but they didn't so instead it made a lot of people mad. But hey, don't believe me. Just check out the forum on Steam, or over on GamesFAQ and see how many threads start with 'how fast can you download' 'steam sucks' 'false advertising about preloads' and so on.

In the forums, gamers are saying load times in the release version are much better. One guy said in the demo it took him 3mins+ to load a battle, but the same thing in the released version took him under 30 seconds.

If you do decide to buy it, go to Gamestop or wherever. DL rates are terrible and getting worse as the day goes on.