Tag: Heatwave

Why Aren’t You Playing: Gods & Heroes


Why Should I Play is a new series where I dive into games and discuss my experiences. This article is not meant to be un-bias’d and due to the intrinsic nature of MMOs, reflects the product at the time of publish but may not reflect the product at the time of reading. As always, MMO Fallout suggests you make use of free trials to form your own opinion of the game.

Gods & Heroes launched back in June to a rather low reception and equally mediocre ratings. A couple of weeks after launch, Heatwave Interactive announced that the game didn’t garner as much attention as they were hoping, and that the company had plans to implement several ideas including free to play at some unannounced point in the future. A few days ago, the company announced the release of the 3-day trial, allowing unlimited access (for three days) to all Gods & Heroes had to offer, along with a price drop to $29.99. I dived in head first into the three day trial to check out what Gods & Heroes had to offer.

Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.

The main advertising points of Gods & Heroes are the estate system and the minion management. Almost immediately, you are introduced to your private, dilapidated estate that must be built from the ground up to its former glory. As you complete quests for the NPCs in your village, you gain access to better perks for your minions, from armor, weapons, etc. The game uses a rather cheap method of having your buildings phase through construction right in front of you when you complete an upgrade quest, but that’s a rather inconsequential aesthetic flaw.

The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.

Gods & Heroes is funny and charming in parts. In one memorable quest, I had to bust up a multi-day long party by smashing wine vats that we then discovered were spiked with a magical essence. Inevitably, I killed the guy behind the magic and given the confirmation that the party would be broken up as soon as everyone sobered up.

Why You Aren’t Playing Gods & Heroes

You may have heard that Gods & Heroes is on the easy side, and that would be completely accurate. Having one minion makes the game easy enough, and that is before you hit higher levels and your squad increases to four. Now, to its credit, there are supposed to be later sections in the game that only allow for a limited number of minions, but with two sword wielding minions, I was steamrolling over anything that came my way. But you can put minions away if you want to make the game more difficult, there is no obligation to have your minions out.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Gods & Heroes is that the game is bugged like a hotel room in a prostitution sting. The game crashed maybe once every two hours, either giving me a “Godsandheroes.exe has stopped responding” Windows error, or simply losing connection to the server. Not that I was at risk of dying, thanks to my two tanks, but that doesn’t ease the frustration of those few moments when you know the game is about to crash, but hasn’t actually displayed the message yet. Otherwise, I didn’t have any lag issues while playing, there was no rubber-banding or jolting NPCs to speak of.

Invisible wall.

Second on my list of three big gripes: The terrain. The terrain needs to be revamped so walking isn’t a fight between myself and my character. Slight inclines or tiny but sharp inclines seem to stop my player in his tracks, and I am fairly certain that Heatwave has installed invisible walls in some areas because I’ve found multiple spots that I cannot pass. In the above picture, you can see my character on pretty level ground, but ground that he cannot pass. It is worth noting that this is nowhere near the area limits.

Third: The game has some issues with lack of context sensitive response, or my character is a pacifist. When fighting, I had several instances where my character would just cancel auto-attack, wouldn’t attack at all, or I would hit something on the hotbar and I would see “queuing quick shot” but my character would never use the power. This isn’t a lag issue, to my knowledge. When using hotbar actions, I also found that there is no context for cooldown. The buttons are grayed out until you can use them again, but the countdown timers always say: 00:00:00 remaining, and the buttons regaining their color doesn’t necessarily mean that pressing the associated button will result in attacking again.

So Should I Play Gods & Heroes?

Gods & Heroes is fun, and its major issues are on the hardware front (performance, responsiveness, and terrain/pathfinding). The estate and minion systems are enjoyable and innovative, but the experience is just crushed under the foot of your minions managing to kill the mob before my scout decides to stop ignoring my button presses.

I’m going to leave this up to the reader to decide, download the Gods & Heroes trial and give it the whole three days before you make your decision, but you may want to wait to activate your key until some much needed terrain/stability issues are fixed. I would buy the game as it is now, because I didn’t find the issues to be game-breaking, if it weren’t for the fact that the Star Wars Galaxies weekly article is my primary MMO right now.

Otherwise, I’d give Gods & Heroes a thumbs up. If you haven’t taken part in the 3-day trial, do so.

http://godsandheroes.com/gods-heroes-rome-rising-free-trial-program-is-live/

Why Aren't You Playing: Gods & Heroes


Why Should I Play is a new series where I dive into games and discuss my experiences. This article is not meant to be un-bias’d and due to the intrinsic nature of MMOs, reflects the product at the time of publish but may not reflect the product at the time of reading. As always, MMO Fallout suggests you make use of free trials to form your own opinion of the game.

Gods & Heroes launched back in June to a rather low reception and equally mediocre ratings. A couple of weeks after launch, Heatwave Interactive announced that the game didn’t garner as much attention as they were hoping, and that the company had plans to implement several ideas including free to play at some unannounced point in the future. A few days ago, the company announced the release of the 3-day trial, allowing unlimited access (for three days) to all Gods & Heroes had to offer, along with a price drop to $29.99. I dived in head first into the three day trial to check out what Gods & Heroes had to offer.

Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.

The main advertising points of Gods & Heroes are the estate system and the minion management. Almost immediately, you are introduced to your private, dilapidated estate that must be built from the ground up to its former glory. As you complete quests for the NPCs in your village, you gain access to better perks for your minions, from armor, weapons, etc. The game uses a rather cheap method of having your buildings phase through construction right in front of you when you complete an upgrade quest, but that’s a rather inconsequential aesthetic flaw.

The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.

Gods & Heroes is funny and charming in parts. In one memorable quest, I had to bust up a multi-day long party by smashing wine vats that we then discovered were spiked with a magical essence. Inevitably, I killed the guy behind the magic and given the confirmation that the party would be broken up as soon as everyone sobered up.

Why You Aren’t Playing Gods & Heroes

You may have heard that Gods & Heroes is on the easy side, and that would be completely accurate. Having one minion makes the game easy enough, and that is before you hit higher levels and your squad increases to four. Now, to its credit, there are supposed to be later sections in the game that only allow for a limited number of minions, but with two sword wielding minions, I was steamrolling over anything that came my way. But you can put minions away if you want to make the game more difficult, there is no obligation to have your minions out.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Gods & Heroes is that the game is bugged like a hotel room in a prostitution sting. The game crashed maybe once every two hours, either giving me a “Godsandheroes.exe has stopped responding” Windows error, or simply losing connection to the server. Not that I was at risk of dying, thanks to my two tanks, but that doesn’t ease the frustration of those few moments when you know the game is about to crash, but hasn’t actually displayed the message yet. Otherwise, I didn’t have any lag issues while playing, there was no rubber-banding or jolting NPCs to speak of.

Invisible wall.

Second on my list of three big gripes: The terrain. The terrain needs to be revamped so walking isn’t a fight between myself and my character. Slight inclines or tiny but sharp inclines seem to stop my player in his tracks, and I am fairly certain that Heatwave has installed invisible walls in some areas because I’ve found multiple spots that I cannot pass. In the above picture, you can see my character on pretty level ground, but ground that he cannot pass. It is worth noting that this is nowhere near the area limits.

Third: The game has some issues with lack of context sensitive response, or my character is a pacifist. When fighting, I had several instances where my character would just cancel auto-attack, wouldn’t attack at all, or I would hit something on the hotbar and I would see “queuing quick shot” but my character would never use the power. This isn’t a lag issue, to my knowledge. When using hotbar actions, I also found that there is no context for cooldown. The buttons are grayed out until you can use them again, but the countdown timers always say: 00:00:00 remaining, and the buttons regaining their color doesn’t necessarily mean that pressing the associated button will result in attacking again.

So Should I Play Gods & Heroes?

Gods & Heroes is fun, and its major issues are on the hardware front (performance, responsiveness, and terrain/pathfinding). The estate and minion systems are enjoyable and innovative, but the experience is just crushed under the foot of your minions managing to kill the mob before my scout decides to stop ignoring my button presses.

I’m going to leave this up to the reader to decide, download the Gods & Heroes trial and give it the whole three days before you make your decision, but you may want to wait to activate your key until some much needed terrain/stability issues are fixed. I would buy the game as it is now, because I didn’t find the issues to be game-breaking, if it weren’t for the fact that the Star Wars Galaxies weekly article is my primary MMO right now.

Otherwise, I’d give Gods & Heroes a thumbs up. If you haven’t taken part in the 3-day trial, do so.

http://godsandheroes.com/gods-heroes-rome-rising-free-trial-program-is-live/

Gods & Heroes: Pricing, Free To Play, Discussions:


Gods & Heroes launched by Heatwave Interactive to a surprisingly small audience, despite the game’s performance on the Steam sales charts. Heatwave, being a small company, came forth over a week ago with some surprisingly blunt admissions:

“We don’t need 500k users to be successful. However, our current growth rate isn’t good enough.”

An article today on Massively boasts an over 50% conversion rate (players who continue to subscribe), noting that although free-to-play is not on the books right now, the model is coming to Gods & Heroes at some point in the future.

“Again, obviously we want as many players playing the game as possible but, from our perspective, we need to get the game where it needs to be and have the right sized audience to go with that.”

The price of Gods & Heroes is seeing a reduction, down to $29.99. I’ll have more on the game as it appears.

Gods & Heroes: Heatwave Fully Committed


Gods & Heroes is one of those MMOs that’ll make you snap your fingers, point at the monitor, and say “I think I remember that game. It launched, right? It was developed by Blizzard or something.” At least that’s what my editor in chief said when I pitched this article. Gods & Heroes, the oft-not-mentioned Rome MMO, has players collecting minions to battle creatures and lay waste to ancient Rome. The game launched at the end of last month, you can find its launch on the MMO Fallout calendar.

Moving on, if my snide remarks about the game’s reception haven’t clued you in, I will allow Heatwave’s CEO explain the game’s predicament:

As I have noted from way back in closed Beta, the economics of our game are different than those of most MMOs. We don’t need 500k users to be successful. However, our current growth rate isn’t good enough. The game deserves more people enjoying it and the three servers we have online aren’t even sweating. I’m sure some of you are concerned about what that means for the future of the game, and so I’d like to assuage your concern. Heatwave and team are 100% committed to G&H. We believe in it and as you’ll see in the list below, we are investing heavily in it and we will continue to do so.

Gods & Heroes currently costs $40, plus a subscription (or a $200 lifetime membership). According to the review on Ten Ton Hammer, the game was barren after two weeks (three servers), concluding:

It’s not that this is a bad game, it’s just far too little/late for this point in the market. The setting is wonderful, and there are some cool systems in play here…. it’s just marred by yesterday’s graphics, too little polish, and some weird design decisions. Wait until it goes on sale before you drop the money on it.

But fret not, as Heatwave has plans!

That said, in the coming weeks, we are going to begin a promotion that will drive thousands more players to the game and turn Baccus, Mars and Jupiter into communities bursting at the seams. Whatever we do, we will make sure that we first take care of you, our active players. You are the early adopters. The founders of Rome. Our “angel” investors even.

Gods & Heroes having issues is hardly surprising, given the tendency of MMOs with bad development cycles to suffer bad launches, even in the hands of another company. Gods & Heroes was one of the two games to be initially dropped when Perpetual Entertainment kicked the bucket years back.

My money banks on some sort of free trial.