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Demigod

Early Technical Woes

While the gameplay itself is pretty solid, something went horribly wrong with the QA of the multiplayer. This is baffling considering the game is all about multiplayer. The laundry list is so long that it's time for a little list...

• Initially the multiplayer simply didn't work at all due to the number of users hammering Stardock servers with an automatic update check done with a HTTPS request. This was a simple capacity issue - seems like nobody considered the potential number of pirate copies that would turn up hammering the update servers.

• Once that was fixed and one could actually try to play multiplayer, people found out that the peer-to-peer architecture used was not very happy with NATs. Many were completely unable to even start matchmaking for a game.

• Those that could actually start searching for opponents ran into problems due to timing issues. As the game happily paired anyone in the world with anyone else (no region or latency-based filtering), people ended up paired without any regard to connection quality. Players often failed to negotiate the session before the game decided to time out.

• The matchmaking code is still unable to remove players that cannot properly connect and replace them with the next available person - if you can't pair up with everyone else, the only way out is to cancel and try again with the next random bunch, which may or may not include the person that can't connect with others.

• You can constantly end up in matches that are padded with AI-controlled bots. Online battles where one side has two or three human players vs. a single player forced to team up with bots get very ugly very fast. The AI is a fine sparring partner, but it has no business showing up in multiplayer matches - whoever ends up with most bots in their team is almost guaranteed to lose. This issue seems to be mostly fixed now, but personally I'd leave the AI only as the last resort in case someone disconnects mid-fight. Also, if you somehow end up as the last human in the game with a bunch of retarded AI opponents, ending the pointless game still counts as a loss for you in the statistics.

• Favor items are currently bugged. At first people were randomly ending up with negative favor or with favor from a match not adding up to your total. With the latest patch, whenever you play online, you appear to lose all favor points and favor items and I'm not sure if you are supposed to even be able to "farm" favor by playing against bots offline. Then there is the whole issue of game balance - those that have a number of favor items available to them have a massive advantage over those that do not - either because they are new with the game or because a bug ate their items and points. The general idea of adding a degree of persistence in the game is a nice one, but at the moment it just doesn't work.

Trying to start a multiplayer game. Looks like we got a bot army - time to try again...

Looks like the game had another player with a harsh NAT so we both get the boot.

To Stardock's credit, many of these early issues are already sorted out or are in the progress of being sorted out, but the first week has been a rough ride. The official story explaining most of the issues is that that the vast majority (or even all?) of their beta players were from North America, with good connections, high end systems and (I guess) very loose firewalls. Not really a representative sample of the rest of the world.

During the first days our playtesting I was completely unable to start any multiplayer game - most likely due to the company firewall being one of those super paranoid ones. After the first patch I could actually start pairing up with people, but only about 10-15% of my attempts to form a game actually succeeded, either due to timing issues or due to running into a game where some other player was also behind a paranoid firewall. According to Stardock, so far they have added a bit to the code that puts North American players into matches populated by other North American players, but for us Europeans, it looks like we can randomly end up paired with someone from Australia or the Far East - resulting usually in a failure to start the match. 10-15% success rate in actually starting up a game is not what you want to see after paying good money for a game.

The obvious fix to correct NAT traversal issues and firewall problems is to have a server where all players connect to, instead of a peer-to-peer style networking where every player is simultaneously connected to every other player. Since that would require a massive set of servers to run the game and a complete rewrite of the network code, Stardock is reportedly attempting to do the next best thing by setting up UDP reflector proxies - effectively people will be able to play by talking to a very simple server that acts as a reflector between two players who otherwise can't talk to each other due to NATs and firewalls. As for the general timing issues, I'm told that a fix was just published as this review was being finished up and, based on the initial third party reports, it has helped a lot with the success rate of starting a game.

Assuming the patches keep on coming, I'd expect the game to be fully playable soon - even now once you actually do get a multiplayer game going the gameplay is enjoyable and everything usually works fine. I've seen a couple of opponents disconnecting, but it is impossible to say if the player dropped out on purpose or not. Still, these early problems are hard to swallow for a game that is almost exclusively played online. The gameplay may be good, but if you can't get a multiplayer game to start, it offers little comfort.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Multiplayer ProblemsPage 4: Visuals and PerformancePage 5: Summary, Scores

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