How about Reprisal? (Godus antidote)

[BPFHAY]

I haven't had time to play it yet, but this looks fucklovely: http://www.reprisaluniverse.com/

There's a freeware version, and they're Greenlight-ing a PC version with other stuff.

It calls itself a homage to Populous, and certainly looks that way.

No comment about Godus.

[BPFHAY]

I fucking hate Godus.

[thraxx]

I fucking hate Godus.

This is all very new to me, but i LOVED the original Populouses.

What's the problem with Godus?  Looks like it even has Peter Molyneux involved.

[BPFHAY]

Oh man. Give it a play (it's free on IOS). You'll be wishing for Farmville.

[mcbpete]

Oh my gosh - thank you. I found a [I guess really early] build a few years back but really couldn't remember the name of the game. Gonna give it a play now, love POP1&2

[lazarou]

Oh man. Give it a play (it's free on IOS). You'll be wishing for Farmville.

The best thing about Godus is that Molyneaux has shit himself in public so badly with it that people might finally be incapable of buying his nonsense any longer. I've given him the benefit of the doubt so many times in the past, but that game is just flat-out abysmal.

This looks much more like it.

[BPFHAY]

The hilarious thing about Godus is how he pitched it on Kickstarter as something he had a great vision for, but he's clearly making it up as he goes along (regularly redoing the gameplay only for it to end up being insulting in the same way each time). His vision is clearly "I deserve to be doing this".

[lazarou]

There was a recent interview where he attempts to justify Godus' F2P-and-timers model after his damning comments about mobile Dungeon Keeper doing the same thing. If you listen closely enough I swear you can actually hear him straining to bend reality around itself.

It's not a bad piece that, they throw him a few fairly tough questions and give him plenty enough room to bury himself.

[Pit-Pat]

There was a recent interview where he attempts to justify Godus' F2P-and-timers model after his damning comments about mobile Dungeon Keeper doing the same thing. If you listen closely enough I swear you can actually hear him straining to bend reality around itself.

It's not a bad piece that, they throw him a few fairly tough questions and give him plenty enough room to bury himself.

I can't believe how self-serving he is in that. All the stuff about getting bullied at school. Part of me thinks he just has absolutely no self awareness and the shortest memory in the world. It's not that he can't remember what he did or said, it's more like he can't remember why he did or said it.

[BPFHAY]

He was the first politician game developer, really.

Oh look, he mentions getting death threats.

[Bored of Canada]

Oh fuck me. This is just an Interview that I can only qualify as utterly ball shriveling. Most people would have shut down the interview after the first question.

I keep reading and the scroll line on the right of my phone screen is SO BLOODY TINY which means it must go on for a very long amount of text. It's really upsetting. John's really out for blood at the start. It was like two years ago that RPS had the interview when he cried, and I'm not sure if he cries through this one yet.

I do have some sympathy for him, but then again, I never was interested in crowdfunding Godus or even playing Godus, and this turns out like a lot of unfortunate Kickstarters, so I'm not hugely shocked.

I thought I remember people posting here who worked on it, so I apologise if I sounded rude in this and I hope all this bad press can at least be a crucible that turns direction around and has some silver lining. Or at the very least, good luck with your next project.

EDIT

I do think John is doing the right thing and despite the bluntness of the opening line, it's a good interview. Especially when he starts hammering against Molyneux's trigger instinct to blame himself as incompetent, which is understandable and I feel that kind of interview would be sparking my self loathing, but he does really hammer home that this everybody is inherently flawed and this isn't about that. It's about clarifying details and reasoning behind broken promises and not letting them get away with it. Which is what happens to politicians, but very rarely do you get such a dogged pursuit with them staying in the interview, or a producer/advisor just stopping it in the tracks. Still haven't finished it but fair play to both of them. It's a really uncomfortable read but a really good interview.

[biggytitbo]

Populous! What ever happened to Powermonger? That was miles better.

[Bored of Canada]

I've finished reading the interview now. It's not black or white. I keep going back and forth on it. It's really unpleasant in the interview style, especially at the start. It picks up later and it's a few key points asked repeatedly that are not getting answered in Molyneux's responses. And only after about 4 attempts for each one do they get a solid answer.

I've no experience with making games but have made and wored on a number of films and shows and it's a fuckload of work and budgeting is the same in any creative industry. It's not a science which is why you build contingencies and have to scale to the production. Doesn't assure anything obviously. Nothings a sure thing and crowdfunding and Kickstarters are an investment, and like other investments, they may not pay off. But the promises and contracts like the winner of curiosity just not having any of his communications responded with after all that time is not on and the pledge rewards not even being started on after multiple years is also not on, and it feels like the interview has made Molyneux address that and they will start on it now, but it's also quite a harsh and brutal interview.

I've often heard of Paxman in these terms, I've never seen him before so I can't say for myself. I think the opening line taints a lot of what's to come. It immediately makes it antagonistic and how else can you respond to that.

That's a very personal line and he does clarify what he means with it, but geez.

So yeah. I'm going back and forth on it. I also keep thinking back on that old interview when basically the same thing happened and he started crying, and said all the same things and has done so all over again. Except it's the public's money and goodwill as opposed to a publisher.

It's a very very very weird situation. Very uncomfortable.

[FredNurke]

Thanks to Consolevania, my mental picture of Peter Molyneux is of a bald man getting up at 4am to clean his toilet with a toothbrush, and occasionally having sex with Rab Florence. This Godus malarkey has, if anything, only made that picture clearer.

[Pit-Pat]

But Molyneux has to be called out on it. Overpromising in the old days was less problematic because there wasn't such a pre-order culture, and customers certainly weren't being asked to find the game. If I was a games journalist I would just be weary of Molyneux now, of his absurd claims, his contestant self-justification and his endless excuses. I don't think the opening question is too antagonistic because Molyneux really needs to be made aware of how badly he's fucked up[nb]Not in a moral, serious issues sense but in a 'noone should or will ever buy your products again' sense[/nb]. Everything he says in videos, and the way he delivers it, is so blasé and blithe that he really needs to be pressed to try to get any honesty out of him.

I actually thought about backing Godus at one point (I've only ever backed one kick starter and it was for a card game) because it looked so nice and fun, and I really love the old god games. Obviously I'm very glad I didn't, but there was no way of knowing it would be quite so much of a shit shower.

Edit:
Here's an article with an embedded video showing just how clueless he can be, not just about how the backers might feel but seemingly about the feelings of his staff.

[Pit-Pat]

If you watch the video I posted it's extremely hard to reconcile what Molyneux says about working sixteen hours a day on Godus and having a large team working on it too. He basically says in the video that he's stepped back from it, has a level of oversight and mentoring but has more or less left it in the hands of a skeleton crew led by a disgruntled backer. It's pretty much been abandoned to a mod team at this stage. The source of the articles John Walker mentions as saying that the Godus team was now tiny seems to be the video itself, potentially contributed to by forum posts by KONRAD or whoever.

Last edit I promise:
The bit in the video where they're joking about Konrad not being paid seems particularly galling when they basically had him working unpaid for a year before giving him a full time job. He's looked pretty galled throughout though. It might just be Konrad's face I guess.

[lazarou]

Another interesting piece on this today: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-14-rich-stanton-on-requiem-for-a-dreamer

It's a familiar cycle. Screw up and apologise, rinse and repeat. The apologies are always full of caveats. The problem with Godus, according to Molyneux, is not that he's a terrible project manager who promised stuff he had no idea how to deliver. The problem is that it's the first game he did on Kickstarter. And it's the first one he did on Early Access. Or the publisher did something. There's always a caveat, always a distraction, always a deflection in the same breath as the heart is bared.

This is the nasty undercurrent to the excuses. Molyneux puts up his hands and undergoes the ritual humiliation with an earnestness that borders on relish. The thing that is impossible to put a finger on is where the calculation begins and ends. Molyneux has cried in front of so many journalists it's hard not to be suspicious, and some of his statements are astonishing.

Most nauseatingly, to my taste at least, Molyneux compared negative reactions to Godus to being bullied at school. "I feel now I am universally hated by the gaming people. I was bullied at school. Badly bullied at school. And I feel some of that emotion bubbling up again inside me now." Bullying is a horrible thing for anyone to go through, and I would never deny that such an experience can ripple through an adult life. That said, Godus is a multi-million pound project that Molyneux directed and managed in his mid-50s. Casting himself as the victim in this situation shows either a lack of self-awareness and proportionality, or an acute sense that it's the kind of subject his critics will be too sensitive to question. Maybe both.

I'd noticed his tendency to beat himself up very publicly after his failures, but I hadn't noticed quite how far he tended to push that. Development can be a crapshoot, but you have to remember Molyneux is one of the oldest hands working in the field at this point, and really should know better. It's hard to imagine Sid Meier shitting the bed and giving tearful apologies every other game, for instance.

[MojoJojo]

On Reprisal - I've played 3 or 4 hours of it. I also played some Populous 2 last year (as well as a lot in the mid 90s).

I can report that it's an accurate recreation of populous 1/2 with a few nice polishes and improvements. However, Populous has aged really badly. All you actual do is flatten ground. No real choices.

Unfortunately that means a lot of the improvements actually work against it. Flattening the ground has been made a bit simpler by a simple UI tweak... meaning you have even less to do. Your people are smarter, so if you tell them to attack the enemy, they'll look more than about 5 squares for an enemy before giving up and just building houses - so you don't need to use your totem to get your people to move and actually attack... so you have even less to do.

Perhaps the worst problem is they've sped it all up, so the playfields are small and only take 10 minutes to play - Populous may have had the problem that half the time you were playing, the outcome was already known, but it did allow time for tension to build and for you to build a really big flat piece of land. By shrinking it all down there's just nothing left.

To be fair, I've not really got into the metagame universe stuff yet, and I've not got any insane powers like volcanoes or tidal waves yet. But I think in the polished version those over powered powers will have probably gone, along with the basically mad stuff like Helen of Troy and Spores[nb]based on Conway's game of life ... and completely pointless. Any other proper games tried to use Conway's game of life, and haven't realised it's not much fun and kept it in?[/nb].

It probably deserves more of a chance, but I have a busy week and will probably forget about it.