Godus: experiment in mobile gamer’s stupidity
Sad example of the decaying state of mobile gaming.
Peter Molyneux created some of the most entertaining, original and, above all, genre-defining games. You may remember few titles. Dungeon Keeper (no, not THIS one), Populous, Black & White, Theme park… If you don’t, you’re probably the younger generation. But it doesn’t matter, just stick with me, and trust me, they were (and still are) very good games.
About two years ago, I read somewhere, that he started a new game development company (or studio, as they’re called now, not sure about the difference, though). Something with twenty tucans. Nice, I’ve always liked birds.
Curiosity — What Can We Get Away With?
Their first endeavor was Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? Some kind of weird mobile video game experiment. Basically a giant cube consisting of many layers and millions of pieces, on which you would tap like crazy for a promise of something big in the end. That, of course, only if you were successful and could connect to their overwhelmed servers. Maybe they fixed it later, I don’t know, I uninstalled it. It was marketed as an experiment, so ok, I got it, but I didn’t want to be experimented upon.
And then cometh Godus
Then, being a small poor Indie studio (led only by a guy who received Order of the British Empire), they decided to crowd fund their next game Godus. Excuse me, GODUS. A lot of promises were given, and, sadly, a lot of money pledged. The proof-of-concept video for Kickstarter was supposedly made in under two weeks. It looked nice. Little did the backers know, that this video would be better than the final product. Or a beta product, because the game is not good yet, because it is not finished, you know?! But more on that later…
I first heard about Godus only recently, when the iOS version came out. Although I consider myself a very curious person, I didn’t read anything about it. I didn’t even know, that it was crowd funded. I stopped following the company right after the Cube.
So I grabbed my iPad and launched the game with a clean slate and open mind… And a bit of worries, since it was free and contained in-app purchases, as noted by good guy Apple with the smallest font possible on the retina resolution right besides the big FREE+ button.
Let’s play
Here comes the splash screen, slowly loading … and a bit of gaming wisdom, sprinkled with a pinch of self promotion. Every world is different, follow us on Twitter. Ok, sure.
We get a 3D view of layered terrain, sand, water, good. And straight to the action — two followers are drowning, they need to be saved and while doing it, you inconspicuously learn how to control the game. No problem here, slowly and gradually introducing to gaming principles is fine. It has been done this way even in the ancient gaming times, for example in the Dungeon Keeper too (yes, the good one).
First surprise, the terrain cannot be rotated. It doesn’t seem as a problem, there’s mostly flat terrain. But later on, this becomes a nightmare.
You guide your followers onto a beach so they can start a civilization. They build the cottages (or Abodes, as they’re called) on free spots that are generated by some random algorithm in a way that maximizes unusable space between them, which you also learn later on, when larger abodes, requiring bigger spots, become available. And you can’t move the spots directly. You need to nudge the land around them, so they can move to a location where you need them to be. (Or completely disappear. Only to reappear somewhere else. Where it is also an ineffective use of space.)
I, belief
But so far so good, it is only a beta, mind you. After few minutes and few randomly distributed abodes around the beach, you’re introduced to the concept of Belief. This is THE energy. The thing that makes developers the money. The reason the game is “free”. Sculpting the sand is free. When you need to sculpt the grass, you need belief. Not much, the grass is cheap. But if you want to go higher (rocks) or lower (bottom of the sea), you … can’t… because you need to unlock it first. Spoiler — when you unlock it, sculpting mountains is really REALLY expensive.
Let’s wait
To replenish belief, you need to wait. It is generated in abodes. Smaller abodes generate less belief but it is faster. Larger abodes and settlements generate a lot of belief but you can collect it only once a day or even after longer intervals.
And you need to tap on every belief bubble.
Like GodusVille.
How about no?
And if you don’t check often, the maximum capacity is filled and the abode doesn’t generate any more belief. So check often!
Broken game mechanics
As the game progresses, you are gradually introduced to more features. And slowly you begin to realize, that there’s something wrong… there’s something missing.
Adventure mode
There’s some temple that allows you to travel by boat from mission to mission and try to get your followers from the boat to the temple through the terrain full of obstacles in order to get a reward. The biggest obstacle is the pathfinding AI, because of all the paths, they always find the one that leads to their death. And when your whole boat crew dies, you need to … guess what … wait. Or pay to speed up the reinforcements.
Mostly, it’s frustrating. And feels out of place. Like it was implanted into the game to make it at least a bit interesting. But it doesn’t work.
Cards and stickers and chests
To unlock new abilities, abode types etc., you need to unlock the cards. Once unlocked, you need to fill them with appropriate sticker. You find them in the chests. Chests that are randomly generated throughout the landscape. Often under the terrain that you need to sculpt out for a lot of belief. New chests are generated during a storm. Which is not so often. And filling a card requires a lot of stickers. So you gotta wait.
Did I mention unlocking the cards? You need to reach certain number of followers, or farms, or ore... i.e. more wait.
Farming and wheat
After a while, you can build farms. Or more exactly, for quite a lot of belief, you can squish your abodes into a settlement to form a farm. Then you have to wait until the farmer is ready. It “only” takes 30 mins per farmer. Then you send him to a new spot. He creates a field on which he starts to farm. Then you have to wait for 5 hours(!) and you can harvest. GodusVille style. Harvest size depends on the size of the spot. The smallest yields 1 wheat, the largest 4.
From the moment you can farm, the construction of new abodes costs wheat. The smallest abode 1 wheat, the largest (at that time) 6. So you can do the math.
For generating more wheat, it is good to have large fields, they take the same time, but generate 4 times the harvest. Unlocking the cards requires you to have more fields and since the space is limited, it is better to have smaller farms. It leads to this:
In the beginning you don’t have a lot of wheat and you need to wait a lot. Or pay. Up to you. (Please, don’t pay.) Then, you start to have a lot of wheat, and no use for it. There’s no motivation to build more farms. By the time you reach this point, a new card can be unlocked. It shortens the time from 5 hours to 2.5. But you don’t need any more wheat, you got plenty. This is what I call unbalanced.
Mining and ore
When mining is unlocked, it follows the same principle as farming, just replace fields with mines. No need to be in the mountains, you can have mines in the sand. For unlocking other cards, you need to have a lot of mines. So it leads to…
But while wheat is used to build, ore is used to … well, you need to have a lot of it to unlock the beacons (to reveal more land, not important). But otherwise, it is useless. And by useless I mean you don’t need it. At all. This is what I call not only unbalanced, but stupid.
Happiness
Your followers need to be happy. Measured by happy meter. I don’t know what happens when they’re not. It is so easy to keep them happy, it feels like a bug.
To make them happier, you need to Beautify the terrain around them. It costs 400 belief per second. It is not cheap, the smallest abode will generate around 40 belief per 15 min (I think). But you don’t need to powder them with your beautifying godly dust for many seconds. All it takes is one click (5 belief) and the happiness rises. And then one another, and another and you’re safe. Total cost 15 belief.
What an utterly useless principle. Why is it there? To make it seem complex? To make it seem as if you need to balance delicately various aspects of the world so your followers can be happy? Or to slowly prepare you for something, that’ll come in the next update? Or in a year, or two? Nope.
Followers
There are games where you need to manage production chains to keep everything going. Lumberjack needs to be close to the mill etc. I loved the first Settlers, they had it done really good.
In Godus you can forget everything. Is your farm on the sand? No problem. Is your abode alone in the mountains? And you sculpted away the last stairs? No problem, because followers don’t need the access. They don’t need anything. It doesn’t matter where they are, what is around. Sure they run out to look if you’re sculpting nearby, but that’s just the eye candy.
There is no interaction with the world.
No need to think about what you’re doing.
It really doesn’t matter.
And did I mention the followers are clumsy and stupid? And very stubborn about building where you don’t want them to.
Sculpting
The main game mechanics to make you feel like god. Only it doesn’t. It makes you feel like a slave. It makes your fingers hurt. You need to make stairs for your followers to climb the terrain. You can’t rotate the view, so about 1/4 of the terrain is invisible.
Sculpting is expensive, it is slow. And it has almost no reason. Since it doesn’t matter where anything is, there’s no need to sculpt. To make the best use of the terrain means to flatten it. And that’s the only sculpting you’ll need to do.
Is this the godly experience you want?
Yes, there are few things I didn’t mention, but they don’t matter. Meteors? Expensive sculpting. Swamps? Completely useless. Rain of Purity? Useless. Holy Forest? Expensive and useless too. Mining diamond veins? Few hours of waiting just for a few gems, not worth it.
There’s no original idea,
not a moment when you would stop and say:
“Wow, nice!”
…
(Not sarcastically, anyway.)
What’s left?
You come to a certain point where you realize there’s nothing left. Every game mechanics is broken, there’s no goal. After you unlock all the cards, fill the cards with stickers, discover the whole land (by repairing the beacons, i.e. more waiting), there’s nothing for you to do. No further goals. No happy ending.
And all this took me around a week of casual playing (1–2 hours combined during the day, when traveling, taking breaks from work etc.). And without paying any money. So I bet the hardcore players (you know who you are, with your five iPads in the shower) could make it even faster.
Some guy on reddit summarized it nicely:
timeshifter_: You complete it when you realize just how utterly stale the core concept of the game currently is, and uninstall it.
karollos: What is the core concept of the game?
timeshifter_: Bulldozer simulator.
Let’s update
I was ready to uninstall it and then the update came. Like a gift from gods. To quote from the update text: And there are NEW FEATURES.
Now, finally, in this update, the IAP model is fully developed. And the rotten core is uncovered.
The new features includes such revolutionary and never-before-seen nuggets of gaming originality such as:
- ability to name your followers (after a hefty diamond unlock of course)
- new gifts for your followers: flags — nice touch if you live in the US, are pirate, or come from hearty-smiley rainbowland
- and finally …
Shrine of Collection
It collects belief for you. So you don’t have to tap. No more FarmVille. Nice! Almost. To me, this seems almost like the game designers are mocking the players. And a perfect example, why this game is so wrong on many levels.
The shrine:
- costs diamonds, not belief (don’t wait, just pay),
- has limited radius, in reality, you cover only a few abodes by it,
- collects only belief, not wheat, nor ore,
- doesn’t work when you’re not present (!)
So you have to be in the game for it to work. To collect belief from 3 abodes in it’s radius. Sometimes it doesn’t work even if you’re looking at it. So completely useless.
What’s next?
Multiplayer? Followers battling one another? Giving meaning to ore? You betcha! My predictions:
- dress your followers (each color unlocked separately)
- share how nicely dressed your followers are on facebook
- more gifts for your followers
- shrine of wheat and ore collection (same radius and effects)
I will keep it on my iPad, just to see how it develops. But as far as playing it goes? No, I’m good.
Seeing it is not much different from the prototype video, I have a suspicion it’s a big scam. And if I were a Kickstarter backer, I would NOT be happy follower.
Sure, it is not finished. There is a lot of promises on the roadmap. But to come out with such an incomplete and empty game, after two years of development…
With Godus, we’re focused on delivering a creative experience with intuitive, clean gameplay for both core and casual gamers that connects people together and provides a consistently surprising and ever-expanding tail-end of the game.
Yeah, you should stick to the marketing. Or politics.
Conclusion — tl;dr
Godus is stupid. It doesn’t have a story, nor any functioning game mechanics. The graphics are ugly. (Peter, have you seen Infinity Blade?) It is not a even a game. It is just another experiment:
How much absurd sh*t can we pull off and still keep people paying for it?
The UI is clumsy. The AI is stupid too. And worst of all, it is a shining example of a nowadays free-to-wait garbage.
… but then, maybe I played a different game from the guy at Guardian.
Mobile gamers, please, wake up
Don’t pay for such games. Don’t play such games. Support good developers. There aren’t many but you can find really great games. Games made with love, passion and dedication. (And not only made for love of money and general laziness.)
Don’t know any good iOS games? Let me know, I’ll give you a few tips.
