09.09
style
enough has changed. There are some neat elements in Gods & Heroes, certainly, but they're obscured by so many broken features, bugs and poor design elements that the end result is a mess.
The player estate is a perfect example. Conceptually, it's where you're supposed to go whenever they're not sure where to quest next, or when there's some sort of interesting event playing out in the world. While I can't attest to the latter as there have been no interesting events yet, the former is highly under-developed. Quests you grab from the player estate send you all over the world map, but not in a good way. For every set of ten or so levels (1 to 10, 11 to 20 etc…) there are two zones to level up in. My guess is that this is to allow for replayability -- you're more likely to level up another character if there is stuff you haven't done before -- or to ward against overcrowding (which isn't an issue because very few people are playing). Unfortunately, the estate quests tend to send you to both of these zones, which means you either ignore some of those estate quests until later, or split your efforts between two completely different game zones. This can get very tiresome.
While quests often reference the Roman mythology, there don't seem to be very many ties to the overarching storyline which, from the opening sequence, is an invasion of the Telchines. The opening of the game focuses on this, and then every ten or so levels you might get another quest that references the Telchines, but they are few and far between and never seem particularly urgent.
The quests aren't bad, but they're not very good either. While they're mostly the fetch and kill quests MMO players have grown used to, and the number of things you need to kill or things you need to collect typically aren't terribly high, many of the quests are tuned strangely, or require very specific enemy kills. Several quests ask you to go into the graveyard area in Roma to complete various tasks, but due to the fact that it is considered to be within the confines of a city, you don't get the benefit of your minions, who can heal, tank or deal damage alongside you. The enemies in this area don't seem to be tuned any differently, so rather than taking on a level 15 enemy with two AI-controlled allies which ends up being a fair fight, you're taking on that same enemy by yourself. If you're a caster character who doesn't have a whole lot of defensive options like I was when I did these quests, you will probably die a lot more than is reasonable.
The minions certainly help in the open world, though. Or at least they do when they function properly. My tanky minions frequently stopped attacking enemies in the middle of a battle and would rarely use their taunting ability. My healer minions -- regardless of how they were set -- would stop and heal me while I was running through or out of an area, draw the ire of all the nearby enemies, and keel over dead. Reviving minions doesn't revive them near you if you're within a large radius, it revives them directly above where they died. As a result, when my healer would die beneath a group of satyrs, reviving him would result in him dying again almost immediately, drawing all the satyrs straight over to me.
Many of the issues with the combat I mentioned in my impressions -- particularly the way enemies completely ignored range -- have been fixed, but the issues with skills haven't. I have a skill that deals a lot of up-front damage, has a small cast time and a very small cooldown, and another skill that deals less than half of that damage, has the same cast time, and has no cooldown according to the tooltip, but in actual fact has a longer cooldown than the previous skill. Besides being a bugged skill, even if it were functioning properly it'd be almost useless. The skills I've been getting from my Deity are even worse. One of my earliest skills was an instant-cast spell that dealt a big chunk of damage and healed me for the same amount. Sweet! Ten levels later I got a skill that did less damage, didn't heal, had a longer cool down, a cast time and only a marginally smaller favor cost (50 rather than 60). Your Deity options are class-based, so only my class could have had access to this spell, a spell which is substantially weaker than all of my other spells.
Enemy AI is also screwy. Sometimes enemies will have enormous and instantaneous aggro radii, so that if you get within casting distance they will turn and attack you (as was the case with a group of vultures). Sometimes while you're fighting an enemy it'll just turn around, go back to its original position and continue to take damage from you without responding. Sometimes they don't respond at all in the first place. For a game where there's not much to do outside of basic PvE combat, more attention should have been paid to ensure that the combat actually worked 100% of the time.
The problems with combat really destroy the cooler things that Heatwave/Perpetual tried. A lot of the enemies have special combat animations -- a winged behemoth can pick up my character and throw him around, dealing a lot of damage, while a shade can grasp me in spiritual tendrils and choke me -- which, when they happen, can certainly impress. They can also kill you, as you're immobilized for the duration of the animation. The same goes for when you're playing a melee character that does special kill animations, which can result on your character being wailed on by five enemies while you can't perform any other action.
If you're a fan of group encounters and playing with friends, Gods & Heroes has very little to offer you. At level 20 I still hadn't encountered anything intended for a group, and I had heard other players within my Tribe (guild) discussing how heavily experience was penalized while questing in a group.
Then there are the issues with polish. I've found dozens of locations in the world where buildings have no clipping (so I can just walk straight through it), or where walls just don't render (so I can't walk through what appears to be an empty space). The player estate is a particularly heinous offender -- there are a lot of graphical and physical oddities, like a bridge in the middle of a field, half-planted in a house for absolutely no reason. There is even an area where I would get rubber-banded around any time I tried to enter it. In another zone I once watched a deer walk sideways up a tree. To be honest, that last one was actually one of my highlights of playing Gods & Heroes.
The massive amount of glitches and bugs really speaks volumes about what the small team at Heatwave was capable of handling when they took control of Gods & Heroes. The game they got was clearly in rough shape from the start, and with limited funds and limited staff I suppose they simply couldn't fix everything that needed to be fixed.
But it goes further than that -- there are elements of a game long-gone still present in Gods & Heroes. In Perpetual's version, I suppose instead of a massive sprawling player estate there was a tiny little camp. The map for that camp is still in the game's map menu as "Campus Olympi". Scrolls sold by a vendor in Roma say they lower the damage taken by falling great distances, but there's no fall damage in the current game. And there are several NPCs who talk about taking boats and flying creatures as fast travel, but as far as I can tell, all of that has been replaced by statues you can teleport to.
Finally, there are elements to Gods & Heroes that simply baffle me. The stats on my equipment keep changing, and sometimes have "+0" listed for a stat like maximum energy. Equipping a helmet made my character's beard disappear and hairstyle change. And the methods for regenerating favor, the resource used for god-powers, are either frustratingly slow or completely broken.
Closing Comments
I don't know what kind of state Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising was in when Heatwave picked it up, but it couldn't have been good. The current game is broken, buggy, and not very fun. The plans for the future of Gods & Heroes are noble, but the core game needs to be reworked first and that could take far longer than it's worth. Rome might be rising, but it looks like it probably won't be long until it falls and the world moves on.
by: Nick Kolan
Posted in: RPG
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