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[nenjin]

Eh. I'll wait for reviews to see if it's actually worth owning on the PC.

[eharper256]

Hm, like people say, he was a genius in the Bullfrog days, someone you always paid attention to in the 90's. And sometime around Lionhead it all went down the toilet. Honestly, though it looks a little dated these days, Populus III is still good, so I'm not sure if a new remake is flogging a dead horse or not. Ah well, since he seems to have made it, I wish him luck, but I'm gonna stay wary until its out.

[burningpet]

Bumpidy bump for a good reason.

It just got on steam Early Access and i was wondering if anyone here had the chance to play it and if so, is it worth shelling those 20$?

[MoLAoS]

I feel sorry for Peter. I like him and his games a lot and he has been turned into a joke, or perhaps a meme, among people in the industry.

I can't figure out if the Molydeux game jam thing is a compliment or an insult. I hope he manages to make another awesome game, not a populous remake, but something new. Maybe if he could be slightly more realistic and keep his aspirations a little less cloudy.

[Sonlirain]

Moly got his image turned into tatters after the Fable series.

Fable 1-3 were good games he hyped up with blatant lies.
Growing trees?
Developing towns that depend on your actions?

None of that ever happened... well maybe in Fable 3 you could do some things as a king but it had nothing to do with the organic buildup that was promised...

Also i think both B&W were good games that didn't really fail my expectations... but i guess it's just my opinion.



As for the populus remake... yeah i'd like to know if it's any good too.

[Leyic]

Bumpidy bump for a good reason.

It just got on steam Early Access and i was wondering if anyone here had the chance to play it and if so, is it worth shelling those 20$?

I've played for ~45 minutes and found it very boring and tedious, but apparently I did things in a very inefficient way (tip: don't send villagers from their home unless you have something for them to do), and the only way to start a new map is to delete the not-obviously named save files (state.bin and state.back in the install directory). I guess the first age is supposed to be like a tutorial, but it's very drawn out and not very informative. The game also suffers from overly simplified controls, supposedly because they want the PC and tablet versions to be as identical as possible.

The worrisome part is that the alpha testers were complaining about these same issues. Apparently, the only notable difference between alpha and beta is some economic tweaking.

I'll try to subject myself to more of this later to see if it gets any better.

[Irenices]

Have not played it myself but apparently the early access had a gems you could buy with real money to spend in game when it very first came out, they where removed i guess pretty quickly but it just shows what they have in mind for this game.  Would not touch with 10 foot pole.

[Leyic]

The PC version is pay once for everything, while the tablet version is supposed to be freemium. The cash shop in the PC version is just another example of how they want the two versions to be mechanically identical. But it's gone now, so we can complain about more meaningful things, like why the game is so horrifically slow to play.

Gameplay for the first two hours can be summarized as flatten land, wait, activate totem, click on houses, wait, deactivate totem, wait, click on houses, flatten land... There's very little to do, and most of it is either mindless clicking or waiting. Supposedly the third part of the primitive age brings roads, and walls are somewhere further down the line, but the game wants some resource I've never seen before, and it's mind-numbingly dull waiting for my civilization to level up just so I can dig up more treasure chests.

Also, battles take place in separately instanced maps, consist of near-mindless swarming, and there's no apparent consequence for losing, not that I wanted to wait for the AI to come for me.

[Lord Snow]

Smartphones really are a lot more powerful than a lot of people seem to think. 

The Samsung Galaxy Note II has a 1.6 GHz quad-core processor, 720p resolution display, 2 GB of RAM, and storage capacity up to 128 GB.  That's about on par with the PC I had about four years ago.  I played some pretty damn good games on that PC.

Not that I have an abundance of faith in this project, I just haven't completely written it off yet.  He's not getting any of my money until I can see where this is going though.

ugh.

Well.

even if they were MORE powerful, they'd still have no keyboard, mouse, gamepad. Just a touchscreen, and even that minimalistic way of creating input then still lacks precision.
You just can't make a game for such a platform and expect a good result on other platforms. It's simply not going to be anywhere near as good as it could have been.

Thanks for this thread, i came pretty close to buying it when i saw it on Steam. No chance of that now. Mobile game for 20€, lol.

[burningpet]

So, is it annoying to collect those pink belief like it sounds (A la farmvile and friends) or is it something which doesn't bother too much? is there away to automate belief collecting?

[Virtz]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKN7-BdeKzo - here's a gameplay demo where he explains stuff.

Apparently there is a thing where you build a statue and all the belief is instead accumulated on that instead of the individual houses. Also, the set back to losing a match is that you lose the guys you sent to that match, which I guess might have consequences if you send in special units?

Call me a sucker, but I'm thinking of buying this. Doesn't look all that bad for a reimagining of Populous or whatever.

[Biowraith]

I've been playing this for ~5 hours, with one re-start once I figured out some stuff.

Gathering the belief is a bit of a pain early on, cos you'll have lots of low-capacity houses that generate small bubbles quickly meaning constantly having to go back and harvest it.  After ~2 hours of play I'd upgraded to newer houses that take a lot longer to generate bigger bubbles (~40 minutes for bubbles worth 120 belief vs ~3 minutes for bubbles worth 5), so the clicking is a lot less frequent at that point, at least for harvesting belief.

Depending on luck (I think, maybe it's all pre-determined) with resources cards, you should unlock "Settlement" around that time too, which lets you replace a house with a structure that gathers all belief in the area.  You still have to go back periodically to click to harvest it, but it'll be one click instead of twenty.  It looks like Settlements have a set radius though, so one on its own won't remove all your clicking, and they scale in cost (2k for the first, 7.5k for the second, I haven't got to a third).


The part that's giving me the RSI though is shaping the land - you can't really do more than small tweaks per click, so flattening a large area (or burrowing down for a resource chest) can take a heck of a lot of double clicks.  Similar story for releasing dudes to go attack the other guy's dudes on the battle map (a mass of clicking which also results in accidental terrain modification, I'm finding).

And as Leyic said, there's not an awful lot to do, at least at this point - mostly a cycle of waiting for belief then flattening land (the loading screen says it's about 40% of the game atm).

[burningpet]

So clicking the belief is a fundamental to progress? now, why would they do that? unless there's a future micro transactions that enable you speed up this process coming with their mobile versions, i can't see a "good" reason for forcing players to go clicking popping bubbles.

[Niveras]

The belief function so far sounds kind of like candy box/cookie clicker/etc kinds of flash games. You can slowly upgrade and eventually automate the process to greater degrees (with limitations dependent on gameplay design).

[Sonlirain]

Ok so my opinions:

1 - They basically took Populus (The ones before Populus 3 anyway) and remade it into a modern social MMO game with farmville elements.

2 - The combat section is... meh. It would be better if it borrowed more form Populus 3 in them letting you have more direct control and varied units... Unless Moly is planning to make your followers act smarter on their own as they go through the ages without you having to constantly plop down godly miracles to attract them to places of interest (like enemy huts)... then again the combat is pretty in line in what Populis before 3 offered.

3 - Terraforming... i'm kinda torn on this because in the olden times of populus the only way of terraforming was to make EVERYTHING flat so that your people can build more huts... and this seems to be the case here as well... meaning that most optimal gamers will just flatten everything they can get thair hands on turning their realms into dull flatlands.

4 - No resources... people seem to just plop houses based on the availbility of space rather than resources... this is fine but personally i'd rather have the system from populus 3 where your brawns ran around gathering wood for house upgrades and new buildings.
Currently they either sit at their homes doing nothing breeding or muck about.
Personally i'd rather see them milling about the landscape gathering resources on their own for house upgrades... or even gathering them for the town storehouse for later use.
It might be a minor detail but i'm just a sucker for watching common activities performed by your minions (that's why i like playing Settlers III or Black and White for example).