Worse than 70% eh? I was thinking like 70-72%, but everything I'm hearing from nonfanboys is making me reevaluate that. I think you're right fishbreath, it will probably stabilize under 70%, possibly going all the way to the 50's. I was watching some streams and all I saw was constant disappointment. I totally agree with you that this won't be like Demigod. That was fun to beta and had solid gameplay testing.
Prior to today I was giving the devs the benefit of the doubt. The lead dev has said multiple times this weekend that this was the most solid game they've ever released. You're totally right nen, they fell in love with their own IP and got blinded. All it would have taken is one outside gamer to play the retail version for a few hours to tell them it wasn't close to ready. You just get the feeling that things are terribly wrong all over the game.
Throughout all of alpha and beta they kept assuring us that the fun stuff would always come later. Even in the last beta they said that most of the content wasn't in. I'm beginning to think the 'fun' just wasn't there.
Looking back on the betas I don't think there was a single aspect I've liked. I've been part of alphas, beta, and game design before so I expect terrible bugs, imbalanced stuff, and crashes, but I also expect that there should be some 'fun' hidden underneath all that. I've never, ever, seen a game I've beta'ed miraculously go from unfun-fun on release. It also seemed like the forum fanboys were a bit too strong and would always cite "It's a beta it's not supposed to be fun". I watched the devs radically changing things like economy and production all the way until the end, without doing enough testing of them. I saw them ignore a lot of good advice and I tend to disagree with just about every direction they went.
-Splitting 'Adevnturing' into it's own tech is absolutely awful.
-The whole dynasty aspect has always seemed terrible to me and even though I like similar dynasty systems in other games (like Total War), I hate this one.
-There was way too much focus on customizing pointless shit like unit appearances and other useless cosmetic details instead of actual gameplay.
-Every step they took away from MOM ended up being a misstep. I can't currently recommend this game to anyone and I would rather recommend playing Leylines, AoW2:SM, any of the HOMM series or even Civ mods.
-The UI is bad as are the hint/tooltips...and I have very low standards for these.
-The whole 1/3 MOM, 1/3 Populous, 1/3 X-Com thing was always bullshit. It was never any X-Com or Populous. It was only MoM with a few changes which are probably for the worst.
-Last minute removal of good features that was in the beta (like nation creation).
The worst part is that we know they had a choice to delay the game until next cycle and that they ignored and criticized players who said otherwise.
/extreme disappointment
Check out this post a player just wrote about all the things he's noticed already (
http://forums.elementalgame.com/391385). All sorts of stuff from crazy AI quirks, spells not having sound effects, etc. My favorite is "why are my spells missing when being cast on my own units, from 1 tile away, 4 times in a row. Does my spearman just really hate being healed?"