22Cans and Peter Molyneux have finally come up for air after being relatively silent for so long on Godus’ progress, and today they bring us not only an update on the update, but the update itself!
Godus is officially swimming in Beta 2.0 waters now, and there have been some rather fundamental changes as they decided to go after ”crucial, deep-seated issues” with it.
One of the biggest overhauls to Godus is the mass reduction in clicking as now it’s more about dragging our godly cursor around, and not stressing out our poor hand muscles.
”We’re aware that we’ve been quiet for a long long time, but there’s a good reason for this. When we released GODUS Early Access, the amount of feedback we received was overwhelming. We took it on board too. We continued to release updates every couple of weeks but whilst this new content was welcomed there was an underlying problem. The key issues were not cosmetic or about the additional content. They were about the foundations of the game itself,” wrote 22Cans.
”What this meant was that whilst we were putting our efforts into small updates, the main problems with GODUS persisted. We had to make a tough choice - either keep updating the game in little, often cosmetic chunks, or to open up the hood and get down to fixing the guts of the game. We chose the latter. Your feedback consistently highlighted the most crucial, deep-seated issues, though and that gave us a roadmap. But game development being what it is, this would make the game unplayable for months. In fact in many areas the game would actually get worse before it got better.”
From today we get can bear witness the fruits of their toil as Godus has been updated through Steam. Peter Molyneux and co-designer Jack have also published a fresh video update where they explain in person the reason for their absence with updates, and what Beta 2.0 has in store for us.
Top Beta 2.0 highlights
▪ Wonderful new interfacing with the world (LESS CLICKING!). Every interaction with the world has been rethought to be more fluid and less frustrating. You can now hold and drag easily to interact with trees, rocks and belief.
▪ Improved Sculpting. Moving the land is much more accurate and more responsive. You’ll be able to move further and with more control. And rest assured, sculpting will continue to improve even more! No more repeated clicking - you just hold and drag in any direction, at any speed.
▪ Introducing the Leash. We’ve waved goodbye to the clumsy totem power. Now you can hold on any number of Followers or occupants, then drag towards a destination in the world and release on it to send them there. It’s a big advance and feels lovely!
▪ Complete redesign of the cards system. Now players discover cards across a timeline and unlock them by applying stickers that are found in the world. You choose which cards to unlock and thus your people’s advances will be unique to you. As time goes on each player’s civilisation will become very different from the others.
▪ Brand new GUI implementation. Much sweat and many tears have gone in to a more intuitive and beautiful interface with which to play the game.
▪ Voyages of Discovery. A brand new game mode where you must guide your Followers across uncharted lands against the clock. There are special rewards for successful voyages!
▪ Explore a new Homeworld. Start your Followers on a new journey, with a completely re-authored landscape to explore.
▪ New God Powers. Put out fires and increase the beauty of trees with the Rain of Purity, or customise your world by planting trees with the God Seed power.
▪ Reengineered Follower Behaviour. We’ve implemented a much more intelligent Follower system that gives unique attributes to each follower’s brain and makes them react to the world.
▪ Countless redesigns, gameplay tweaks, and bug fixes. Months of hard work has gone into improvements to the experience. There are so many that we couldn’t start to list them, but you’ll feel them throughout.
What’s not in Godus yet?
▪ Story mode
▪ Battles
▪ Meteor
▪ Hubworld
▪ Extra ages
▪ Extra Settlements
