I played it for about 3 hours today. I really enjoyed it- the land sculpting was well done, and the constant progression carrots kept me hooked.
However, there is a free to play currency called “gems” involved. There is a mechanic in the game where you have to click on every house in your world to collect belief (mana).
This is a total pain in the ass.
However, you eventually unlock the ability to make a “settlement”, which links together several houses together so you can click on a single house to collect belief from all adjacent houses. You need to save up a fair amount of belief to create one of these houses. The cost keeps going up, and after you’ve created your third settlement… well…
You then have to pay not in belief for your next settlement (the constant currency created by your world)- but in “gems”.
Gems can be purchased through the in-game store interface. It is currently not online yet, but you are initially given 100 gems. See where this is going?
It’s a free to play game masked in a $20 early access game.
Here is what Peter says about the “gem” economy:
Peter:
As a designer, this new world of sharing development and design with the community playing the game is super exciting. The focus that the forum has on gems needs me to explain some thoughts on this feature.
This is the way I think of Gems in Godus beta:
- We need to test these systems for the future of the game
- You should never NEED to buy gems, it will never be a block to the game. There are plenty in the game for your followers to find for you, in the form of tribute.
- In the last 100 hours of playthoughs I have balanced the game in a way that I have not purchased a single gem.
- You cannot buy game features with gems, only effectively speed things up, because of feedback we removed gems spending on features
- Gems cannot be used in multiplayer, in no way are they used as a pay to win mechanic.
- I regard buying gems as cheating, but some people love to cheat.
Please remember Gems is part of the experiment, how much we use gems we need to test, like any experiment this could result in huge changes in the balance, and even possibly radically removing any motivation to from gems.
The most crucial thing at this stage is to see how the gems experiment plays out. We have already learnt a lot from your feedback so in todays update we will be removing all references and abilities to spend or buy gems from the first establishment period. We will also be looking at the analytics so if people are spending too many gems on the wrong things, hence running out of gems, we will rebalance.
Please believe we love this game and we will never do anything which will make feature like gems be corrosive to what we hope will be a wonderful and delightful experience.
Peter Molyneux
Apparently you can find your own gems in the game. But- the very fact that there is an alternate currency you can purchase to make your life easier while playing makes me very nervous.
It’s quite an amazing game, but I can’t recommend it in it’s current cynical state.
