Stardock has released the playable Occulus character for free to everyone who logs in to the multiplayer part of Demigod. It is the second new free Demigod hero (first one was the Demon Assassin) and Occulus appears to be a freakish Minotaur who mumbles corny but amusing quotes such as "Ride the lightning" and he also has some kind of lady Justitia complex: Oculus uses the powers of lightning to aid his friends and punish his enemies. His powers include chain-lightning, the ability to re-charge the mana of friendly demigods, and the lethal capability of launching himself down on his enemies from his throne. To add him to your account, simply load up the latest version of Demigod, logon to Multiplayer and after that, he should be available to you both in single player and in multiplayer.
Earlier this week players were already able to snatch Occulus but it required going through a store website with a free keycode. Brad Wardell from Stardock admits on BluesNews that this was an experiment to see how many people would be willing to go through all these steps, presumably when they also could be paying for possible new Demigods in the future. "The original plan was that on Friday, we would release Oculus as a free Demigod in which people added him to their accounts via the store page. By doing this, we would be able to measure the current interest in DLC for Demigod to determine whether we could justify paying GPG to develop additional maps and demigods later." "In responding to the issues, one of our moderators implied that us having to do this would eliminate our ability to determine the active size of the Demigod community and therefore end any hope of additional DLC. However, the moderator was mistaken as we can determine the active userbase by the number of people who logon and work from that."
Demigod wasn't really a smash hit (despite the fact it was often just as enjoyable offline against AI players) and it remains to be seen if paid-for-Demigods or maps are viable and wether the extra free content could increase the size of DG's online community. Further (free) updates are up in the air for now as developer Gas Powered Games is busy with wrapping up Supreme Commander 2. For more information about the future of Demigod you should read Brad's latest official blog post. |
