Well…um…

Do you know why I’m making Planitia?

Because I want to play Planitia, and nobody else seems to want to make Planitia.

Several times over the course of Planitia’s development, I’ve been excited to hear about a different game that seemed like it would scratch my “play Planitia” itch. From Dust, Reprisal and now Godus all seemed like they might do that.

And every single one of them has let me down. From Dust turned out to be more of a puzzle game, with no multiplayer component. Reprisal has the basic Populous thing down but doesn’t have multiplayer.

And now Godus looks like it’s going in a different direction completely.

Even putting aside the myriad annoyances listed in that video (most of which will certainly shake out before launch), it looks like the basic design of Godus is that of a real-time empire-building game rather than a strategy game. Finding resources, using them to unlock technologies and advancing through ages make Godus more complex than Populous by at least one order of magnitude. And makes it sound like Age of Empires. Wait, wasn’t there already a simplified version of Age of Empires with guys dressed in little blue tunics? That’s right, there was!

And right now, the multiplayer looks horribly deficient – it’s not played on the main map, terrain alteration (a big part of Populous multiplayer) doesn’t appear to be a factor any more and the fastest way to finish off an enemy is to just send your units over to kill his before he can get anything going. Yes, it was an early multiplayer battle but even then you should at least be using earthquakes to slow down their villages.

It reminds me of Black & White 2, which was absolutely schizophrenic about how it wanted you to play the game. Your goal – conquer all cities on a map. But if you raised an army and did it directly, you were evil. If you spent hours and hours and hours slowly building up your influence until they decided to join you, then you were good. This means that, if you want to play as good, the RTS element of Black & White (which is sorely needed) was useless to you.

So once again, I am happy and sad. I’m very, very sad that unless Godus undergoes a complete redesign it’s not going to scratch my Planitia itch. But I’m happy that I’ll still get to bring Planitia to the masses instead of giving up on it because something better came along.