Godus Wars launches on Steam Early Access

Godus Wars, an RTS edition of Peter Molyneux’s latest God game Godus, is now available on Steam Early Access, 22Cans has announced.

All backers and owners of Godus will get Godus Wars for free, and all new buyers of Godus Wars will receive the original Godus at no extra cost. The original Godus will be removed from individual sale, however.

The newly available Godus Wars carries the lower price of £10.99.

• Take control of one of four Deities, each with different play styles, abilities and powers.
• Use your might to battle over 7 varied continents, through hundreds uniquely designed and modifiable levels.
• Collect over 20 different Power Cards with potentially thousands of variations and use them to gain the upper hand in battle.
• Control expansive armies with up to 50 different unit types from Archers to Catapults!
• Wield up to 8 mighty God Powers to bring devastating destruction or protection to your followers.
• Maps that change as you play with the unique deformable land – No two battles will be the same!

For those thinking the launch of Godus Wars means 22Cans is abandoning Godus, a Q&A says otherwise. “The release of Wars proves that we are still dedicated to Godus,” explains a Steam post.

Creator Peter Molyneux also made a lengthy post outlining how Wars came to be:

“To answer the question, ‘What is Godus Wars?’ You have to take a step back and look back at the very start of our Kickstarter campaign – where we stated that we wanted to reinvent the god game. What were were taking on was this massive task of developing a game for PC and Mobile platforms. Those are completely different audiences with different likes, dislikes and different mechanisms,” explains Molyneux.

“In 2015, We had taken the mobile build as far as we wanted to take it at that particular point. The mobile build has been successful, editor picked and downloaded millions of times and had over 250,000 4 star or higher reviews.

“When we wind back to the PC version, it wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a PC game and that’s where we started – What is Godus and what should it be come?

“We’ve always loved the landscape forming, changing and sculpting but quickly realised that it’s slightly more uncomfortable to do a lot of sculpting with a mouse. Really what it lacked was brutality, was war, was the ability to take on challenge and use your god powers and sculpting powers to fight, war and battle. And that’s where our initial concept of Wars started.

“We said this simple thing – ‘Why don’t we change Godus into a RTS style game with God-game capabilities and landscape modification, a RTS game with a huge amount of variation and power, the ability to approach each battle in a different way?’

“We sat down and said if we’re going to make an RTS game in Godus and do it right – What are we going to have to do? Yes, we could create battles on Godus landscape and yes the landscape modification could be wonderful, you could create your own landscapes, turrets and use followers strategically – but there were a few things that really got in way.

“One of those examples, which our Godus PC community had been crying out about for a long time, was the nature that you collected your belief – that didn’t really fit within a RTS game. Our aim was to make each battle an intensive 20 minutes – not 2 hours or 10 hours but 20 minutes. So we did the logical thing, we make the collection of belief completely automatic – so the player could concentrate on the troops.

“We also had this idea of making it far more fluid and far more focused on battles rather than focused on belief and spreading people. We created a completely new GUI which was more orientated towards troops and battling. It has the ability to group troops together and mix troop type together was at the centre of our thoughts.

“That was the core of what became Godus Wars – but that wasn’t enough. What we need was motivation. What would would motivate me, as a player to move from land to land to land?

“In fact, we wanted to create hundreds lands, we wanted to give the player an entire world to conquer. Split up into continents, each continent having different maps. To do that, to get players to play hundreds levels you have to worry about their motivation.

“We’ve centred on is the ability to become more and more powerful and with it – giving the player more flexibility. We’ve brought over cards from Godus but in a completely different way. These cards can be extremely strategic; there are cards that’ll buff your troops, there are cards increase the speed, attack, range and even introduce stealth.

“Finding a level it too difficult? There’s a probably card for that. All of these cards you can collect together and by the end of hundreds of levels I imagine players will have hundreds of these cards to use. We’re incredibly proud of the card system.

“You’re also going to need an opponent. You really need the concept of fighting against someone. We introduced opposing deities. and these deities control continents and they’ll take lands as you take lands. It really feels like you’re fighting against them; when you pick cards, they pick cards – they modify your strategy according to you. Now this starts to feel like what it truly should be, this real threat this real challenge a real purpose.

“What we’ve ended up with is a true mix of a god game and a RTS with the ability to build your own deck of powers and buffs.

“We’ve got all sorts of surprises in the game. Try playing around with the globe. See what happens. We really wanted to make this brutal, we wanted to make it funny and we wanted to make it exciting. I feel we’ve really done that and I can’t wait to see what the community thinks.”

Source: Steam