Demigod Interview

In the second part of their PAX interview with Stardock’s Brad Wardell, Shacknews quizzes the CEO about their involvement with Gas Powered Games’ Demigod.

Shack: How much is Stardock involved in the development of Demigod? Seems like you guys have more than a few hands on it.

Brad Wardell: Yeah, we have the source code. We can check in and check out source code here. Typical publisher-developer relationship, there’s a producer at the publisher and then there’s a contact at the developer. And if the contract says anything, it might have some sort of source code in escrow, or something.

Whereas here, I was just down there [at GPG] and I literally was checking in and checking out source code. And I was in an office, I was down there in the bullpen. Me and [GPG designer] Mike Mar were sitting there brainstorming about ideas that we want to put in the game. We’ve changed the game pretty dramatically over the past few months. I mean, we’re both DotA guys, but, and I don’t know if you’ve ever played Defense of the Ancients–

Shack: Oh yeah, definitely.

Brad Wardell: Okay, good. Well then as good as DotA is, there’s not enough to it to sustain a stand-alone game in our opinion. There has to be more to it. So we’ve been adding all kinds of stuff like that. We’re having a persistent multiplayer universe. We’ll have tournament modes, and have actual tournaments online. And then single-player, having these quests that your Demigods can go on.

And of course, once we did that, we said, “Well, DotA has 65 Demigods. We don’t want people going on 65 quests, that would be obnoxious.” So we were like, well, let’s have fewer Demigods, but make them a lot more different. And make them a lot more customizable. So you know how in DotA one of the reasons why there are so many Demigods is because their inventory system in Warcraft 3 can only support, what is it, 12 items?