When I first saw this game on the self in Best Buy I thought wow, this is awesome. I've been trying to find a good space game, something I can play with my friends and has a good single player experience. The ablilty to capture planets and construct my own ships from the hull up were features of the perfect game. Well I got home and opened it up and NO MULTIPLAYER. Well I was shocked, I mean what games doesn't have multiplayer in these days? And it was turn based to boot, not that was bad, I wanted a turn based game, but I didn't know there was any turned based game made that didn't have the hot seat option. Well I jump online as fast as possible and get on the website and I'm looking for the reason my fleets aren't crushing someone. I read that they left out multiplayer because they wanted to focus on the single player aspect of the game. Ok but it would take a novice programer to have a basic multiplayer hotseat only a day or two, if that long to add it. This means that the game's makers are stupid or lazy. I did see the poll that says people arn't interested in a multiplayer option, but as someone noted those who see the game has no multiplayer arn't going to hang around to take polls, so the poll is misleading and stopping the player community from getting what they want. I play a lot of games and so do my friends and family. They thought this game was incredable until they learned no multiplayer. You lost about 20 something sales right there. Not to mention with no mulitplayer I doubt I wil buy the expansion and neithor will all those who didn't buy the game because of the lack of a multiplayer feature. Your losing tons of sales because you couldn't be bothered to wait 2 more days to launch the game.
I didn't get on here to rant about Dread Lords, I got on here to try and knock some sense into Stardock, which will most likely not be around for long with its marketing plan. Anyway back to the game. Ok I say so they focused on the single player, I mean its got be be good right? Wrong. Not that the game its self is bad but the campaign should have been a lot better. I love the ship construction feature, the UI, the graphics, the space battles, the land battles, the planet system, the random crap, the AI, I love pretty much the entire game engine and the idea. But the campaign was a huge letdown. Why? There was almost no cutscenes, a game like this should have tons of cutscenes. Second there was having to research the same techs every mission. Are humans incapable of remembering anything? Or do we have to start from scratch every few years? And then there are the missions, invade some planets. If that was my goal I'd play customs games. I want plot driven battle, interesting adventures, etc. Not invade the planet again after researhing the same tech tree again. For someone that cutout multiplayer for single player it has the worst single player of any game I've played. If players stop with the camp half way through to play custom missions then your campaign needs a rewrite.
What Stardock has in Dread Lords is the chance to make a game that shows us that the turn based gameing genre is not dead. To show us the games like Age of Wonders II was not the last of its kind. By the way if you need a base for your mulitplayer look at this game because this is the way it should be done. Stardock needs to pull its socks up and get to work, launch a patch that gives us pvp, give us in the expansion a gripping campaign with tons of cutscenes and make it non-linear for the love of your customer base. You got a game that could make you tons of money and give your company a chance at lasting 5 years, otherwise someone will buy you out and does Galactic Civilizations III right.