Stardock's new game "Elemental: War of Magic"

[YourConscience]

But it's not just design and polish. From what I've read the game has SERIOUS bug issues. They had beta-testers. They MUST have known about the bugs.

You have to wonder though, if beta-testers are predominately stardock fans or people with vested interest, how useful they are in the long run.

In a way should beta access to people who hate the product/company, they won't be concerned about trashing egos when they file bug reports.

The beta tester were alright, from what I can gather. They did massively try to intervene with the early release, except they haven't been listened to. An attitude of 'they are just nigglers, troublemakers' appears to have manifested through the last months of the betatesting.

And in fact, stardock just misinterpreted the meaning of 'beta' anyway. A beta for me, as a software developer is a feature-complete product that needs the rough edges ironed out. *All* betas of Elemental were far from feature complete. At best you could call them Alphas, if even that at all, because they didn't even contain all the parts of the game yet. As such, the beta phase has just started, because the game has seen featurecompleteness only a few weeks ago. Typically a betaphase for a product in development for more than 3 years should take at the very least half a year, but more like one year. Which is why I said to everyone to wait 1 year from now before buying it.

But despite all this we also don't want Stardock to stop making games. And given the little success Stardock had as a publisher, it could easily perish from the gaming world altogether. Hence, pay for the game at least within the three years I gave as a maximum. Hopefully as a bundle with the hopefully appearing Expansions.

As a remedy for the preorderers and first four weeks buyers I'd give those the next payable DLC for free. This could help ease the bad PR somewhat.

 

[Malakal]

From what I gather most betas choosen among the fans does not report anything anyway. They simply use this as an opportunity to play the game early. This is why Paradox did beta in VII with a professional company and select few good peopel from forums.

BTW should we care about Stardock anyway? What GOOD games did they release? Disclaimer: I didnt like GC.

 

[YourConscience]

BTW should we care about Stardock anyway? What GOOD games did they release? Disclaimer: I didnt like GC.

That is a question that needs to be discussed indeed. It made me realize that I had the feeling of needing stardock because of the ever-present promise that one day they will produce something that I'd like a lot. With GC2 they came close, but ultimately failed to deliver. And perhaps the only real issue was that it takes so damn long before you can invade something at all.

SoaSE(though not developed directly by stardock) also came kind of close to success, but ultimately failed. Again, perhaps the only real problem was (for me) that all the techs had little impact (especially the military and social techs) and it simply didn't feel like 4X anyway.

Now comes Elemental, and again it kind of gets close, showing the promise, but ultimately fails, and will probably fail in the end too, unless Brad hires someone gifted to have the say in the game design department. He should stick to what he can do best, which is two things: make good AI, market the game.

There is a consistent pattern here, and I don't like it.

 

[kanenas]

BTW should we care about Stardock anyway? What GOOD games did they release? Disclaimer: I didnt like GC.

That is a question that needs to be discussed indeed. It made me realize that I had the feeling of needing stardock because of the ever-present promise that one day they will produce something that I'd like a lot. With GC2 they came close, but ultimately failed to deliver. And perhaps the only real issue was that it takes so damn long before you can invade something at all.

SoaSE(though not developed directly by stardock) also came kind of close to success, but ultimately failed. Again, perhaps the only real problem was (for me) that all the techs had little impact (especially the military and social techs) and it simply didn't feel like 4X anyway.

Now comes Elemental, and again it kind of gets close, showing the promise, but ultimately fails, and will probably fail in the end too, unless Brad hires someone gifted to have the say in the game design department. He should stick to what he can do best, which is two things: make good AI, market the game.

There is a consistent pattern here, and I don't like it.

But is there a good AI in this game?
The only good parts seems to be superfluous stuff aimed at casual gamers that would want a fantasy civ spinoff with some sims dress up and a little larping here and there

People would probably be more forgiving if they marketed it as their own fantasy GalCiv spin off instead of the spiritual successor of master of magic

The end product feels like the devs didnt even bother to actually play master of magic
You have to try really hard to manage to fuck up the tactical part and the magic system so badly
not to mention the non existant-almost placeholder race and character creation

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

The AI is pretty bad in its current state. Sovereigns will attack your city by themselves, they won't build many military units, etc. There really is very little redeemable at the moment with the game.

 

[Berekän]

Update 1.07 is out

---------------------------------------------------
----------- Elemental v1.07 Change Log  -----------
---------------------------------------------------

***************
* Performance *

+ Major improvement to rendering system, especially when over cities.
+ Condensed scene rendering process from 3 passes through scene into a single pass
+ Bunch of fixes to the issues behind "DX Error: Invalid Call", particularly when Alt-Tab'ing. This will continue to be worked on.
+ Added new framerate limiter ( limits framerate to refresh rate of device )
- Removed throttle framerates option (this is always on now)
+ Particle Effects no longer render if the "Disable Particle Effects" option is on
+ Outlines now LOD-out as you zoom out
+ Added option "Disable Outlines" to the options screen to turn off rendering outlines (Might help lower-end machines, and some people prefer no outlines)
+ Commented out unnecessary debug messages

*************
* Bug Fixes *

+ Fixed Various Memory Leaks
+ Fixed the issue that was causing the unimproved tile designs for elemental shards to stick around after a shard-harvesting improvement was built on top of them.
+ fixed a bug where if you have the option on where when entering/leaving city build mode, the camera switches between overhead and default view, you could get stuck in overhead view (and forced to manually move the camera back) if you pressed the city build mode button, while already in city build mode
+ fixed bug where AI demands a tribute of 0 gildar
+ fixed display issue where improvement cost entries overfilled the improvement build list
+ fixed display issue where units with long names overfilled the name area on the level up wnd.
+ fixed display issue on battle init wnd, if defense or attack was negative then it showed up as a huge number.  Beserker ring gives a -3 to defense, which could give you negative overall defense.  Same might be true of attack if in the future we have some strange item that decreases your attack.
+ Fixed bug where units in tile designs (like horses, wargs, etc) would not fade out when the tile is under fog of war
+ Fixed "jumping units" when starting new game from within a game (or loading a game within a game)
+ Other fixes regarding battle initition window, creating mountains in map editor, first contact status not being set to relation unknown
+ Fixed a bug where improvements that were flagged as once-per-city were able
to be placed twice.

**********************
* Gameplay / Balance *

+ Fixed bug where economic treaty gold bonuses weren't getting added to the global resource pool
+ Changed how creatures and NPCs increase their stats when they level up to nerf incredibly powerful high-level monsters running around 
+ Stacking of items fixed (can now only wear 1 per type per champion)
+ Pioneers in a boat can no longer build a Settlement at sea
+ Wild improvements will now be able to be taken into account in a city's resource usage correctly, if any of them ever have negative resource production
+ Refugee camps (and other wild improvements that provide population storage bonuses) improvements
+ Fixed Miner sovereign profession bonus
+ Fixed Great Warriors faction bonus 
+ Removed really high starting mana regen ability from Umber's faction config
+ Fixed Advanced Tracking techs (in both tech trees) to change the player ability that is hooked up to affect movement
+ Fixed broken productionreq tag on vengeance coating
+ References to Ice shards changed to Water for consistency
+ Sprint duration adjusted to 2
+ Lowered HP for fallen peasant
+ Fixed up resource hoard description text
+ Various food resources now provide different amounts as indicated by old description text
+ Improved output of Temple of Essence
+ Improved output of Tower of Titans, Tower of Souls
+ Fixed construction resource cost for curgen's exchange
+ Resource hoard costs now mirror kingdoms resource costs
+ Fixed up description text for construction yard
+ Great Theatre no longer provides +100% Gildar, only +100% Prestige
+ AI: Added code to send sovereign back to his capital city if he has no destination after the early phase of the game
+ Fixes for various terrain types not responding to RaiseLand spell
+ Resource hoards no longer deduct from the buildable tiles of a city (the 'bananna cities' from the forums)

***********
* Battles *

+ Changed the calculation for battle damage to take multiple troops into better account (with each unit getting an individual attack roll).
+ Every time panic is caused, the combat text for the panic will be shown.
+ Fixed a problem where misses and non-damage spells would cause an on hit animation to be played in tactical battles.
+ Fixed a possible bug where units would no longer update their troop counts after reaching a single troop left.
+ When selecting the spell book in tactical battles the cursor should now reset to the arrow.
+ When clicking on a unit's hiergemenon entry in tactical battles the cursor should now reset to the arrow.
+ Turned on bounding box picking for tactical battles to improve the feel of unit selection.
+ Selecting units should now be turned back on while other units are animating in tactical battles.
+ Fixed a bug where unit tooltips in tactical battles would draw over tooltips for items and spells.
+ Added some checks to the battle init window to stop the window from showing when defenders or attackers were null. Also added logic to clear waiting flags in this case.

******
* UI *

+ Adopted the unit vitals context for a Details tab to show when a wild improvement is selected on the main map, to give more meaningful and easier to read information
- If the improvement is under construction, it says so and uses the level slider to show the progress towards completion and the turns left
- If the improvement is done, it shows what that improvement is producing and has an entry to get further information about the improvement by opening up the lorebook
- Also, it shows which city an improvement is linked to, or "Not linked" if it isn't.  If it is linked, the tooltip explains that this city is contributing production bonuses to the resource production of that improvement.  If the improvement is not linked, the tooltip says how many tiles the nearest city needs to be closer to link with that city, explaining that it will be able to get city production bonuses if it does link
+ New Tactical Icons hooked up for Smelter, Trade Center, Construction Yard, Merchant Guild
+ New Tile Designs for Ventri Iron Mine, Stone Quarry, Clay Quarry, Marble Quarry, Drath Village, Shrill Hive, Spider Nest
+ Fixed bug where double-clicking on a spell you couldn't cast from the spellbook popup would queue a bunch of "Can't cast tactical spell" message boxes to appear over and over, now just plays a little failure sound if something that can't be cast is double-clicked
+ Fixed a typo in a campaign dialog
+ When you build an improvement on a resource, the map notifier for it is removed
+ Fixed typo "completly restored" to "completely restored"
+ Fixed some places where the display of per-turn gold production lagged behind changes to it, gets rid of some income discrepancies between some screens when loading a game, adding/cancelling a treaty, etc.


****************
* Known Issues *

+ Tactical Battles: Stuck turn if you use space bar or click "Pass Turn" button while selected unit is moving.  Clicking auto-resolve will end the battle if the turn is stuck.
+ Occasional instances of damage indicators not appearing over units.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

The first five patches are going to have to be spent fixing the numerous bugs, it'll be awhile before they really get around to fixing the gameplay.

 

[Mortmal]

from official froums by frogboy:
"(I'm up north on vacation typing on an extremely slow connection so bear with me)

I don't think people yet fully realize the completeness of Stardock's fail on Elementa's launch.

I'm going to write more about this but not only did we think v1.05 was ready for everyone but we felt v1.0 was too. That's the level of disconnect/poor judgment on our part we're talking about.

If the game had come out in February, it would still have been a disastrous launch because lack of time wasn't the issue. It was blindness, sheer blindness. We felt the game was finished. And I speak of v1.0, not v1.05. Blindness.

There will be massive consequences for Stardock's game studio. I'll be talking more about this when I get back. But the game wasn't released early. The game was released poorly. Head in the sand syndrome imo. I've read the reviews as much as possible given my hideous internet access up here and I agree with them. We just didn't see what they were talking about. We thought any complaints would be about polish points or something.

The point is, the issue here is far far worse than many of you think it is. I wish it was an issue of the game being released too early. That's an easy thing for a company to "fix". Elemental's launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part.

EVERY competent software developer knows that the programmer must never be the one deciding whether the program is done. Yet, my love of Elemental broke my self discipline and I began coding on the game itself in vast amounts and lost any sense of objectivity on where the game's state was. I normally only program the AI on our games so I can keep a level of distance from the game itself to determine whether it's "Ready". On Elemental, I was in love with the world and the game and lost my impartiality.

We'll do better. "



Glad to see they finally had a reality check, all those cocksuckers telling them they are great an the game ready probably helped to make them live in dreamworld.Its rare to see someone admitting he completly failed. Now 1.07 is improvement but look at the list of things to fix still...

 

[Malakal]

That was already posted, but at least they pretend to care. Well I dont.

 

[Berekän]

I thought you were going to copy his next post. Well, I'll do it then.

Stop Stop Stop. And I'm not just saying that because it takes like half a minute to load up a page from here.

There is a phrase they use in the movie industry "Kill your darlings".

The person green lighting a production should NEVER EVER be the one working on said production. Writing AI on GalCiv or helping design the game mechanics on Sins of a Solar Empire kept me at a reasonable distance from the actual GAME.

The problem with Elemental was that I am in love with it. To me, it's not just a game. It's a whole world that we can expand and build on. During the months of July and August, when I was working on the game non-stop, I literally had a hard time distinguishing the difference between the GAME, the MODS and the future. It all merged into one fuzzy centrality.

Stardock will be working on Elemental for years to come. Literally. Let me be specific: Stardock will NOT release a new game next year. It'll all be Elemental related. Releasing it in August wasn't a financial decision. Hell, Stardock's games aren't funded by PC game revenue. I wanted you guys to get the game ASAP.

I think most people would agree that Elemental has tremendous potential. The reason it was released when it was was because we thought it had reached that level ready to be shipped. When you're living, breathing and eating something 24/7, your perspective changes.

From a personal pride point of view, it would be much easier to say "Whohaah, my jet fuel requires Elemental to ship in August!". To give you guys an idea of how certain I was that the game was ready for everyone to ship, I didn't just give copies to reviewers, I sent copies to my friends who used to be reviewers (long story but the gaming media has changed a lot in the past 18 months) because I was dying for them to see this masterpiece.

Tom Francis's debiliating PC Gamer preview only was possible was because I personally compiled a version for him (of v1.0) for him to see because the v1.0 version doesn't work outside North America (region checking). In other words, that negative PC Gamer UK preview was only possible because I was so confident in Elemental's readiness that I bypassed Stardock's PR people to get a friend of mine in Europe a copy.

I don't think there should be much disagreement that Stardock absolutely blew it with the launch. Holy cow that should be obvious by now. In my mind, anything less than "game of the year" (in a year with Starcraft 2 and Civ V in it) means we totally screwed up.

The real question, and the question I think every single person who shelled out $50+ for this game should ask is this: What is Stardock going to do to make me whole?

And the answer, I hope, is in the coming months because, like I said, most of Stardock's revenue doesn't come from making PC games.

Having my idiocy shown on a global stage is humbling but probably very constructive for PC gamers. I think most people would agree that Elemental is a fantastic game -- once you get past the idiotic UI decisions, balance, etc.

We are very fortunate to be in a position to make the situation right. We're our own publisher. We don't have the same financial constraints as other companies so we can spend months or even years if necessary to do right by you guys.

Hopefully, this message will make it up to the forums, (because it was long) but if it does, please take it as it is meant. I failed you. I failed you because I love what we're doing and out of sheer hubris -- that the basic law of programmer != guy who decides if it is done somehow didn't apply to me. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Elemental is getting pasted in reviews and deserves that pasting. I'm glad many people are having fun but our eyes have been opened. Like I said before, I'll be writing a lot more about this when I get back to an Internet connection that measures bandwidth with an M instead of a K.

 

[Silellak]

That sort of honesty from a developer is pretty refreshing, though I notice he's not offering any sort of refund.

In related news, I will not be buying this game any time soon, if ever.

 

[Berekän]

That sort of honesty from a developer is pretty refreshing, though I notice he's not offering any sort of refund.

In related news, I will not be buying this game any time soon, if ever.

Well, they are giving refunds to people who demand it. You just have to contact them in sales@stardock.com and ask for it AFAIK

 

[dragonfk]

Damn. Even if you want to hate them you can't.

I still believe Brad and his company can deliver MoM successor. But it's a shame that it won't have a chance to become GotY. You don't get to have a turn based strategy/turn based tactical game to be a GotY very often and I think they had a shoot at it.

 

[Shannow]

Damn. Even if you want to hate them you can't.

I still believe Brad and his company can deliver MoM successor. But it's a shame that it won't have a chance to become GotY. You don't get to have a turn based strategy/turn based tactical game to be a GotY very often and I think they had a shoot at it.

Not with SC2 and ciV in the same year. No chance.
But that post was entertaining.

 

[Raghar]

The beta tester were alright, from what I can gather. They did massively try to intervene with the early release, except they haven't been listened to.

Do you have a link with a detailed list of problems they reported?

A beta for me, as a software developer is a feature-complete product that needs the rough edges ironed out. *All* betas of Elemental were far from feature complete. At best you could call them Alphas, if even that at all, because they didn't even contain all the parts of the game yet.

I heard it somehow differently:
Beta is unfinished SW, which doesn't need to have all features implemented, however it doesn't crash when used normally.
Alpha, a SW which has missing textures, has frequent crashes, and various temporal problems.
Release candidate. A SW which has all features implemented, however it's still rough on edges, and could have some bugs nobody knows about.

SoaSE(though not developed directly by stardock) also came kind of close to success, but ultimately failed. Again, perhaps the only real problem was (for me) that all the techs had little impact (especially the military and social techs) and it simply didn't feel like 4X anyway.

It was supposed to be RTS, they never had plans to make it as a grand strategy. It was decent RTS, but not much else as it was intended to be used more like multiplayer game than single player.

There is a consistent pattern here, and I don't like it.

A lot of companies have problems with game design, because game design requires experience and some vision/sharp brain. It somehow resembles the difference between people who acted from theirs childhood, and people who became actors when they became rich and had spare time. Even these who had talent, required few years until they became something average.

The question is: Would he learn, or not?

 

[dragonfk]

Damn. Even if you want to hate them you can't.

I still believe Brad and his company can deliver MoM successor. But it's a shame that it won't have a chance to become GotY. You don't get to have a turn based strategy/turn based tactical game to be a GotY very often and I think they had a shoot at it.

Not with SC2 and ciV in the same year. No chance.
But that post was entertaining.

Why thank you .

PS. I don't give a shit about SC2 so maybe I'm underestimating it's importance. But it wasn't ground braking. As for Civ 5 it is still to be seen whether it will flop or not. So with Elemental having all it's promised and expected content and polished gameplay I believe it would be a contender.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

 

[Gondolin]

In related news, I will not be buying this game any time soon, if ever.

In even more related news, I won't even pirate this game. Doesn't seem worth it.

 

[Trash]

Uninstalled it after giving it another try. Seeing all my heroes suddenly have the same portrait and avatar was just too much. This game needs at least a few more months before it's ready to be let outside the box.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

I'm leaving it installed, but only because I have a ton of HD space and I want to see when they patch and if any of the patches look like they might really make a significant difference. Anyway, kind of pissed I paid all of that money for a mediocre beta.

 

[Annonchinil]

What I meant was that the internet drama so far has been fun. The Quarter to Three thread is 140+ pages and very amusing.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Oh yeah, especially with Brad shooting his mouth off early on. That was priceless. The fanboyism on Stardock's forums are pretty funny, down to saying that anyone who is having troubles with the game pirated it.

 

[Annonchinil]

And then RPS and other sites quoted him resulting in Tom Chick to freak out.

 

[Zed]

http://forums.elementalgame.com/395131

What we’re going to do is that for users who own the game by a certain date will get (at least) the first expansion pack for free as a token of our appreciation for hanging in there with us. As some long-time Stardock gamers can tell you, our expansion packs aren’t minor things.

Hrmph.

 

[Mortmal]

What I meant was that the internet drama so far has been fun. The Quarter to Three thread is 140+ pages and very amusing.

Its just another evidence 90's game were so much superior to today games, people are craving for similar gameplay ,they are arguing so much on forums because they played master of magic and nothing as good was released in 15 years, they were overjoyed to play a modern version of it.Its obvious its not only the codex ,an handful of grognards, who wants something else than the mainstream shit.