Last year's sequel-cum-remake* Fallen Enchantress went some way to redeeming the troubled launch of Stardock's Elemental, but Adam still came out of it thinking that "Elemental feels like it’s a few steps sideways from where I’d like it to be." The journey to make Elemental the strategy-roleplaying accomplishment we'd always isn't over, however - next month sees the release of expandelion Legendary Heroes.
]]>Last night I had a chat with Stardock's Derek Paxton, the man responsible for making sure the production of Fallen Enchantress – the follow-up expandalone to Elemental: War Of Magic – goes smoothly. Read on below for what he had to say about the upcoming game and the issues surrounding its creation.
]]>Stardock are running a video developer diary series detailing various aspects of the Elemental expansion, Fallen Enchantress. I've posted the first couple of these below, thanks to BluesNews. It's looking good, and lead designer Derek Paxton has told Gamespot that UI changes will make this game far easier to get to grips with than its troubled parent game. This time around it also has a team better suited to getting an unbugged game out the door on time: “There are dedicated producers, designers, and a formalized production pipeline that we have borrowed from the enterprise software world. The design is focused, fixed (with some flexibility as we iterate and improve), and communicated to the team. Time is set aside for iteration (after we are feature complete) rather than still implementing critical features until release day.”
So that sounds good. The game looks like an improvement on the original, too.
]]>Stardock have had some more to say about Fallen Enchantress, the recently-revealed expansion for their fantasy strategy game, Elemental - War Of Magic. The game, which will be free to everyone who bought Elemental before 2011, will be a standalone title, and should, Stardock have said, be regarded as a new game. Not least because it has a new team behind it: "Fallen Enchantress gives us the opportunity to have a very different fantasy strategy game than War of Magic. While the original intent was simply to eliminate an unnecessary SCU (we can simply have Fallen Enchantress with an upgrade price for people who have War of Magic), in this case, it lets us make an even bigger break from War of Magic because it has a new Lead Designer (Kael instead of myself) with Jon Shafer helping as well as we begin pre-production of Jon’s new game along with many other changes. It’s still Stardock but it’s a very different Stardock than what made War of Magic (or GalCiv II for that matter)."
]]>(EDIT: OK, missed this. Fallen Enchantress will also be free to anyone who purchased Elemental before 2010 (Surely you mean 2011, Quinns? - Jim). That's a Hell of a thing.)
Couple of things. First of all, Big Download's assembled the information on Elemental: War of Magic's upcoming expansion pack, Fallen Enchantress. Who is the Enchantress? Why did she fall down? Was she drunk? We don't know, but we do know the expansion will add new spells, equipment, new ways of using magic and new areas that must be purged of enemies before you can settle in them. These will include the Bhinadmi Fissure, where a player must walk up to the edge and challenge the Elemental Lord that lives within. Mm! Mm.
Second, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has been making some interestink predictions in an interview with Gamasutra that Elemental is going to end up costing his company money.
]]>BigDownload scooped the news, using their giant info-bagger (which gnaws endlessly at the heart of the ever-growing internet), that Civilization V designer Jon Shafer has been hired by Stardock to work on Elemental, the turn-by-turn strategy game that appeared last year to a chorus of mixed frowns, but is now probably fine after a bunch of patching, we still haven't had time to check. Apparently awesomeness is planned for Elemental, so that sounds awesome. Go awesome! That's what I say, like when a guy playing American football says "Go deep" or whatever. I say that to Quinns when he is racing another blog post to the blog line. Anyway, the Stardockians have also used their cash to hire Dave Stern, a novelist and editor, who will apparently be working on Elemental's lore. There's life in the old lich yet, it seems.
]]>Were you interested in Elemental: War of Magic but put off by all the reports of it being buggy? Did you instead choose to spend your week's shekels getting proper bum-guzzled on the danger liquid at your local alcobuilding? Well, perhaps now is the time to reconsider that lifestyle of yours. Stardock has released its monster 1.1 update for the game, fixing a whole hive of bugs, adding spells and upgrades, changing the mana and population systems, updating the UI and rebalancing everything else. As always, a changelog of this size holds plenty of gems, including "Balanced Children" and "You can no longer drink some quest items (like the magic flute)." Version 1.2 is apparently already underway, and we can look forward to a demo in January. Latest trailer follows...
]]>In what is hopefully the final word on the sorry release saga of Elemental, Stardock bossguy Brad Wardell has issued another remarkably frank public mea culpa, following the weekend's awful news that several Stardock staffers were to lose their jobs and a future project may be axed as a result of poor reviews and lower-than-hoped revenues for the roleplaying strategy game. While it's by now scarcely any secret that the man's publicly holding himself accountable for the release of a rickety game, the sum total of information and apparent self-flagellation offered has been extraordinary.
]]>Stardock's Brad Wardell has given an extraordinary mea culpa in response to the furore surrounding the release of Elemental. Posting on the official Stardock forums, he explains that he doesn't think people have yet to "fully realize the completeness of Stardock's fail on Elemental's launch." He goes on to say that, "Elemental's launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part." The problem, he says, is not one of having released unfinished or buggy code, but of the development team having lost sight of the game, of "blindness". It's a fascinatingly honest comment, and one that must surely affect so many teams after years working on a game. Wardell has gone on to write more on the subject, while still on his holidays, here. In it he explains that there will be no new Stardock game next year - just more Elemental content. He promises more on this matter when he gets back to a proper internet connection.
You can read the original comment below. Don't forget Kieron's thoughts on the game, over here.
]]>In my time so far with Stardock's Elemental I've come to hate one thing above all overs. As in, its name. Which seems strange, because it's a name with a certain grandeur to it. It also pretty-much close to Google-proofs it when I'm scouring the Internet, trying to find out whether it's possible to do obscure and arcane things like - say - upgrade your units. I'm left without a clue, and pressing on anyway. And doing really well, but there's the nagging sense that I'm missing something and could be doing better. That said, the AI seems to be in the same boat, so perhaps it all evens out.
]]>Following yesterday's energetic discussions of Elemental's release state, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has issued a statement which can be read in full below. In it Wardell addresses comments made on the Quarter to Three game forum, saying that the remarks about people not buying Stardock games if they disagreed about their state of completion were simply a heated remark to a friend: "This comment was totally out of line and I apologize for it. It was made in the heat of a ~2000 comment long thread and is not how I honestly feel."
On the issue of the Gamer's Bill Of Rights, which we initially thought deleted from the Stardock site due to a broken URL, Wardell says: "We stand by it. It is, with some irony, our commitment to no DRM on our DVD release that ultimately caused the rough pre-release experience of Elemental. Several retailers broke the street date and we felt we needed to release our gold version to our customers who had pre-ordered from us as well as to our beta community that helped make the game the outstanding strategy game that it is."
RPS remains uncomfortable with industry practices that involve shipping incomplete gold code, requiring - and assuming - day zero patches as a standard.
]]>UPDATE: Stardock's own Gamer's Bill of Rights is no longer to be found on their site, which looked a bit odd. But actually you can still find it on its own site here. So that's that stuff out the window. Anyway, there's more... That'd be the Bill of Rights featuring the proud bulletpoint:
"2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state."
Fantasy strategy epic Elemental: War of Magic was released by Stardock this week, a day ahead of schedule. We're still waiting on our code (as are most other online gaming sites, judging by the game's barren metacritic page), but the metaphorical word on the digital street is that it's broken to the point of being unplayable, having never convincingly left the beta that was available to pre-order customers. Here's people being upset right on the RPS forum.
]]>Elemental - War Of Magic arrives next week, bringing with it a feast of 4X fantasy strategy-RPG happenings. Stardock have released a launch trailer which gives you a flavour of the game, and you can see that below. Personally, I've found it fascinatingly intricate, but a little tricky to get to grips with in the beta of the game. I've found the pace of things and the escalation of a events a little overwhelming, and I hope the balancing and tweaks that have been going on over the past few weeks will ease that. We'll have a properly detailed look at the game soon, nonetheless, hopefully with some time spent examining the game's multifarious multiplayer.
]]>We're itchy for access to Elemental, Stardock's massive 4X fantasy strategy with delicious and nutritious RPG bits. Why? Read this. Pre-ordering types can get access right now, thanks to the second beta of the game, which is detailed over on the mail site. Also this beta guide goes into some of the detail that wasn't quite clear from Wardell's epic twelve-minute ramble from earlier in the month, and it's just making more desirous of the game. Release for all is August 24, a date which Stardock describe as "firm". And we like firm.
]]>...as narrated by Brad Wardell. We're pretty excited about Stardock's forthcoming role-play strategy, not least after this interview, and this video gives you a bit more of a taste of what to expect. It's going to be a great big feast of a game, albeit for a slow-eater. This is not going to be a game for impatient folk, but it's almost certainly going to be for Kieron. The big nerd.
The game is having a beta of sorts over the summer, and is set for an August 24th release. Anyway, go watch the video, below.
]]>We're peering through the futurescope at the games we can expect to see in the coming year. There's plenty to work through, so let's get on with a look at some of the notable games of Spring and Summer 2010. (You can read part one here.)
]]>When listening to the latest Three Moves Ahead about Demigod, I found myself over on Troy's blog nosing around. In it, I find something fun from GDC which we missed - namely, Stardock having released a little walkthrough video including the first public (if early) footage of Elemental: War of Magic. You'll remember Elemental from the memories laid down inside your noggin when we interviewed Brad Wardell for our Unknown Pleasures feature. Anyway - as the Elemental beta inches closer, time to see the fantasy/strategy/RPG malarkies Stardock are working on. Video beneath the cut.
]]>Ever since RPS' inception, Stardock done nothing but to do things to further endear themselves to PC Gamers. A fountain of Gal Civ splenditude. A move into publishing with the brilliant Sins of a Solar Empire and the looking-brilliant DemiGod. Even pushing a gamers bill of rights. This is simply their next step, a Master-of-Magic inspired fantasy game which they've been working on for years but only finally gave it a name towards the close of the last. It's time we all learned it. It's Elemental: War of Magic and looks set to becoming the next PC-strategy game du jour. We talk to Brad Wardell about it...
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