Elemental - Now Fallen Enchantress

[Typhon]

I'm hopeful that the engine is as heavily data-driven as Frogboy claims and that Kael is given enough time to create a similar level of faction diversity that he created in FFH 2.

My concern is the tactical map.  I really liked what it added to MoM.  Elemental's current implementation leaves me wanting something richer.  I hope Kael is able to translate his talent to the tactical game as well.

[Murgos]

Actually Frogboy and Stardock themselves promised to continue support for Demigod. It was NOT all Gaspowered Games fault but I dont buy their products either anymore.

I just don't think that a publisher CAN provide the kind of support you are talking about.  Support from the publishers view is not really the same thing as continued development.

[Sir T]

Yeah, the tactical map IS weak in elemental

[JWIV]

This is getting really interesting now.

Shafer apparently landed at Stardock.

http://news.bigdownload.com/2011/01/04/exclusive-civilization-vs-lead-designer-hired-by-stardock/

[Murgos]

Shafer apparently landed at Stardock.

http://news.bigdownload.com/2011/01/04/exclusive-civilization-vs-lead-designer-hired-by-stardock/

So, Elemental 2 should be pretty good?  Except it will cost so much to make that Stardock will be put out of business...

[Modern Angel]

This is one of the strangest things I've ever seen. Elemental's not going to be a hit now. It's not. The ship's sailed. Quite aside from putting Civ V's lead dev on the team? Aren't we all complaining about how average to bad Civ V is?

[Reg]

Yeah really. Seeing the lead developer from the most disappointing game of the year move to the company that made the second most disappointing game doesn't make me feel better about my purchases - both of which I deeply regret.

[JWIV]

Enh.  I actually am pretty fond of Civ V  - I think it needs some work and polish, but I like the general idea behind the design.  Ideally, for Elemental, what this means is that Shafer is going to work on fixing the bland combat and tactical game while Kael works on bringing out the lore and other aspects of the game.

[Modern Angel]

But even then so what? It could turn into the greatest game of its genre and nobody's going to give a shit a year after launch, or at least not in the numbers to justify the money they just dumped on it between these two hires and continued relentless development. Don't get me wrong, I think it's fairly admirable that they're continuing to go at it but this is the sort of thing that turns into a company sinking Frankenstein if people aren't careful.

[Ingmar]

Elemental was so bad that they have to name the sequel something else just to avoid poisoning the well, imo. Paying people to try to save it at this point just seems like wasted money to me.

[Ruvaldt]

It's also the only way to even remotely redeem themselves as a developer though.  I, for one, won't ever buy a game from Stardock unless this thing is fixed and I didn't even purchase Elemental.

[Typhon]

But even then so what? It could turn into the greatest game of its genre and nobody's going to give a shit a year after launch, or at least not in the numbers to justify the money they just dumped on it between these two hires and continued relentless development. Don't get me wrong, I think it's fairly admirable that they're continuing to go at it but this is the sort of thing that turns into a company sinking Frankenstein if people aren't careful.

I disagree. 

1) Releasing a underwhelming game and supporting it until it's good is pretty much Stardock's MO.  Gal Civ was pretty boring at launch. It is in Stardock's best interest to support this game until they get it to the point where everyone who purchased it include a, "well, it's good now", in a discussion of the game.  Is that a great business model?  No.  But it's better than EA / SoE launching crap, taking money and then going silent.

2)  I felt that Civ 4 was bland and tedious at launch.  FFH used the same engine and made the game very addictive to me.  I ended up buying the BotS expansion because of changes that were made to the game (granted, not made by Firaxis).  Improving a game to the point of "it's good!" can drive expansion sales.  Not everyone is looking to harbor a grudge because some game developer couldn't get their shit together for a new game launch.

3) There is little competition in this space (turn based strategy).  Stardock had a successful business prior to this failure.  For those that like turn based strategy, a good game on the (digital) shelf that you haven't played yet is irresistible.  You can make yourself feel good about not buying it when it sucked, but if it gets good, you'll eventually pick it up (ideally from the bargain bin).

[Sky]

Firaxis is weird. It's hard to tell where the talent lies. Soren did Civ IV and then Spore, so we know how that turned out. Did Jon help with the good bits of V or encourage the bland awfulness. Soren was an AI guy, so that might be part of the issues Firaxis is having in the AI department.

If you told me Brian Reynolds was working with Kael at Stardock, I'd be excited. Colonization/Civ II/Alpha Centauri is pretty much the pedigree to have if you worked at Microprose/Firaxis. But he's off making zyllions at frontierville

I tentatively agree with Typhon's #2, but I think Civ had a better framework supporting it. I'm not sure if you can BtS and FFH the Elemental engine. I guess we'll see. At the least it's nice to have interesting things happening in TBS.

[Yegolev]

I'm not sure if you can BtS and FFH the Elemental engine.

Based on what was done with GalCiv II, I would imagine so.  I'm still going to wait for the Kael patch before I give it another whack.

[Speedy Cerviche]

If they turn the game around and make it a top notch product, and get a mod scene going, it will continue to generate revenue for years. Like Typhon said, there aren't many options out there for TBS fans, people are sitting around playing Master of Magic & Panzer General, waiting for Stardock to get its act together.

[Sir T]

Yep. Falcon 4.0 is still making money. I know, I bought a copy in the shop today.

Elemental is still selling well according to Impulse.

[Stormwaltz]

It seems that last Tuesday they announced Elemental's first expansion, Fallen Enchantress, which I'm sure isn't nearly dirty as it sounds in my head.

Paxton is the producer/lead designer, Shafer is "the other designer" (there are only two).

Press release with extremely vague feature suggestions: http://forums.elementalgame.com/403846

Full team credits: http://forums.elementalgame.com/403891

[JWIV]

Stardock just published their yearly report and there's a pretty significant section dedicated to Elemental.  

Probably of most import is that they realized they can only fix Elemental so much and are giving Kael complete free reign over Fallen Enchantress.

Full report - http://www.stardock.com/press/CustomerReports/Stardock2010.pdf

Elemental is a fictional world designed to act as the setting for a series of fantasy strategy and role-playing games. During 2010, Stardock had two games in development based on this world, the first being Elemental: War of Magic and a second one being Elemental: <RPG Title>.
Unfortunately, as discussed above, War of Magic was a disappointment to Stardock and its fans in a number of areas and exposed some deep-seated problems with the games unit.
While War of Magic has subsequently been greatly improved, Stardock is not convinced that this title, with a 55 metacritic average, can redeem itself. Therefore, rather than tie new Designer/Project Manager Derek Paxton to the
previously planned expansions of War of Magic, it was decided to have Derek and his team focus on the creation of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, a stand alone expansion which will not require users to purchase War of Magic.
Users who purchased War of Magic this past year will receive Fallen Enchantress for free; Stardock will also provide steep discounts to anyone who purchases War of Magic prior to the release of Fallen Enchantress. We are also committed to enhancing War of Magic on its own path for those users who prefer its game mechanics.)
Figure 3: Fallen Enchantress will take a dramatically different direction from War of Magic in terms of game mechanics.
As a practical matter, Fallen Enchantress is a new game, one that shares some art assets with War of Magic but little else. The scope of the differences between the two will become very apparent in the early months of 2011. Extensive brainstorming sessions between Derek Paxton (Fall from Heaven), Brad Wardell (Galactic Civilizations), and Jon Shafer (Civilization V) resulted in a complete redesign; combat systems, tactical combat systems, character creation, economic system, game mechanics, etc. are all new.

[Sky]

That's great news!

It should be interesting to see if the 'deep-seated problems with the games unit' that were exposed have been properly rooted out. And of course, the presence of Shafer (and maybe even Wardell) casts a shadow over Kael's new baby.

[Kitsune]

The public spankings that both Elemental and Civ V received ought to be enough to demonstrate that their directors shouldn't be captaining the boat.  Which in a lot of cases isn't enough to stop that sort of terrible idea, but since this is Wardell's own company, I really doubt he's planning on shooting himself in the foot by hiring a golden goose to fix his game and then ignoring their input.

Stardock's said they're giving me (and all the early buyers) the first two expansion releases for free, so I'm eager to see if Kael manages to deliver something sweet in that timeframe.

[Ingmar]

Elemental was so very disappointing that I'm not going to give them another chance personally, free or not.

[Sky]

I'm extremely tempted to just buy the Fallen Enchantress to roundabout pay Kael for FFH2. So many variables that could make it suck, though. I almost feel bad for him getting his big shot in this manner.

[Reg]

If anything defines poor Kael as a "failure" it'll be his legions of over-the-top fans the first moment he makes something that doesn't fulfill every single one of their FFH fantasies.

[Sky]

I AM NOT OVER THE TOP!

 

[Typhon]

If anything defines poor Kael as a "failure" it'll be his legions of over-the-top fans the first moment he makes something that doesn't fulfill every single one of their FFH fantasies.

I cannot conceive of a world where that is possible, so I think you should shut your dirty whore mouth.

[Murgos]

It should be interesting to see if the 'deep-seated problems with the games unit' that were exposed have been properly rooted out.

I'm pretty sure Brad Wardell still works there.

[Yegolev]

It should be interesting to see if the 'deep-seated problems with the games unit' that were exposed have been properly rooted out.

I'm pretty sure Brad Wardell still works there.

^^^

I like Brad but it's time for him to stop writing code.

[Sky]

I have a vain, naive hope that his utter belief in teh awesoem of Elemental and it's early release and subsequent public flogging had some effect on his ego. Go work on GalCiv3 (or not) and let Kaelco do their thing.

[Sky]

http://www.strategyinformer.com/editorials/11622/live-chat-with-derek-paxton

"This year"

[Sky]

Elemental: Busted Version half off at Impulse this weekend. $20.

[sinij]

I have a vain, naive hope that his utter belief in teh awesoem of Elemental and it's early release and subsequent public flogging had some effect on his ego.

Elemental release pissed off a lot of gamers. Impulse sale pissed off a lot of indie devs and more gamers. I am not sure how he plans to release more games, now that he has no control over distribution channel and tons of ill-will all around.

[Merusk]

Sell the company to EA, stay on for a year or two as a figurehead while talking about how you still love the company and it was the hardest but best decision you ever had to make, then fuck off to the Caribbean to let tanned native women soothe your 'wounded ego.'

aka the Mark Jacobs plan.

[Lightstalker]

1.2 is still frustratingly unplayable in case anyone was wondering.

I patched and fired it up last week.  There appear to be a few more difficulty level settings and a lot of the same problems. 

• Playing fullscreen multi-mon... don't.
• Increasing the challenge level just causes the AI to spawn on top of you with upgraded units.
• Loading a game causes a memory leak.
• Playing the game causes a memory leak.
• The game chokes at 1.3gb working set, that's early for the OS to shut down your process.  The game begins showing display errors (blank images, slow transitions) at about 1.1gb so it seems like it is running out of contiguous memory allocations rather than actual resource exhaustion - and that's shocking to have trashed your process space that quickly. 
• Unit movement in the 3-d world is still unpredictable - especially at the default camera angle (clicks catching mountains in the foreground).
• The new pop-up selector for casting a spell on a unit never populates with the units to select (this was added in 1.2 and doesn't work).
• Some AIs still just sit at home and knit.
• Map artifacts appear throughout the game (adventure locations that aren't).
• Not an exhaustive list, not in the least.

You just can't play a high-tech high-challenge game right now.  There is no balanced struggle, only rush and roflstomp.  The highest difficulty puts your level 1 sovereign with 14 health against Critter armies of 350 hit points...  Still so very bad.

[Ingmar]

• Some AIs still just sit at home and knit.

I can't believe of all the things you list, that this still isn't fixed. 

[tazelbain]

Ya, the first thing I did was check the board when I saw the new version.  These guys are serious dumbasses.