Elemental - Now Fallen Enchantress

[Hayduke]

IIRC Demigod had its release date broken early by Gamestop as well.  And there were some silly conspiracy theories that Gamestop was pissed because Stardock was selling a digital download + boxed copy for the same price as retail.

[Soln]

when is the Gamasutra rebuttal/post-mortem?

[Sir T]

when is the Gamasutra rebuttal/post-mortem?

Ok, now you're getting boring.

Anyway I've got a fairly serious performance issue with this (it seems to be not using my GPU) , so I'm shelving it till that's fixed.

[Yegolev]

Two updates in less than 12 hours.  I think I am going to give this one about a month and check on it then.

[JWIV]

Two updates in less than 12 hours.  I think I am going to give this one about a month and check on it then.

Word is, hotfix tonight to the current 1.06 isn't going to be save compatible.  I think Yeg has the right idea.

In the mean time, back to AoW:SM

[edit - deleted broken link]

[Baldric]

Two updates in less than 12 hours.  I think I am going to give this one about a month and check on it then.

Word is, hotfix tonight to the current 1.06 isn't going to be save compatible.  I think Yeg has the right idea.

In the mean time -

It isn't.  I found that out this morning.  I am still enjoying the game, but I haven't touched the campaign or had the crash issues either.  I will say this though, the drama has been much more enjoyable than the game itself.  I was wondering for awhile if Brad wardell is really Abashi.

[Aez]

The game is almost playable with the last patch.  There is still one major game braking bug: idle AI player.  I just got one a good 75 turns into a game and it's mighty annoying. 

[Dren]

Wow, I'm glad BBuy was out of this when I went to check this weekend.  I'll wait for the game to improve and the price to drop.  I win either way.

[Ghambit]

Well, I finally got to play a bit of the Campaign last night.  My first impressions are that the game is extremely lightweight on the surface... definitely not the depth of something like Civ4 or even SoaSE (which imo is the best Stardock game made).  For the most part, the whole thing seems like some single-player "dungeon-crawl" wherein you also build an empire.  It's not terribly difficult, but the potential for depth-of-play is there.  Combat is odd, it almost seems smarter to just auto-resolve the main hero's combat rather than go into battle and potentially lose your army.  In this sense, building a paladin type hero is pretty go'ram dumb to do.

I dunno, overall I liked the game quite a bit and definitely see great potential for some nice mods, rife with great storytelling.  BUT, a $50 game this is not.  If you want Civ, get civ... you'll get your monies worth and then some as usual. 

Also, you can get Elemental-type play from many a persistent webgame out there these days.  And the reality is, a game this lightweight should've been considered for at least large private persistent servers, rather than the vanilla 10 player, short, MP skirmishes.  Leave it to a modder though I guess.

[Typhon]

[...]Combat is odd, it almost seems smarter to just auto-resolve the main hero's combat rather than go into battle and potentially lose your army. [...]

I have exactly the opposite experience.  Unit position matters quite a bit because attacking units that kill the defending unit on the first strike do not take damage (effectively a "first strike" ability without having to pay for it).  Ranged is more expensive, and after you get logistics, brutally effective.  Ditto for spell casters with AOE combat spells.

If you auto-resolve, it seems like neither spell casting nor ranged comes into play, and you don't get the benefit of maneuvering.

Complaint: a squad (four units combined into one) that loses some of the squad mates is broken in that the squad mates never regenerate OR that the stats of the squad do not decrease.  I would have wondered what the hell was going on when my 72 hp unit was one-shotted, but it was pretty obvious as the UI showed only one unit instead of four. 

Not sure what the intended behavior is, but if you are creating squads be aware of this behavior.

[Ghambit]

Yah, the squad-army stuff is a bit obtuse.  My complaint was only relative to early game play; like I said, I've only played for 1 short evening. The hero's army in early play is near useless and are better served not battling at all or just running.  I've lost ALL of my named minions at this point and will likely restart.

My favorite mechanic so far?  Being able to design your own peasant is fuckin ingenious.  Not only do you get to customize appearance (including background, making a nice card), but you can customize the gear loadouts and stats.  Thereafter, whenever you want that particular type of peasant you merely just hit build and you've got a clone.  This is a mechanic other 4x designers need to take note of as it takes a LOT of the micro of unit upgrade out of the picture, simplifying it.  In a "normal" 4x you'd have to make a vanilla unit, then when it's done, find it, upgrade it over time, buy it stuff and equip it, and on and on.  In Elemental, you do it just once at the build order and you're done.

Overall I like the game a lot though, dont get me wrong.  But a lot of its laurels are based on the simple fact that there's little to nothing out there like it.  And it's one of the few games out there of late that I'm excited about perhaps modding.

[JWIV]

Got my Limited Edition box set today.   It's actually a really slick package - the mini is  nice (and yes, I'm going to paint it and use it in a D&D game I'm sure), and a soundtrack, a high quality history book, an actual manual, and a pretty poster are all nice.  And god, the canvas map is enough to make my nostalgia ovaries ovulate.  

One day, maybe the game will be as good as the LE is.  

[Dtrain]

Game needs to be fine tuned with a sledgehammer. Still, it promises to be a nice mixture of Civ and HoMM once all the problems are worked out.

The one major problem that I have discovered is how trivial combat becomes early on if you get a few champions with decent int scores, transfer some of your essence to them, and train your way through all the summoning spells. Each champ can cast each summoning spell, and those guys are no joke, especially given how early you can have them. So you get a free army from one imbued champion. Seems like they should only allow 1 active summoning.

And that's not even counting how horibly broken the Empire's Vigilant Minion summoning can be - a 3 mana spell that inflicts an unmitigatable 10 damage to every unit on the board. And it's their lowest level summoning. Maybe someone accidentally added an extra 0 to the damage?

[Zetor]

I don't plan on getting this game (4x is not my thing), but I found this review of the accompanying book pretty amusing. 

[UnSub]

I don't plan on getting this game (4x is not my thing), but I found this review of the accompanying book pretty amusing. 

The island of white people really should build that fence. 

[Typhon]

Game needs to be fine tuned with a sledgehammer. Still, it promises to be a nice mixture of Civ and HoMM once all the problems are worked out.

The one major problem that I have discovered is how trivial combat becomes early on if you get a few champions with decent int scores, transfer some of your essence to them, and train your way through all the summoning spells. Each champ can cast each summoning spell, and those guys are no joke, especially given how early you can have them. So you get a free army from one imbued champion. Seems like they should only allow 1 active summoning.

And that's not even counting how horibly broken the Empire's Vigilant Minion summoning can be is - a 3 mana spell that inflicts an unmitigatable 10 damage to every unit on the board. And it's their lowest level summoning. Maybe someone accidentally added an extra 0 to the damage?

Completely agree, wicked broken, especially since he levels up.   Get his essence to 6 and he's doing 20 points of damage to every opposing unit on the board.  Crazy-broken.

A interesting fix would be to make him do that damage to all units, and raise the level of the summons.  Would feel more like a demonic bargain being made.

[Sky]

I don't plan on getting this game (4x is not my thing), but I found this review of the accompanying book pretty amusing. 

http://www.amazon.com/Elemental-Destinys-Embers-Bradley-Wardell/dp/0345517865

 

[Merusk]

She was wearing a long cloak. Underneath it, he saw, was a dress.

Beware - The Dress.

[Lightstalker]

I really wanted this to be more finished than it is, but at least it installs and patches!

This game wants to be fun, but there are a wide variety of problems with this title.  Some really should have been addressed prior to release to Test much less Beta(s) or RTM.  The first set of is akin to sb.exe, they are enough to completely define a game’s legacy if they continue much longer.

• Memory Leaks: about a 3 hour limit until the process exceeds 2GB and self-terminates
• Crashes: multimon, alt-tabbing, some rare event outcomes
• Hangs: Illegal movement in world or tactical, AI decision deadlocks (e.g. end-turn hang)

The second tier is comprised of design and gameplay related issues.  These are softer errors and if resolved would result in a game remembered as fondly as TA Kingdoms.

• Curious UI choices – low discoverability
• Several AIs appear to not be wired up at all (will sit in the starting city all game)
• All AIs can be trapped and confused risking hanging the game or an underdeveloped opponent
• Poor information design through the campaign, fails as a tutorial since it doesn’t actually guide the experience well (especially since the text is dismissible but not recoverable)
• Ability and faction unevenness
• Missed ability-chains against low defense targets
• Tactical AI is dumb
• AE is devastatingly unbalanced / has no mitigation in many cases
• World economy is random and tedious to manage (random arrangement of tailored map units is good (ala torchlight), most random arrangements won’t actually be fun to play)

The last tier consists of usability problems with some of the otherwise ‘cool’ aspects of the game.   Fixing issues here, assuming the upper tier issues are resolved, would result in a great title.

• Overland map is difficult to differentiate units (cloth map is clearer, but if there are light and dark factions shouldn’t the pieces themselves reflect that rather than just the band at the bottom?)
• Left side hero sprawl can push cities off the bottom of the screen at any resolution
• Cities and Heroes are difficult to differentiate on the left side
• Army grouping – can it even be done?
• Tactical movement is cumbersome – the UI perspective is an impediment to unit control
• Overland movement is cumbersome – especially on the back side of mountains and hills.
• Higher difficulty levels aren’t all that harder – I don’t think you can pretend replayability and challenge is supposed to come from other players when the game is this unstable on a single client.

This title reminds me of TA Kingdoms and Shadowbane from a technical standpoint – and that’s not a good thing as both those titles effectively killed their studios.  There are a lot of options for how one could play through the game; most of them just don’t matter.  Eventually you just build a cheese stack and thug the map because it is too tedious to maintain it all.

One thing I miss from MoM was the leader customization in number of books as a fixed limit on potential power.  In Elemental you exchange time for depth of access and in 4x, especially with the ability to raise impassable terrain, you can have all the time you need.  Actually, Colonization (both the original and the remake) did a great job of keeping time pressure up on the player.  This isn’t colonization nor is it original MoM so spell access is really unbound in any relevant way.  Likewise, the diversity of races doesn’t play out as relevant in game.  Certain units are unbalanced but they aren’t tied to a specific race or faction so much as they just happen to have been assigned to a specific race or faction.   A lot of these sorts of things could be sorted out in the coming mod that redeems this title, assuming the technical and play issues that are apparent are sorted out.

I’m likely to play a few more hours tonight then park it for a few patches and the Magic Mod that will save the title.

[Ghambit]

mmmk, yah I'm done playing this game.  (sigh)  wtt for Civ5

[jakonovski]

Holy poop, I was so hyped for this game. Good thing I was broke for a while, saved myself some money. The developer seems to have gone off the deep end, with predictable results.

[Ghambit]

This is one of those situations where a long essay on gamer's rights would be worth reading.

[Soln]

for at best a 75% refund on your purchase


and only after you submit to a technical review by SD of your problem.  Cause you know you may not really need a refund.  This is not in the manifesto.

[Maledict]

To be fair to stardock, I got a full refund, no questions asked, after submitting a short email to them on Friday outlining my unhappiness and the technical faults with the game. I presume at the moment they've said that anyone wanting a full refund can get it.

[ffc]

To be fair to stardock, I got a full refund, no questions asked, after submitting a short email to them on Friday outlining my unhappiness and the technical faults with the game. I presume at the moment they've said that anyone wanting a full refund can get it.

for at best a 75% refund on your purchase


and only after you submit to a technical review by SD of your problem.  Cause you know you may not really need a refund.  This is not in the manifesto.

Which is it?  I didn't want to add on to the frustration with this game because Stardock gets got points for the refund policy which I painlessly used with Demigod for its multiplayer issues.  But if the refund policy is tiered/gone/depends-on-who-reads-your-email then there is no point in buying this game just to wish for magical improvements.  Improvements which Demigod never saw. 

And the improvements for Elemental go way past poor multiplayer since the game is plainly unfinished in addition to everything already detailed:  disabled multiplayer, 2d maps being better than 3d maps, stupid AI, unhelpful UI, no explanations of anything, stupid campaign, no tutorial, buggy everything, mute world, etc.

A particular sticking point for me is the map as exampled here.  Can you tell what's going on?  Because I can't.  It's a muddled mess.  Good luck figuring out what anything actually is.




Here's the 2d view.  Now objects make some sense and I can distinguish between them.




If something as basic as THE MAP has to have two versions to be functional then there are bigger problems than just pumping out hotfixes to hotfixes. 

AoW: SM does everything better.  Everything.  Elemental is lifeless in comparison and should be skipped.

[Stormwaltz]

Stardock's "we need to fix this" list.

[Soln]

because someone asked SD's refund policy, for realz 

highlights:

We require that you utilize our technical support services prior to issuing a refund. [original in bold] ... We do not give refunds on beta or pre-release versions of software or subscription renewals. [original in bold]  Refunds are only available for fully-released programs....

For Stardock Products Only - Please review the minimum system requirements for our software carefully. If you request a refund and your computer does not meet the minimum system requirements, you will receive a partial refund of 75%.

If you are not willing to work with technical support on any problems you are having, or request a refund even if you are not having problems using the software, we will issue a partial refund of 75%. To receive a partial refund, please email sales@stardock.com.

look up, now look down (Gamer's Bill of Rights).  Now look up again.

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will adequately play on that computer...

And so on.

[Soln]

WD amidts it's another Demigod

they'll do better with player's money (again) next time (tm).

(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.

[Modern Angel]

That actually just irritates me. There's this sweet spot between "nothing is wrong" and the linked "I am so blind sob sob bloo bloo next time dudes" spiel. A simple "We fucked up pretty royally, sorry, refunds even if you preordered" is the way to go. It's not about you anymore, Stardock. It's about the people who bought this turd.

[Sir T]

As far as I'm concerned the core game is pretty fun. The rest can be ironed out. As long as there's a decent game in there I'll play other stuff and get back to it in a bit after it has a few patches. I'm not going to get my knickers in a twist about it.

And, btw, I probably can less afford the price tag than the people raging on it. Especially those that have knickers in a twist about the company regardless of the state of the game. And as for Demigod, that was pretty fun on release, its just the netcode kept crashing from the number of pirates trying to log onto the servers. The core singleplayer game was much more solid than Elemental can be said to be right now, so saying its 'another Demigod' is basically untrue. You could play Demigod singleplayer straight out of the box and have fun with it. I know I did.

Which, to be fair, a good half of the people posting on the Elemental forums basically are.

[Typhon]

I have to agree with Sir T.  I see all the issues.  I get why people are slinging the hate - the game is still unstable and it hasn't had a pass where all the boring bits are bumped up a notch.

What it does have though, it significant promise and significant difference.  It's not MoM, it's not AoW, it's not Warlords, it's something new.  Ideally they'll be taking another couple passes at the game and making something notable.  In addition to that, hopefully someone will release mods that borrow heavily from the other games that I've mentioned and we'll get some nice fusions.

Like I said before, some games you just put up with more shit because there seems to be so much promise.  For me, this is one of those games.

[Hayduke]

I don't think it could be as much of a disappointment as Demigod.  At least if Stardock managed to fix up the game it might still be a solid single player experience.  With Demigod I decided to give them a few months to iron the game out, and by the time I got back it had already been abandoned by players and consequently the developers.

[Ingmar]

Guh, no. It really is just awful now. With the more or less vast number of titles we have available to us there's really no reason to play this until they can patch it into unrecognizability. The exact problem with it is that the core is NOT fun right now. That's more or less the opposite of previous unpolished gems like Mount & Blade or King Arthur.

That post at least makes me hopeful that that extensive revision will happen.

[Musashi]

Yea.  Guy may be a douche.  But at least he's a douche who's taking responsibility.  It won't amount to much if he doesn't fix it.  But for that kind of honesty - and not selfishly throwing some underling under the bus - you've got to at least give him a couple of points.

[Kitsune]

Stardock does good turn-based toys.  I'm willing to sit and wait for Elemental to get the needed love to work out the flaws.  It's a shame that it was clearly not made properly from the get-go, but I have faith that they'll work on it until it's the game it ought to be.  It's not like I don't have other things I can be doing in the meantime.